Gay Wellbeing: What Makes Homosexuals Happy?

What really makes gay people happy?  The coalition goverment has proposed a happiness index, which will assess the general psychological wellbeing of the country. Defining happiness is a very complicated exercise, however, and I’d like to think for a moment about what really makes us as gay people happy.

When Terry Sanderson’s book, How To Be A Happy Homosexual was published in 1986 , it dealt with practical matters and gave encouragement to those feeling oppressed. With the relative liberation past decades have brought us and increased self-belief,  it’s useful to look at what makes us happiest now.

Assuming as homosexuals we’re in reasonable health, and out and proud, it might be worth adding essayist Joseph Addison’s three essentials for happiness in the mix, namely

“something to do, something to love, and something to hope for”.

An age-related perspective is also helpful, and I want to contrast testimonies of younger gay people with the evidence of a couple of memoirs from gay oldies, because age and maturity tend to bring a more settled happiness.

The Greek poet Palladus (4th century AD) spoke of ” loving the rituals that keep men close”, meaning the art of writing that enables us to send affectionate messages and loving greetings. I based a poem of my own on my liking for drinking tea in bed on waking up with a lover in the morning, while discussing things we planned to do, when my happiness also came from knowing that we would have sex again before starting the day:

     ” Of all the ancient rites affirming God, still this: two urban gays drink tea speak dreams make love.

Gay sex may be pleasurable or ecstacy-filled, but happiness to me has an expansive, or spiritual, quality, more associated with the anticipation of sex, or the remembering of it.

When actress and writer Anne Valery asked Quentin Crisp, who famously embraced Manhattan in later life, to recall a moment of pure happiness, this is what he said:

      ” It was Christmas and snowing in New York and I’d been invited to a friend’s. He lived in a very grand, very tall, apartment block, and when I entered the…elevator, it went straight up to his stately penthouse. When the doors opened, there were all my friends, smiling at me and holding up glasses and shouting, “Happy Birthday”. And there, through the enormous windows on three sides, sparkling with a million lights, was the fabled city of New York at my feet!”

Here we have the same expansive feeling, in Crisp’s case accentuated with a real sense of belonging, so much at odds with the social ostracism of his earlier life in London, and by the dramatic setting.

Quentin Crisp found happiness in New York (here played by Sir Ian McKennan)

American lesbian novelist and poet May Sarton, despite the frustrations of increasing physical frailty, expresses what happiness means to her in  a memoir of her eighty-second year. In Sarton’s case, scenes from the natural world around her home in Maine raise her spirits. She writes of

“this marvelous blue ocean morning”, or of “…a renewing drive…the sun was out, the leaves were glorious…”,

and the joy of watching her cat Pierrot carefully washing his paws. When she feels depressed, like Palladus and Addison she tries “always to find something to look forward to” such as the visit of a dear friend with whom “it will be so wonderful to resume all our little traditions.” Happiness here resides in an appreciation of the things often taken for granted in our youth, at the opposite pole to Crisp’s Manhattan rapture.

What has struck me on looking at gay dating sites is that for younger members, a sense of dissatisfaction often gets in  the way of a real sense of wellbeing. There may be many reasons for this, but the quest of happiness should nevertheless be one of our primary goals.

To be less oppressed than past gay generations does not make us happier automatically, the winning of sought-after political gains and greater public awareness of our needs will not make us happy homosexuals by themselves.  And,  just as certainly, no government initiative can truly capture our hearts and minds on its radar.

Happiness in the end is something we must all find individually, whether partnered or not. However, it cannot come from being self-centred or selfish, but involves our openness to the needs of others, gay and otherwise.

Derek Jarman found happiness in his garden at Dungeness

When gay filmmaker Derek Jarman went public with his HIV diagnosis in 1989,  he was living in Dungeness and creating his far-famed garden. He realised suddenly that the focus of his life was shifting from himself to “the minds of [his] audience.” Despite niggling doubts about health matters and other things, he reveals he  has,        

“never been happier…I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Planted lavender and clumps of red hot poker.”

By John Hartley

(c)  Copyright 2011.  All Rights Reserved. 

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