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“The more I immersed myself in predominantly gay male culture, the more I started to feel inadequate in my own body.” “After I came out, which was supposed to be this wonderfully, healthy, positive thing, it unfortunately triggered my anxieties again, because I was reconfiguring myself in a sexual context that I wasn't really prepared to enter,” he said. “And based on my height and frame, I was at a very unhealthy weight.” After a year of struggling, he managed to regain some of his weight back, but things only grew more difficult from there. “I would run several miles every day until I became dangerously skinny,” said writer JP Brammer, as he recounted being picked on for his weight in high school in rural Oklahoma.
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Other possibilities include anxiety about one’s “role” in the gay community, or even something as simple as the “increasingly muscular action figures” kids are raised with, with “impossibly muscular physiques that don’t really exist in adult reality.” Feeling that difference could cause one to internalize higher standards of beauty as a coping mechanism. There’s the idea, for one, that gay men know themselves to be somehow “different” from a young age, and are “continuously judged by a broader, generally homophobic global society,” as he put it. Ken Howard, an LA-based therapist who focuses on helping gay clients, attributes a variety of causes to the proliferation of body dysmorphia in the community. Whether suffering from a diagnosable disorder like BDD, or just inundated with negative attitudes about one’s looks, it’s clear that when it comes to body image issues, gay men are hurting-and the root causes are likely endemic to the way the gay community functions itself. Studies show that gay men disproportionately suffer from eating disorders and negative body image, and BDD may affect gay men at a higher rate than straight men as well. Countless gay men have struggled to see themselves within it as a result. It’s no secret that certain segments of the gay community hold high, near-oppressive standards of what counts as sexually attractive. Jamal is also gay, making him one of many queer men who suffer from BDD and distorted body image. It’s classified as an obsessive-compulsive disorder in the DSM-V sufferers become obsessed with particular aspects of their appearance they deem unworthy, no matter how unrealistic those thoughts may be. Jamal suffers from body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD.