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BRIAN SPITULNIK on Gay Trauma, Grindr, and Coming Into Reality

THE HARDWARE 

STORE DOESN'T

SELL MILK
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Photography and Words by Benn Jae.

Styling by Michael Rosenberg. Grooming by Erin Anderson.

Like most gay men in New York, Brian Spitulnik found his way into my life through my phone. 

The algorithm knows what it's doing. One day he was simply there, a therapist on my feed saying out loud the things I had been thinking privately for years. About gay culture. About how we treat each other. About the strange, exhausting theatre of it all. It was like watching someone broadcast my inner monologue. Every video felt less like content and more like confirmation. You are not the only one thinking this.

Which, it turns out, is exactly the point. It's why he started posting in the first place. But we'll get to that.

For those who don't know him, here’s the run down. Brian Spitulnik is a licensed psychotherapist specialising in gay men. Before the couch, there was the stage. Fifteen years on Broadway, including the run in Chicago, the show he'd wanted from the start. He was the cover for seven roles. Some days he'd perform one part in the afternoon and a different one at night, holding an entire show's choreography in his body like a second language. Then, over those fifteen years, he watched three gay men over forty die. He was staring down forty himself. So he made a decision that sounds simple and is anything but: I don't know how to save anyone else, but I'm going to try to save myself. He went back to school for social work while still performing, and pointed every thesis and every piece of research at one question. Why are gay men so traumatised, and what do we do about it?

The answers built his practice, then his following, then an app, GAYFULLY, and now rooms full of strangers doing the work together in person. He is warm, quick, extremely funny, and constitutionally incapable of giving you a soundbite when the truth is more complicated.

I should declare my interest. I am a happily married gay man. My husband and I run our lives across two countries, two households, New Zealand and New York, and a punishing amount of air travel. Most people think it's insane. My gay friends say, you're so lucky, it seems so easy. No, girl. Nothing about it is easy. It is fucking hard. What it is, is chosen. And choosing, I would quickly learn, is the thing we as gay men find hardest to do. With a tank top buffet of opportunity on our apps, in our clubs, in our gym locker rooms, we refuse to choose, almost as a way to punish ourselves. Our trauma. Accepting happiness into our lives might be far more complicated than I originally thought.

Brian arrived at Brownstone Cowboys on a bright Pride Week morning, fresh from the groomer's chair, our first-ever podcast guest. Forever known as the BSC first. Fitting.

New York was in that rare summer mood where the whole city feels like it's flirting with you. We drank coffee and we talked for hours. Honestly, it felt like we were only scratching the surface. One of the sharpest minds working on gay male happiness, began to tell me why the hardware store doesn't sell milk.

What follows happened. The sequence is mine, the words are ours.
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ON SAVING YOURSELF

BENN JAE: We found you through your socials, which we. What I think is amazing, is how you talk about culture and being kind to yourself, respecting your own space before you respect anyone else's. How did you get into therapy for gay men? Was it the plan, or did the plan find you?

BRIAN SPITULNIK: I was on Broadway for fifteen years. And in those fifteen years I saw three men die, from suicide or accidental overdose. They were all gay men over forty. And here I was, heading toward forty. I thought, I don't know how to save anyone else. But I'm going to try to save myself. Let me go back to school and see what ‘myself’ is. So I got the degree in social work. I was studying while performing, and every single thesis, all my research, was geared toward gay men. And the answers I found were that we are, by and large, a terribly traumatized community. 

We're traumatized by growing up in a homophobic world that doesn't want us to exist. Whether you had an accepting family or not, depending on what time in history you grew up, we were all traumatized by that. And then there's the added layer of crisis, depending on your age. I'm 43. My age group was traumatized by proxy. Broadway was my gay community. I didn't have another one. So what I knew about being a gay adult, and what I knew about being terrified of HIV, came from that world. The echoes of it are still with us, even though any kid today will tell you we're protected now. And it's true, and it's wonderful to live without that fear. But what's not true is that they're free of it. They're still coming up in the shadow of that trauma, because the world still sees us that way. We're treated differently. Like any minority group, really, depending on where you're living and what history you're carrying.

ON THE TRAUMA OLYMPICS

BJ: I grew up privileged. White gay male, an accepting family, layers of gays in the family, we're everywhere. But even in that space there was trauma, because of where we grew up. In New Zealand it wasn't okay to be gay, and I didn't realise the weight of that, until much later. Then I look at people who don't have what I had, and on the spectrum my trauma feels so minimal compared to theirs that I almost don't talk about it. Sometimes I feel guilty.

BS: I deal with that too. The men in my practice are self-selected. They're already in a place of knowing they need help, and they can afford to be there. But here's the thing. There's no such thing as suffering that disqualifies you from the reality that you are also a human being experiencing difficult things. There is a kind of resilience that comes from being generationally traumatized, and it's real. It's not a good thing, but it's real. If you're a minority, everyone around you shares that experience. We don't have that. We grow up different from our parents and our friends, so we carry a very particular kind of aloneness. And when it comes to healing, which is the goal, to live a full life, it does us a disservice to think, my trauma isn't important because their trauma is worse. They are deserving of healing. So are you. It doesn't do any of us any good for me to pretend I don't have my own. Let's help each other instead.
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ON BEING TOXIC TO EACH OTHER

BJ: Let's steer back to gay men and how toxic we can be with each other. I'm happily married, ten years, but you still experience the culture, through friends, in a bar, in a club. It's fascinating how horrible we can be in those environments. How judgmental. We should be lifting each other up.

BS: Why is it so? Because we hate ourselves. That's a huge generalization, but it also happens to be the core. We are told we are not acceptable as we are. So it becomes this horizontal oppression. You're not getting higher than me. If I'm not going up, you're not either. We're in the same boat. And there's the gay sensibility, which has always been dry and campy and cutting, and there's a part of that we all love. But you know those men where it borders on cruelty. They think they're reading you, and they're not reading you, they're just being mean. And then there's the extra layer of what happens when we dehumanize ourselves: we start rejecting each other. Rejecting each other in the most brutal ways, never speaking to anybody on these apps.

BJ: What I find fascinating is the conformity. For people who are largely independent, independent in thinking, independent in identity, we become this conformist society inside a really independent minority bubble.

BS: I moved to New York in the early 2000s, and we were all wearing baseball caps and American Apparel T-shirts and tight-but-not-too-tight jeans. That was what was okay to wear. We were not wearing makeup, not wearing nail polish. It was heteronormative toxic masculinity in a box. And of course there was always the subculture within the subculture. Look back through gay history and it was always there. San Francisco had the clones. Everybody looked the same in the 80s, the mustache, the tight shirt. At the time, that was living your fantasy. But if you weren't that, you were on the outside. There's always been some version of this. I don't go out much anymore, I've always been a 40-year-old man inside whatever body I was in. But when I do go out now and I see guys in makeup and dresses and crop tops and earrings, I think, oh yes. To me that's really exciting.

BJ: I went to a party on Wednesday night that felt like New York in 2010. Insanely wild. A masquerade, Gen Z everywhere, completely nonconformist. All colours, all shapes, all sizes. Nobody was on their phone. People were talking to each other. I wasn't there to document it, I just happened to have a camera in my bag, and I was so enamoured I started shooting. I hadn't felt that energy inside a venue in years. If this is what's coming back, I'm here for it. Bring Gen Z to the party.

ON THE HARDWARE STORE

BJ: The apps, though. The apps are crazy.

BS: They're crazy. We're objectifying ourselves by putting ourselves there. It's a meat market. Some people go on explicitly wanting sex, show me the goods, that's what we're here for. Some people just want to chat. But there are a lot of men going to the hardware store trying to buy milk. The hardware store is Grindr. The milk is connection. And they're not going to get a loving connection there. Although, plenty of men have married people they met on the apps.

BJ: I met my partner on Tinder. But that was years ago, back when it was where you went to date.

BS: The real solution to how we treat each other is learning to love ourselves. Learning to have compassion for ourselves and all the parts we've been told are unacceptable for as long as we can remember. That's why I started posting. All the men in my private practice were saying the same thing: nobody wants anything but cheap sex and drugs. All of them, saying the same thing about each other. I'm seeing half of New York and they're all describing each other. Honestly, if I didn't have a license to protect, I'd have started a dating agency. So I started saying it online instead. You're not the only one thinking this. If I'm saying it out loud, it's because I have the data to back up that it's happening. And what came out of that was the app GAYFULLY. It's community. You can chat, you can DM, but more than that there are tools. Meditation, breath work, a step-by-step self-led guide to finding compassion for yourself. Because the reality is gay men are happy to connect online, but they want to be in a room. They're sick of the distance the apps create. This weekend I'm running my first in-person event with strangers, on Pride Sunday, right before the parade. A connected, peaceful moment in the middle of the madness. Real space for real people.
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ON THE BRIDGE

BJ: I have so many single gay friends who ask, what's the secret? There is no secret. You have to be willing to look past the superficial. Find a connection with someone who isn't what you thought it would physically look like, then be willing to work on it, over and over. I watch friends meet great guys and dismiss them for the most ridiculous reasons. There are so many fish in the big city that we're quick to throw them back.

BS: And there's no right answer, because plenty of men stay when they should go. The opposite end is the fear that this is as good as it gets. Gay men don't have a monopoly on being afraid to lose what they have. But most gay men are looking for some kind of partnership, they just don't always know what it looks like. A relationship requires blunt honesty with yourself and with your partner, at every moment of every day. That doesn't mean constantly saying, I hate the way you chew. Although at some point, politely, in a way that lets them know they're loved, maybe mention there's a different way to chew. That's a real example, by the way. It's more this: a lot of guys say, I just want to be loved, I want to be enough for him. Great. Go into the relationship wanting that. Then keep being honest with yourself about what you want now. And now. Because it's going to change. You are going to change. Your dynamic is going to change. And if you don't change with it, it gets ugly.

BJ: Someone once told me every relationship is a bridge, and you meet each other on it. Sometimes one of you has to walk further across. The point is to meet in the middle, and that's not easy. Our rule in our relationship is that it's your responsibility to bring your own happiness into the relationship.

BS: You just said a lot. Because bringing your own happiness also includes allowing yourself to feel safe when that person goes away, and secure that they'll come back. That's how you find out what makes you happy in the first place.

BJ: We travel all the time. People ask, how do you do it, it must be so hard. Honestly, I don't think we'd still be together if we were together all the time. The time apart and the coming back together, that constant flux, works for us. How wonderful to be able to have your own life and share it.
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ON THE COUCH

BJ: I must say it thirty times a week to people in my community, and that's across all the letters of our little alphabet. Just go lie on a couch and talk about your feelings. I've been in therapy for almost twenty years. My best sessions are the ones where I arrive happy and healthy with nothing to talk about, and the next minute, I'm ten layers deep.

BS: A reason for that is you have more space. I do a lot of work with emotion and body and mind together. The short version is, you tell me something makes you really angry, and I ask, where do you feel that in your body? Most people say, I just know I'm angry. But take a second, and you realise, oh, I know I'm angry because my face is heating up. Making space for all of that is where the healing begins. If you come in light and breezy, you already have space. Although sometimes you come in light and breezy because you've shut everything down. That's a different session.

BJ: Should everyone be in therapy?

BS: Every question you ask a therapist, the answer is always: it depends. Not everybody should be in therapy, and not every therapy suits every person. There are people who are profoundly traumatized who need focused, short-term work first. Therapists get blowback, people asking why you'd grift people for money. This is my job. But I understand where it comes from. You're coming to me with your pain, and you're also giving me money to help you with it. That's so vulnerable, so exposing. There's such a level of trust and hope in handing somebody money to help you, that I understand how someone who has been profoundly disappointed elsewhere in life would be suspicious of anyone offering help in exchange for money.

BJ: For anyone listening: just try it. Maybe three or four times, because once is never enough. It can be like dating. No chemistry, wrong fit, try again.

BS: Do your research. You could land with someone who isn't equipped for what you're bringing in. Ask the right questions. Then make an informed decision.
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ON RUPAUL BEING WRONG

BJ: Before we go. You can give our audience one piece of advice today. What's the tip?

BS: You have to come into reality with yourself before you can be in a relationship with somebody else. What's the line? How you gonna love somebody...

BJ: Hang on. What is it? Oh my god.

What followed was a full minute of two gay men failing to remember the most famous line in gay culture. RuPaul has said it to us thirteen times a season for over a decade. We got there. Eventually. I mean FFS.

BJ & BS: IF YOU DON'T LOVE YOURSELF, HOW IN THE HELL YOU GONNA LOVE SOMEBODY ELSE?

BS: Thank you, Jesus. That took way too long. Okay, so here's the thing. I don't fully agree with it. The way it's supposed to work is that as a child you learn to love yourself from the way the people around you love you. And if that didn't happen, you can learn it later, including by being fully and truly loved in a relationship. So instead of worrying about loving yourself, I suggest coming into reality with yourself. Where am I defending? Where am I hiding? Where do I feel I'm not acceptable? Where am I holding shame? If you come into reality with all of that and truly look at it, then you can be present enough to be in a relationship. That's the long way of saying: love yourself.

BJ: And my thing is, get off the apps. If you see a hot guy in the bodega while you're buying your groceries, say hi. Don't open Grindr to check if he's on Grindr and message him through Grindr while he's standing in front of you. Walk up and say, hey, how you doing?

BS: There's a lot to be afraid of. Rejection is possible. People can be mean, people can be dismissive, and that hurts. But I see men standing on the edges of the dance floor and I think, there are six hundred shirtless men in front of you. Just dive in.

BJ: I'm a personality hire. I don't look good in photos, I think that's why I became a photographer. But in person I come alive. My stocks are always up in person. And I'm like, guys, you think your stocks are up on the app. You're better in person. We're all better in person.
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I keep thinking about what Brian said about reality. Not self-love, the poster version. Reality. Where am I defending? Where am I hiding? Where am I holding shame?

After the interview, Brian told me about a mindfulness workshop he was running for thirty gay men in the closing week of Pride, and asked if I wanted to attend. So I did. I sat in a room and shared and listened to the stories of twenty-nine other men. And all of us, and I mean all of us, carried the same trauma, just playing out in different ways. Age played no part. Old, young, middle-aged. We are all suffering. And we all want the same thing: some form of safe love.

Sitting in that room, I realised how lucky I am to have the life I have. My husband and I are complete opposites. He is six foot four, a gym rat, disciplined to the bone, the man who sits quietly in the corner of a dinner party and somehow leaves with the most intriguing details of the evening. I see the inside of a gym once or twice a week, love a martini, and can reliably be found on the table, not under it or beside it. It's yin and yang. It's balanced. And it works for one reason only.

We chose each other. Through the bad times, we chose each other. Through weight, body, looks up, down and all around, we chose each other. Through two countries, two households and a thousand goodbyes at airports, we keep choosing each other. That choice, made over and over, is the only thing I've found that quiets the trauma that was sitting in every chair of that room. But to find it, you have to be able to choose. And to choose, you have to be in reality with yourself first.
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So I say this. I am not a therapist, but I am going to take Brian's advice, smack it down in caps lock, and hope you queers listen and action it. I know I will be..

GET OFF THE FUCKING APPS. STOP CONFORMING. BE YOURSELF. CELEBRATE OTHERS' INDIVIDUALITY. WHEN DRESSING FOR A NIGHT OUT AT ANIMAL (OR ANY GAY BAR), DO NOT CHOOSE THE BLACK TANK TOP. GO AGAINST THE GRAIN. WEAR SOMETHING YOU REALLY WANT TO WEAR. TELL YOUR FRIENDS HOW GOOD THEY LOOK. GET THEM OFF THE APPS. START TALKING TO PEOPLE IN BARS, EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FUCK THEM AT FIRST SIGHT. HAVE A CONVERSATION. THEY MIGHT HAVE ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY BRAINS, AND THEN, LIKE MAGIC, TA-DA, YOU'LL WANT TO TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF. BE FUCKING NICE TO EACH OTHER. THE WORLD IS AGAINST US. WE CAN'T BE AGAINST EACH OTHER. YOUNG GAYS, LISTEN TO OLD GAYS. WE'RE A WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE AND HAVE BEEN THROUGH SOME REALLY ROUGH SHIT. AND FFS, DO NOT SPEAK SHIT ABOUT EACH OTHER. AND IF SOME TOXIC QUEEN TRIES TO, JUST SAY "BOO, I'M SURE THEIR LIVED EXPERIENCE IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT TO YOURS. AND SHE SEEMS CUTE." SHUT IT THE FUCK DOWN. LEARN TO BE IN REALITY WITH YOURSELF. LEARN TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER. LET'S GET BACK TO COMMUNITY.

Okay, I took some gay liberties there. LOL. But you get the memo.

Brian Spitulnik spent fifteen years learning other people's choreography. Now he teaches ours. And the first lesson is simple. Stop looking for milk in the hardware store.
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