Gay and bisexual men: the double shame
Many gay and bisexual men carry two shames at once. The first is the shame of being, absorbed early in a world that told them same-sex desire was wrong, dangerous, or something to keep quiet about. The second is the shame of struggling with sexual behaviour that once brought pleasure and belonging and now brings harm. This piece is about how those two shames interact, and why the work has to hold both.
Published
There is a particular quality to the shame that many gay and bisexual men carry into this work. It is not a single shame. It is two shames, layered, and the second one sits directly on top of the first. The first is the shame of being, of being gay or bisexual in a world that spent decades telling them that was wrong, dangerous, or at the very least something to keep quiet about. The second is the shame of struggling: of finding that the sexual behaviour that once brought pleasure, liberation, belonging and connection has started to cause harm.
What compulsive sexual behaviour means here
Understanding what it was doing that was useful is not a distraction from the work. It is the work.
Many men arrive describing themselves as sex addicts or porn addicts. Those terms are used widely and I take them seriously. The way we work calls it compulsive sexual behaviour: a pattern in which sexual behaviours that once felt pleasurable, liberating or functional have escalated over time, begun to cause harm, and feel increasingly difficult to interrupt.
Nobody engages in these behaviours unless they brought something worthwhile at some point. That is the baseline in this work. The behaviour worked. It felt good. It brought fun, excitement, liberation, relief, connection, community. Understanding what it was doing that was useful is not a distraction from the work. It is the work.
Who arrives, and what brings them in
The gay and bisexual men who come to this work are not a uniform group. Gay men typically arrive first through a sexual health route: repeated sexually transmitted infections (STIs), infections, physical injuries. The GP refers, or the sexual health clinic flags a pattern. For younger gay men, the picture is sometimes starker still. Men who first became sexual in a technological landscape of apps, online contact and social media may have no reference point for sexuality that does not also carry risk. For many of them, harm-coded sex has been all they have ever known.
Older gay men follow a different trajectory. They had other forms of sexual experience earlier in life, were introduced to drugs and risk-taking later, and often carry a direct internal comparison: this is what I used to have, now I have this, and I cannot go back.
Bisexual men arrive in a different position again. They often have more limited experience of sex with men, frequently feel invisible in gay or queer spaces, and find that the most accessible entry points into gay sexual culture are often its most liberated but also its most drug-connected spaces. The way in to feeling comfortable sometimes goes through a door that also leads to harm.
Racialised gay men face an additional layer. Seeking sexual connection in spaces where access and status have been structured by racism and fetishisation shapes a different pattern, a different kind of pull into behaviours, and a different and often harder relationship with leaving those behaviours behind.
A minority of the men I see are not yet out. For them, the sexual behaviour has been the only available outlet for their sexuality. The question of public versus private identity runs through everything.
The cultural driver
There is something specific to gay culture that sits behind much of what men describe, and it is important not to shame it. Gay communities have, for understandable historical reasons, developed a culture in which sexual freedom and multiple partners are often coded as part of the community experience. Where heterosexual masculinity celebrates sexual conquest in one way, gay culture has its own version of that coding: freedom from the constraints of monogamy as a kind of achievement.
This is not inherently a problem. In a community that was criminalised and shamed for its very existence, sexual freedom became a political stance, a form of resistance, a way of being fully oneself in a world that demanded concealment. The men I work with understand that history. Many of them lived it.
The complication arises because that same coding creates a particular trap. When sexual behaviour starts to feel out of control, when the scales have tipped from pleasure outweighing harm to harm outweighing what it gives, there is nowhere obvious to put that. Feeling distressed about what sex has become adds shame on top of shame. The cultural expectation of sexual freedom becomes one more way to feel inadequate. Men suffer alone because to name the struggle feels like a betrayal of community norms they have internalised.
The stress of being gay or bi: the load underneath
The organising idea for understanding why gay and bisexual men are so disproportionately affected is the stress of being gay or bi in a straight world. It describes a layered set of stressors specific to sexual minority populations: external discrimination and prejudice; the chronic vigilance those conditions create; the expectation of rejection; and the internalisation of negative societal attitudes about one's own identity. Each layer accumulates. Each adds to an ongoing chronic load that is distinct from, and additional to, the general stressors all people experience. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has found the rate of self-harm among lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB+) people in England and Wales is 2.5 times higher than among heterosexual people, a figure that reflects the accumulated weight of that load.
The behaviour is not a moral failing.
It is a comprehensible response to an abnormal amount of chronic stress.
What this stress means for sexual behaviour is that the drive to find an emergency off-ramp, somewhere to discharge what has become unbearable, is not a personal failing. It is a predictable response to a lot of ongoing stress. Sexual behaviour becomes useful as a relief precisely because it is high-reward, immediately available, and in gay culture specifically, celebrated.
The layers that shape the picture
A bisexual man navigating gay spaces where his identity is not fully recognised carries a specific form of invisibility stress on top of the stress that all gay and bi men experience. His most accessible entry point into gay male sexual culture may be the highest-harm end of it.
A racialised gay man navigating a community that has its own racial hierarchies, and whose sexual attention, when it arrives, is often fetishised rather than genuinely desired, is not simply experiencing that stress once. He is experiencing it at least twice: from the broader heteronormative culture and from within the community that is supposed to be his refuge.
A man who is not out, who is presenting to the world as straight while living a sexual life that must remain hidden, is carrying a burden no amount of individual resilience should be expected simply to absorb.
Younger gay men who have come of age entirely in the digital landscape of apps, social media and online pornography may be carrying a template of sexuality that contains almost nothing but harm, with no earlier reference point for what sexuality can feel like when it is not risk-coded.
What the work addresses
Time To Talk About Sex is a six-month group therapy programme for men with compulsive sexual behaviour. It draws on Compassion Focused Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and it takes the stress of being gay or bi seriously as the ongoing load underneath the behaviour, not as an excuse for it. The programme is open to gay, bisexual and straight men, with groups organised by sexual orientation so that men work alongside others whose experiences are most similar to their own. Each cohort takes up to ten men.
The programme does not prescribe a single destination. It does not frame abstinence as the mandatory goal. The goal is a different relationship with sexual behaviour: grounded, thinking before acting, making decisions led by values rather than by whatever the alarm inside you is telling you to do in a given moment. What that looks like in practice will differ from man to man.
The shame worth naming
Men arrive with shame. Shame about what their sexual behaviour has cost them: relationships, money, health, time, self-respect. Shame, in many cases, about having been unable to manage something that their culture tells them should feel natural and free. And underneath that, for many of the men who come here, an older and deeper shame that has been there for much longer: the shame of who they are.
The two shames have to be held together.
The instinct, when facing a man carrying that much shame, might sometimes be to move quickly to the problem and the solution. The work here moves more slowly than that. Because until the older shame is taken seriously, made sense of, held with something approaching compassion, the newer shame about the behaviour sits on top of it without resolution. The two shames have to be held together.
Questions men often ask
Why is compulsive sexual behaviour more common in gay and bisexual men?
Men make up the large majority of people who present with compulsive sexual behaviour, and within that group, gay and bisexual men are significantly overrepresented. The cultural coding of male heterosexual sexuality as performance and conquest means that behaviour which has become genuinely out of control can look, from the outside, like a man who simply has a high sex drive. That framing protects the behaviour and delays help-seeking, often for years. For gay and bisexual men there is an additional layer. Many grew up without any positive framework for their sexuality, in silence, in families or communities where same-sex desire was invisible or unwelcome. Then, often suddenly, they encounter a gay culture that is explicitly sexual, where being sexual is the primary way of connecting with other gay men and feeling part of something. Sex and community become entangled in a way that makes it very difficult to separate them later. A lot of emotional need, for belonging, for validation, for being known, gets channelled through sexual behaviour. And that is a significant driver of patterns becoming compulsive.
What is the double shame that gay and bisexual men carry?
The double shame refers to two distinct but overlapping layers of shame that many gay and bisexual men carry. The first is the shame of sexuality itself, the messages absorbed, often from very early in life, that same-sex desire is wrong, abnormal, or something to be hidden. For most gay and bisexual men, these messages arrived long before they had any sexual experience, and they went deep. Even for men who are now openly gay in confident, accepting environments, that early shame rarely disappears cleanly. It goes underground. The second layer is the shame that accumulates around the compulsive behaviour, the sense of not being in control, of repeating things they did not intend to repeat, of the gap between who they want to be and what they are doing. What makes this particular combination so difficult is that these two shames reinforce each other. The shame of sexuality drives a man toward the sexual behaviour as a release or a source of validation. The shame of the behaviour then compounds the shame of being gay in a specific and painful way, as if the behaviour is confirming the original verdict. Understanding this is essential to the work.
How does the stress of being gay or bi, also known as minority stress, drive compulsive sexual behaviour?
It is the ongoing burden carried by people who face stigma for who they are. For gay and bisexual men, this includes external experiences like discrimination and rejection, but also the internal experience of vigilance, constantly managing how much of yourself is safe to show, in which contexts. It includes the anticipation of rejection even when it is not present, and the internalisation of hostile messages about your own sexuality. This chronic stress load has a direct relationship to compulsive sexual behaviour. When the alarm inside us (the part of the brain that switches on when something feels dangerous or overwhelming) is running at a heightened baseline, as it tends to be in people who have grown up managing their identity in an often-hostile world, the drive to find relief goes looking. Sex is one of the most powerful and accessible forms of that relief. Add to this a sexual culture that positions sex as the primary route to community and belonging, and you have the conditions for compulsive patterns to develop in a very understandable way.
How does internalised homophobia contribute to compulsive sexual behaviour?
Internalised homophobia is the process by which hostile messages about same-sex desire, absorbed from family, culture, religion or community, become part of how we relate to ourselves and our sexuality. This does not require explicit homophobia to have been experienced. Silence, absence of positive representation, the sense that your particular desire was never quite welcome, all of these leave a mark. And even when we feel proud of who we are on the surface, that earlier shame can still be shaping choices from below. Compulsive sexual behaviour is often, at its heart, an attempt to answer or discharge that shame through the very sexuality it makes us feel ashamed about. Unpicking that loop is central to the work.
Why does gay culture sometimes make compulsive sexual behaviour harder to see?
Gay culture, for reasons that are historically and politically legible, has often positioned sexual freedom as an aspect of liberation. Multiple partners, sexual diversity, and freedom from monogamous norms are all coded, in many gay spaces, as part of the community experience. That framing is not, in itself, the problem. But it means that when a man's behaviour starts to feel out of control, there is often no cultural language to name it as such. He looks around and sees the same behaviour celebrated. The gap between his internal experience and the cultural surround becomes its own isolation. And the men we work with often describe how much of their private struggle happened long before they could bring themselves to name it publicly.
Does the programme understand bisexual men's specific experience?
Yes. Bisexual men often carry a form of invisibility inside gay male spaces that gay men do not. Their identity is questioned, minimised, or treated as a phase. In practice, the most accessible entry points into gay male sexual culture, for a bisexual man trying to find his footing, are often the most sexually and chemically intense spaces. What starts as an attempt to connect can quickly become entangled with high-harm patterns. The work takes that specific pathway seriously and does not require a bisexual man to argue for the reality of his identity before it can be worked with.
If what you have read here feels familiar, this is what the programme was built for.
A six-month group therapy programme for men whose sex lives have started to feel out of control. Available across the UK.
See how the programme works