He sat across from me in my apartment, knees bouncing. He was not a client. He was a friend. Someone I had known since university. Intelligent. Reserved. Often self-critical. He always read memoirs. He rarely looked in mirrors.

He is Asian. He grew up in a religious home where the word gay was only used when it needed to be condemned.

We had never spoken like this before.

He said it quickly, like the words had been locked inside his chest for years.

“I get off to anti-gay stuff. I watch sermons on YouTube. Pastors condemning queers. Talking about hell. And then I jerk off to a podcast about two guys touching for the first time in a university dorm. What the fuck is that? I hate it. But I can’t stop.”

He laughed when he said it. But his eyes were filled with pain.

As a therapist, I understand how trauma settles into the body. How it attaches itself to desire. How the nervous system can confuse shame with intimacy because that was the first time it ever learned to feel something close to it.

But hearing it from him, from someone I genuinely cared about, struck something deeper.

He told me this: “I’m not even out. I’m not even sure I’m gay. But I want to be dominated by men. I want them to want me so badly they forget their religion. I think I want to feel that powerful. Like I can undo all the times someone told me I was disgusting.”

And I thought to myself: This is what we do not talk about.

This is the invisible struggle many queer men carry. Especially those raised in families and cultures where masculinity is defined by control and not expression. Where any expression of desire is punished. Where silence feels safer than honesty.

He is not broken. He is navigating a world that taught him to eroticise his own erasure.

There is a reason shame becomes arousing for some men.

There is a reason dominance can feel familiar.

There is a reason stories about first times, with nervous hands and whispered kisses in shared bedrooms, can feel like the closest thing some of us have ever known to romance.

What people often call kinks are sometimes just trauma re-enactments that carry the illusion of safety through arousal.

Healing does not mean erasing those urges.

It means holding them gently and asking, What do you want me to understand?

I am not writing this to label or explain him.

I am writing this because I want more therapists, and more people in general, to recognise this.

To understand that queerness does not always appear in pride parades or polished identities. Sometimes it appears as guilt that comes after pleasure. Sometimes it hides in search histories and silence. Sometimes it shows up as a friend who says softly,

“I wish I could just be normal.”

But maybe normal is not the goal.

Maybe the real work is learning how to sit with the contradictions. And to keep listening.

Maxwell E. Guttman, LCSW is a psychotherapist and owner of Recovery Now, a mental health private practice in New York City.