Our Own Private Loneliness Epidemic

Even in this context, we can address one of the most persistent and solvable challenges in LGBTQ+ lives: our loneliness.

Recently, I heard a religious leader say that he saw a lot of loneliness in NYC—with some undeniable level of contempt—and couldn’t really relate because his community is so strong.

The veiled contempt annoyed me. A few weeks later, I am still thinking about it, which is why I am writing these Sunday musings. Because for LGBTQ+ people, community remains elusive, despite our best efforts. It has nothing to do with character; it is a fact of our lives.

The Unique Landscape of LGBTQ+ Loneliness

Everyone talks about the “loneliness epidemic” these days, particularly in ultra-capitalistic societies. But for LGBTQ+ people, it’s more of a loneliness tsunami. Research consistently demonstrates this disparity: according to a comprehensive meta-analysis by Gorczynski & Fasoli (2022), sexual minorities report approximately 35% higher loneliness scores than their heterosexual counterparts. The CDC’s 2022 data reveal that bisexual adults experience loneliness at 56.7%, gay men at 41.2%, and lesbians at 44.8%, compared to 30.3% among straight adults. Transgender individuals face the most severe disparities, with rates between 56.4% and 63.9%—nearly double that of cisgender people.

You don’t need a PhD in psychology to see why. Most people find social connections within family or institutional settings—work, church, school, sports—all areas where LGBTQ+ historically faced exclusion. And our complex relationship with honesty, vulnerability, attachment, and trust—forged through years of necessary concealment—is even more insidious in sapping our chances at genuine connection (something I alluded to in a post titled: A love letter to my sons and an apology to everybody else).

Even more cruelly, the coping and mitigation mechanisms available to others (like Gen-Z finding solace in religion, according to the NYTimes) often remain inaccessible to us. We’re less likely to have access to organized religion, less likely to maintain strong family bonds, and more likely to have moved far from our childhood friends. In the U.S., about 60% of straight adults are married or living with a partner, but only about 32% of gay men and 35% of lesbian women report the same.

The Complexity of “The LGBTQ+ Experience”

I’m conscious of how inaccurate it is for me to speak of an “LGBTQ+ experience.” It’s such a broad grouping across class, socio-economic status, gender, race, geography, and disability. My experience as a gay Frenchman from 1978 is, I assume, very far from that of a Tunisian lesbian in a rural area today.

It’s also profoundly different generationally—the internet changed everything in terms of information and connectivity for invisible and dispersed LGBTQ+ people. To paraphrase Napoleon, to understand an LGBTQ+ person, you have to know what the world was when they were twenty.

For me personally, the intensity of my experience as a gay man growing up in the 1990s, the migration and isolation that ensued, was so intense that I have to be careful with every generalization I write on the topic. My homosexuality was probably the singular aspect of my being that determined most of my outcomes—where I lived, what I do, my financial situation, my well-being, my health. I understand it might not be the case for everyone. For a young queer indian, for example, gender, caste, or religion might be much bigger determinants.

The Data We Don’t Have

What makes it harder to assess the commonalities of the “LGBTQ+ experience” is the persistent lack of data. India’s landmark 2027 population census won’t, for example, collect data specifically for the LGBTQ+ population. Similarly, the US decennial Census only gathers information about same-sex couples.

My Koppa colleagues wrote an excellent paper in 2016, “Investing in a Research Revolution for LGBTI Inclusion”—basically a laundry list of all the data we need. Published by the World Bank, needless to say, the Bank never invested a penny of its own funds to fill the gap, and under Scott Bessent’s thumb, it certainly won’t.

Among the questions that remain unanswered for me are those that relate to loneliness: How many LGBTQ+ people leave rural areas for urban ones? What percentage leave their country for a more tolerant one? What percentage are estranged, or somewhat estranged, from their families? How many feel lonely most of the time? What percentage of suicides are committed by LGBTQ+ people? How is addiction impacting the LGBTQ+ community?

The Universal Within the Particular

Despite this data gap, when one pays attention, remarkable similarities emerge across LGBTQ+ experiences—particularly in the difficulty of building community and finding connection. Almost all LGBTQ+ people share the experience of alienation from family, having to lie to parents and teachers, questioning, rejection from places of faith, and then the gradual return to some form of spirituality—the hard road of restoring a relationship to truth. The need to chart a path independent from one’s parents, often modeled after other LGBTQ+ people, is the constant work of building community.

I found being gay to be profoundly alienating. There are particular moments when I realized how alone I was: when I first came to the US in 2000; when I separated from my partner and was embattled at the World Bank in 2014; when the pandemic hit and I moved to Connecticut with my sons; and again in 2022, when I launched two ventures. Sometimes, it felt all-encompassing, almost impossible to bridge.

But there were also periods where I found true community. Ten years with the Radical Faeries in my thirties stand out—interestingly, it was intergenerational, across the spectrum of LGBTQ+ people, and centered around spirituality. On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been to places with high concentrations of upper-middle-class gay men and never felt lonelier—it often felt transactional, harsh, and vapid—a good argument for retaining our unity. I always say that Fire Island is what awaits gay men without lesbian supervision. It might be more complex than that.

The “LGBTQ+ experience” is also that - feeling at times incredibly disconnected in the most social of settings. Often, it remains an inside job.

Perhaps nowhere was the LGBTQ+ capacity for building community more powerfully demonstrated than during the early days of the AIDS crisis. When government agencies turned away, when hospitals isolated dying patients, when families abandoned their sick sons, the gay community created an entire infrastructure of care from nothing. Lesbians, who were largely unaffected by the virus, became nurses, caregivers, and blood donors when gay men couldn’t donate. As Vito Russo said in 1988, “After we kick the shit out of this disease, we’re all going to be alive to kick the shit out of this system, so that this never happens again.” That last part didn't really happen, but it showed us we could create parallel systems of care. The infrastructure built then, born of necessity and love in the face of unimaginable loss, became the blueprint for LGBTQ+ community organizing until real money got involved and spoiled the whole thing.

The Market Responds

I suspect many readers will find this litany boring. A business leader recently told me that gay men are tired of being constantly portrayed as victims; they want to be seen as winners. I also vaguely remember Andrew Sullivan arguing somewhere that life is difficult for everybody. But it’s not insignificant that the person who tells us we have reached our goals is himself a practicing Catholic who found community in Provincetown.

If you doubt that LGBTQ+ people face a harsher loneliness epidemic, here’s telling evidence: straight businessmen are betting on it. Increasingly, venture capitalists are investing in and developing tools to address the LGBTQ+ loneliness epidemic. I mean, just this week, two straight board members are attempting to take Grindr private (see here). They know there is money to be made in our community’s quiet despair.

Beyond Acceptance

I’m not convinced that greater societal acceptance will solve all our problems. LGBTQ+ people will remain more likely to have moved, more likely to be childless and single, even when gay marriage becomes universal. They will always have to trudge the long road back to honesty and authenticity.

Interestingly, this is one area where public policy is probably less impactful than our individual actions. We can blame the current U.S. administration, but there is so much we can do for each other despite the external context. Some elements of the solution already exist in the form of LGBTQ+ centers, sports leagues, geolocalization, and communities like the Radical Faeries, but we need to scale up our game.

If loneliness is one of our main commonalities, then it’s worth applying our knowledge, expertise, and heart to addressing it. Community is such an important quest in the LGBTQ+ experience that, like many other issues, loneliness might actually have an LGBTQ+ solution to it—one that could benefit everyone struggling with connection in our atomized world.

After all, we’ve been building chosen families and creating community from scratch for a very long time. Perhaps that’s the expertise the broader world needs now more than ever.