He cites the familiar fixtures in gay spaces such as the ubiquitous club and bar scene and bathhouses that tend to dot the landscape. He says his experience has been the same all over Europe in his search for companionship and connection. “It’s hard to connect with people if you’re gay,” says Koumar, a teacher and IT instructor. With the world slowly opening up and vaccinations at a fever pitch, the promise of glad-handing once again looks promising, if daunting, a sort of emotional whiplash seems expectant.īut for men who love men and communities of colour in particular, whose struggles for acceptance and visibility has been acutely pronounced, loneliness seems to have predated the pandemic, isolation and ostracization twin companions. But we’re all lonelier now, aren’t we? Didn’t Corona untether us from each other and secluded us in our private domiciles, our anguished indignities of life, left to be the purview of blue-light screens, meeting virtually, if at all? Hasn’t the burgeoning digital world driven a metaphysical wedge between our face-to-face, in-person and flesh, communion to likes and swipes? We’re the most connected species in human history, to be sure, yet somehow, inexorably, the loneliest.
