Free The Velvet Rage by Alan Downs

others linger, and some even spend an entire lifetime suffering the torment of overwhelming shame. Regardless, this first stage often leaves us with several problematic coping behaviors, like splitting and shame avoidance. Romantic relationships created during this stage are almost always stormy and traumatic for both parties, and everyone is often deeply wounded by the experience.

Chapter 5
    BEWITCHED, BETRAYED
    T he intimate relationships a gay man has while in stage one are often some of the most defining relationships of his life. It is a tumultuous time, filled with rage, fear, and shame. Confused about who he really is and what kind of life he might expect to have, he is often unpredictable, impulsive, and without clear direction. His relationships are often intense, explosive, and for so many gay men, deeply wounding.
    Even as I write this chapter, my mind reels of my own lost relationships of those early years and the too-short relationships of my clients who often recount them through heavy tears of grief. In his 1995 autobiography Palimpsest , Gore Vidal—arguably the first openly gay male American novelist—tells of his tender, loving relationship with an astonishingly handsome man named Jimmie Trimble. Trimble’s full-page picture in Vidal’s book depicts an adolescent beauty; Vidal describes a lifelong infatuation with him.
    Written by Vidal in his seventies, Palimpsest provides a sweeping and grand tour of his life. It’s filled with references and bits of conversation with the rich, richer, and famous. He
tells of conversations with Jackie and Jack Kennedy, Charleton Heston, Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, and Paul Bowles, just to name a few of the luminaries with whom his life intertwined. And yet it is Jimmie Trimble who stands out from the grandeur, a young man whom Vidal loved during his high school years and who was killed in the World War II battle of Iwo Jima at the tender age of nineteen. As Vidal states simply, Trimble “was the unfinished business of my life.” 1 In the last pages of his book, Vidal prints the last picture taken of Jimmie and in caption asks that he be buried near Jimmie’s grave.
    What is it about a relationship with this young boy that so imprinted itself upon Vidal’s life, a life that was lived between Hollywood, Washington, and Europe among the most dashing and genteel of the times? Why are gay men so affected by these early infatuations and trysts? Why do so many of us go on to fill our lives with men we can manage to forget?
    â€œSometimes I think my first lover will be the only man I will ever really love. I would have given him everything I had . . . and eventually I did. I still think about him twenty years later.”
    JORGE FROM SAN DIEGO, CA
    The relationships formed in stage one have enormous power over the gay man. That first experience of feeling romantic love blended with erotic surge burns itself into our brains. The joy of finally having touched the innermost secret and first feeling of completeness it brings is monumental in our lives.
    The darker side of stage one relationships is the overwhelming shame that clouds and penetrates this first powerful relationship. We are not free—not yet—and we struggle internally between the two defining poles of our lives, shame and love. This emotional struggle manifests outwardly as intense relationships that
are often swiftly abandoned and subsequently denied, leaving one or both men stunned and heartbroken.
    Michael told me the story of his first love, Phillip. He hadn’t deliberately recalled the story for more than twenty years, and it was obvious as he told it that the memories and emotions were flooding back, at times reducing him to tears. Michael had met Phillip at the University of Texas during their sophomore year. At the time, they were dating two girls who were friends, and the foursome had quickly become an inseparable unit at football games and pizza parlors