Monday, Sep 8, 2008
Ex-model/novelist Brad Gooch's "Finding the Boyfriend Within" reaches a new low in the gay self-help genre.
Oct 12, 1999 | It was my therapist who suggested, after bearing witness to my despair about the end of my 12-year relationship, that I attend a Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting, a 12-step group geared toward those who "enable" addictive behavior in others. Because CODA is not about some specific behavior or substance abuse, it also serves as a catch-all for those who have become excessively dependent on something more amorphous than heroine or gambling. I've never taken a 12-step approach to my own life (I've never been an alcohol or drug abuser), but I did become dependent in love. I guess a 12-year relationship will do that to a person.
I was a little leery about subjecting myself to the 12-step way. I see many gay men -- having suffered the fallout of obsessive-compulsive behavior and various addictions -- who have turned to 12-step groups like a new drug, and sometimes the effects are as numbing as any pill they could pop in at any club. In an attempt to remove pain completely from their lives, they walk around like Stepford wives with pecs. They don't drink, smoke or do drugs. They smile a lot, and hug one another, like the Teletubbies. They are the new gay fascists -- skeptical of irony, downright hostile to whatever constituted a "bad attitude," yet still looking for the supreme male specimen. (That never changes.) Luckily they're in the minority of gay men.
But the bottom line was that I was suffering. I needed -- and was willing -- to experience the shock of recognition, so I went. For the record, this meeting wasn't full of gay Stepfords; these were men who were feeling all kinds of things, including an inordinate degree of negativity and isolation, and by the end I felt lightheaded from a mixture of empathy and despondency. But there was a moment of levity: During the meeting one of the participants wryly mentioned a new book of self-help he'd bought, called "Finding The Boyfriend Within," and even in a roomful of co-dependent gay men in pain, this was greeted with a hearty, knowing laugh. Apparently, more than a few had been down this path before.
Gay men in particular seem to be ideal customers for the self-improvement trade, whether they're self-anesthetizing types or smart people simply struggling with the external pressures of homophobia as well as the internal pressures of maintaining body and soul in an extremely unforgiving queer world. Books like "The Principles: The Gay Man's Guide to Getting (And Keeping) Mr. Right" and "How to Survive Your Own Gay Life" reflect this. "Finding the Boyfriend Within," the newest addition to the canon, was written by Brad Gooch, former model. For those familiar with Gooch's work, you could see this coming from the Fire Island Ferry, and revel in the delirious preciousness of it all. The author of one respectable book ("City Poet," a biography of Frank O'Hara), this is also the same man who only a few years ago wrote a novel called "The Golden Age of Promiscuity," with its cover art a glory hole. Not one to lag behind the times, Gooch has now embraced the healing power of aloneness. (That for many gay men there is a direct corollary between promiscuity and being alone is one of the many ironies Gooch glosses over.) Whatever you want to say about the age of promiscuity, it wasn't golden, and neither is celibacy, but unfortunately those are too often the only choices gay men give themselves.
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