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If gay men are going to have to self-diagnose and treat their own mental-health issues, lending a well-thumbed copy of The Velvet Rage might present the first Elastoplast to the problem. “When you read it, it all seems so very obvious,” says therapist David Smallwood, “but no one had written it down before. I don’t want it to seem like I’m a single-issue fanatic. All I’m saying is that when I see someone that is troubled in this way I will bet my next 20 years’ salary on where it started. I start dealing with gay men that have issues around sex or drugs or alcohol and within five minutes I know that we are into their childhood. So I think that every gay man to some extent will have been affected by velvet rage.”

This is a must read for 99.99999% of gay men out there. I realize that it won’t resonate for everyone, but so much of it is relatable to my own experience and that of pretty much all of my gay friends.

I'm conflicted on this book. While I could relate to many of the author's points on gay shame and how it affects us, I struggled with the position from which the author was writing. Early on, the author puts forth a homogenous view of the gay experience, one that oftentimes seemed moneyed and white. With practically every example the author employs, there's mention of fabulous wealth, executive careers, and many other hallmarks of affluence that I just couldn't relate to in my experience. Early on, I had doubts whether or not this book could be applicable to me, given that my experience as a gay man differed so much from the experience the author painted. I know the author was writing based on the experiences he's had with his clients, and those clients may've been very well-off, but there was just something extremely off-putting with the constant mention of wealth and high gay society. The window of Alan Downs’s therapy practice overlooks Santa Monica Boulevard and the heart of Los Angeles’s glossy gay ghetto, West Hollywood. The psychologist can stare out at the gay gym he uses and the “very gay” restaurant he dined at the evening before we talk. In the distance is the Hollywood sign. Downs is at the heart of LA’s gay community, yet the book that has made his name completely reassesses the modern gay experience, holding up an unsparing mirror to it. Currently, he consults with individuals and couples in his Los Angeles office as well as over the internet worldwide. In addition to his expertise in working with gay men, he is an intensively trained Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) therapist who has worked with individuals as well as therapists who are seeking to learn the mindfulness, emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills which are so effectively taught within the DBT therapeutic framework. Most recently, Dr. Downs has been quoted in Vogue, The Guardian, and The New York Times.

However, the core notions of dealing with shame I think still hold and are at times groundbreaking (at least for me).

We have pioneered the largest worldwide conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century. To be clear, the experiences of Downs and his clients are certainly relevant and legitimate, but that they're the only examples used to extrapolate and arrive at a generalized theory of gay male self-actualization is laughable (and pissed me off endlessly). I've wondered if the book is simply outdated, but as it was published in 2005 and updated in 2012 I'm not willing to give it that out. Toward the end of the book, the author offers ten short lessons to further encourage healthy relationships, such as Lesson #1: Don't let your sexual tastes be the filter for allowing people into your life and Lesson #8: Actively practice accepting your body as it is right now. Benoit Denizet-Lewis asked our country’s leading queer writers to suggest five indispensable books. I wanted to like this book way more than I did. Downs' broad premise - that gay culture is awash in deeply calcified narcissism - is a valid one, and bears the additional virture of being entirely true. However, like many readers, it became clear to me very early on that I did not fall into this book's target demographic, which has led me to wonder if its scope is much more narrow than many (including the author) realize. There is a white upper middle class American-centricity to Downs' approach, an outlook perhaps shaped by Downs' drawing most his interviews for this book from clients of his LA practice. While it's entirely possible that he uses a sliding scale, therapy is prohibitively expensive for most people and then usually not covered by health insurance. I imagine this may have skewed his samples sample somewhat, as the reader winds up being guided by Downs through a world of high-achieving, feminized, outsized personalities hosting fabulous dinner parties in Malibu, guided all throughout by the minorly irritating usage of the first person plural (you can only put up with so much of the word "we" if it's being consistently applied to experiences that lay very far outside your own).While I initially thought this book was going to be a history of LGBTQ rights/activism in the US, it’s actually more of a self-help book written by a psychotherapist who has a career of working with gay men. It goes through the experience of what growing up gay is like for most of us, as well as the lifelong issues that develop because of that—and how to work on them.

As others in the review have noted this book sits in an interesting space in the community. The text is largely informed and directed at a cis-gendered often upper-middle class gay male audience but I think this is simultaneously a strength and a (minor) weakness of the text. As self-help books go (and I will admit that I am not a fan of the genre), The Velvet Rage is actually quite good. The problematic issue with many self-help books is that the underlying philosophy (or approach, or methodology, or treatment, etc.) is based on the assumption that everyone who reads the book is suffering with or struggling with the same condition (e.g., obesity, addiction, unhealthy relationship). This kind of essentializing or pathologizing of a condition usually results in overly generic (i.e., pretty much useless) strategies for correcting the condition. This book, however, is based on a more solid foundation—the belief that most gay men face similar challenges during the course of their development. These challenges result in deep-seated shame that often precludes any ability to maintain healthy, loving adult relationships with other men. And on this point, Dr. Downs pretty much gets it right.Downs’s belief is shared by other mental-health professionals. Therapist David Smallwood, who is the former head of addiction treatment at the Priory, and a blunt-speaking recovering alcoholic, goes one step further. “Gay pride is an adaption,” he says, “a way of dealing with something we can’t deal with. We put on this TV picture and what we show is: ‘I’m proud to be gay.’ Underneath that, we might be dying inside.” I’d always known I wanted to work with flowers and plants so I left school at 16 and went to work for a large florist in Victoria. The company was mixed and there were a few older gay guys working there and we’d all often go out for drinks after work. One of those nights, when I was about 18, one of them suggested going to a gay pub up the road called the Vauxhall Tavern. I was nervous, but didn’t want to look homophobic so I went along. Inside, I tried to look comfortable, but I was terrified and couldn’t wait to leave.