Denneny’s seventh proposition is: “The elemental gay emotional experience is the question: ‘Am I the only one?’ The feeling of being ‘different’ and our response to it, dominates our inner lives.”
The gradual or sudden but always unnerving awareness that one is “different” leads to the fear of being the only one. Gays emerge as gay in this trauma. One suspects that it haunts gay life in countless subtle ways that we have not begun to trace. One wonders if the extraordinary fear of rejection that dominates the social interactions in gay bars — and that appears so senseless, since we have all been rejected many times and know from experience that it is certainly not devastating — is nothing more than a replay of adolescent psychological scenarios, when natural sexual desire threatened to expose one as “different” and invited the devastating possibility of total rejection, even and especially by those “best friends” to whom one was most attached. This undermining of sexual and affectional preference, putting into question what one knows with immediacy and certainty, traumatizes a person’s integrity to the point of making one feel that one’s very being is somehow “wrong.”
This assault on the integrity of the self, which every gay experiences, should never be underestimated. It is the basic tactic our weirdly homophobic culture uses to destroy us—first isolate, then terrorize, then make disappear by self-denial.
As our archetypal emotional donnybrook, it also helps to explain many things in the gay world—gay pornography, for instance, is by and large positive fantasy fulfillment that counteracts the nightmarish fears of our adolescent years and, as such, is politically progressive.