Compulsive sexual behaviour and the closet

The man who is managing compulsive sexual behaviour while still in the closet, or who does not have the privilege of being able to come out socially has a marked experience that is important to explore and doesn't always match that of other gay and bisexual men. Living a life that is publicly heterosexual and privately something entirely different, he is carrying a particular weight. Not just the weight of the behaviour, and not just the weight of the secret. But the weight of a fundamental division in the self that has often been maintained for decades, that has structured every significant relationship and every significant decision, and that has become so load-bearing in the architecture of his life that the prospect of its removal feels less like liberation and more like demolition.

This piece is for those men. And for the people around them who may be beginning to understand that something like this is true of someone they love.

Who these men are

The men I am describing are not a single type. They range across ages, backgrounds, relationship structures and degrees of self-awareness about what is happening.

Some have known from early in their lives that their desire was not what the world expected of them, and have spent decades managing that knowledge privately, constructing a life that accommodates the public expectation while finding other routes, usually secret ones, for the private reality. Others have arrived at same-sex desire later, in ways that have surprised them, in the context of lives already built around a different assumption. Some are married. Some have children. Some occupy positions of public or professional visibility that make the stakes of any disclosure feel particularly high.

The man that the world knows, and the man that exists in the spaces the world does not see.

What they share is the division. The man that the world knows, and the man that exists in the spaces the world does not see.

What the secret life provides

The spaces where these men express the part of themselves that is not publicly acknowledged often involve compulsive sexual behaviour, though not always. Apps, cruising grounds, saunas, encounters arranged through networks that operate invisibly alongside ordinary life: these are the contexts where the suppressed self finds expression.

What those spaces provide is real. The relief of being, even briefly, in a context where no performance is required, where the desire that has been managed so carefully can exist without management, is genuine. For some men it is the closest thing to authentic selfhood they have experienced. The encounter, however transactional or brief, is not just sexual. It is an experience of being, however partially and however temporarily, real.

That reality has costs. The secrecy required to maintain these encounters is itself a chronic stressor. The emotional labour of managing the double life accumulates. The intimacy available in the secret life, because it must remain secret, cannot be sustained or developed. And the shame that surrounds the whole structure, the shame both of the desire and of the deception, is a persistent and powerful driver of the threat cycle.

Why the closet makes the behaviour harder to address

Compulsive sexual behaviour is always harder to address when the identity dimension underneath it cannot be acknowledged. The standard clinical approaches, which involve understanding the function of the behaviour, building alternative regulatory strategies, developing a different relationship to shame, all of these require the man to be honest about what is actually driving the pattern. In the closeted man's case, what is driving it is inseparable from the identity question. And the identity question cannot be safely addressed within the existing structure of his life without consequences he may not be prepared to face.

This creates a clinical impasse that is worth being honest about. The work cannot be fully done without some degree of honesty about the identity dimension. And some men are not in a position to be honest about the identity dimension, because the structure of their life does not permit it. A man who would lose his marriage, his relationship with his children, his professional standing, or his place within a religious or cultural community if his sexuality were known, is not making an irrational calculation when he stays silent. He is assessing a genuinely impossible situation.

What the work can do in those circumstances is more limited and more specific: it can reduce the acute harm of the compulsive pattern, it can build some internal capacity for managing the threat state without the behaviour, and it can hold the identity question in a way that allows the man to at least acknowledge it to himself, even when external acknowledgement is not yet possible.

The discovery by a partner

For men who are married or in long-term relationships with women, one of the most common routes to clinical contact is discovery: a partner who has found something, who has noticed something, who can no longer sustain the fiction that everything is what it has appeared to be.

That discovery is almost always a crisis for both people. The partner is dealing simultaneously with the revelation of secret sexual behaviour, the question of what the behaviour means about the relationship and about her husband's sexual identity, and the retrospective re-evaluation of a shared history that now looks different. The man is dealing with the loss of the structure that the secret life depended on, often before he has any clarity about what he wants or what is true.

In this context, the clinical priority is not the compulsive behaviour specifically. It is the stabilisation of two people in acute distress, and the creation of conditions in which both can begin to understand what has happened and what they want. That process is slow. It almost never proceeds in a straight line. And its outcome, whether it leads toward disclosure and some form of integration, toward the continuation of a renegotiated relationship, or toward separation, cannot be known at the outset.

What I want to say to men who recognise themselves here

If you are reading this and recognising your own situation, I want to say a few things directly.

The division you are carrying is exhausting. The management of the double life, the sustained performance, the chronic weight of the secret, takes a toll that accumulates over time and that is rarely visible to the people around you, and sometimes not even to yourself.

It is not a random malfunction. It is a coherent response to an impossible situation.

The behaviour that has developed in the secret spaces of your life makes sense in the context of that division. It is not a random malfunction. It is a coherent response to an impossible situation.

And the shame that surrounds it, both the shame around the desire and the shame around the deception, is not a verdict on your character. It is the predictable result of growing up in a world that made honesty about your sexuality feel untenable. The world's failure to provide a safer context is not your fault, even though you are the one carrying the consequences.

None of this means that the behaviour has no costs, or that the people around you are not being harmed by the deception. Both things are true simultaneously: the situation is comprehensible, and it is causing harm. Holding both of those at once, without collapsing into self-justification on the one hand or self-destruction on the other, is part of what the work involves.

If this describes your experience, Time To Talk About Sex offers six-month group therapy for men with compulsive sexual behaviour (CSB), with up to 100 free places, in person in London (with Brighton, Essex, Suffolk and Manchester subject to demand) or in a confidential online format. Information about applying is at the applications page. Growing up gay or bi: the stress driver explains the wider stress that shapes the closeted man's experience. Gay shame and compulsive sexual behaviour addresses the internal dimension of what secrecy produces.