Ask Beastly: How Can I Help a Young Gay Man Who’s Struggling?

Sometimes the best thing we can do is be proof that gay men survive and thrive.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written primarily for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.

I answer real, reader-submitted questions about sex, kink, desire, and intimacy.

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Hi, my friend, thank you for your blog and for opening my mind to subjects I wonder about. My question is, I guess I have become an older mentor to a College Junior in my hometown. We met while he was working on a College assignment. Being 22 years older than him, full disclosure, I am in my early 40s. After he interviewed me for his assignment, he turned off the recorder, and the conversation went personal.

He admitted that earlier that same week, he got "stealthed" by a local older man through a Grinder Hookup. The college guy admits freely that he hooks up because he is horny, and who isn't? And that he has hooked up with over 150 people in the past four years. I am not saying this for judgment; I am just laying out the context.

At New Year's, I had him over for dinner, and we talked during that conversation. We discovered that he had also hooked up with a mutual acquaintance who is HIV positive. My young friend, who started Prep after his stealthing encounter and a rather long and embarrassing trip to our local rural Emergency Room, has gone through a terrible time with parents who tried to get him into a conversion camp and just mental abuse. And he was raped his first year on campus here. 

I feel as a community leader, I need to do as much as I can and as a friend too. Besides being a kind ear, trying to arrange counseling, and connecting him with the nearest major metro men's health clinic, what can I do? I don't want to let him down, and I want him to feel safe here. Plus, I feel like it's a duty to be nonjudgmental and supportive. What ideas do you have?

Hello sir,

It sounds like you're doing everything right. Being non-judgmental and supportive is the best course. Remember that his experiences may be very different from yours. New tech and a rapidly evolving culture make for drastic differences in the experiences between different generations of gay men. Some things will be similar, but many will be very different. His experiences all sound harrowing, but more than that, they sound common.

Half my friends have had similarly awful experiences on the apps. We have a new and frightening technology that we still don’t fully understand yet, that is already changing the fabric of gay life, with consequences we likely can’t foresee yet.