Gay children are uniquely isolated, and cope in an equally unique way. He writes that “the trauma of growing up gay in a world that is run primarily by straight men is deeply wounding in a unique and profound way.” For gay men, “he roots of our trauma with men come from two distinct sources: being a man in a hyper-masculine culture and being a gay man in a decidedly straight world.” Downs posits that “homosexuality is viewed as the ultimate betrayal” of our culture’s masculine ideal. Downs starts off strong with a solid hypothesis. Rather than go deeper, Downs’ work stays stubbornly on the surface of things, reducing interesting and complex ideas to so many slides in a PowerPoint presentation. But while Odets looks at a huge sampling over many years of practice to examine what those individual stories say about the shared experience of being gay, Downs uses what feels like a handful of composite stories to simply and blandly illustrate his talking points. Both men are clinical psychologists with private practices (Odets in San Francisco, Downs in New Mexico) both books examine the unique experience of being a gay male through the lens of their patients’ stories. Commonalities can be found in both the writers and their books.

I eagerly tracked down Downs’ book, published in 2005, imagining he might be a kind of spiritual forebear to Odets.

I first caught wind of Alan Downs’ The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World in writer Emily Nussbaum’s profile of television auteur Ryan Murphy in The New Yorker, when Nussbaum connected Murphy’s relentless work ethic with “the fury gay men feel in a straight world.” I’d recently become aware of this rage within myself, brought to the surface after reading Walt Odets’ stunning 2019 opus on authenticity, Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives.

The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs