Aging, Friendships, Loneliness, Daddiness, Monogamy, Open Relationships: Let's Go Deep with a Gay NYC Therapist
I talked for three hours with Belgian-born Jean Malpas, 48, who has worked with countless NYC gay men as individuals and couples the past 20+ years.
Happy late April, Caftaners! I hope you all are well, and thanks as ever to both continuing and newish subscribers, whether paid or free. I’m coming up on three years doing this project and even though I don’t think I’ve put in sufficient effort to scale it and market it and algorithmize it and all that stuff, that’s mainly because most of the work goes into finding the right guys to interview, and then actually doing and pulling together the interviews, which takes hours and hours. I guess I just sort of hope that word-of-mouth or word-of-type will keep it slowly growing, and that’s exactly how it’s gone. Please, if you like Caftan, continue to tell people about it and ask them to subscribe.
As I write this on Sunday April 21, I am so damn happy because tomorrow I’m going away for a week with a primary purpose of simply not pounding my laptop every morning but just walking around/seeing old friends in a city I love but haven’t visited for awhile. It is very hard for me not to pop open my laptop and start working on something, even on weekends, which is why I’m hoping that going away will help me do it.
The husband and I just finished Ripley on Netflix last night, which is so good. It looks gorgeous in its black and white, and it’s deliciously nerve-wracking on the most minute, slowed-down level, and Andrew Scott brings a dissociated, vacant-eyed psychosis to Ripley that is so much more creepy and convincing than American Bro Matt Damon’s interpretation from the 1999 film, as much as I love it. (And, hey, I like Matt Damon too—we’re both Massholes!)
I also want to rave a quick sec about the novel I’m currently reading, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, who is published by Grove, my former publisher.
I really couldn’t get far in her debut tome of a few years ago, The Parisian, which read like one of those esteemed but let’s face it not very page-turnable nineteenth-century doorstoppers. But this new novel is contemporary, with a female narrator who feels based at least somewhat on Hammad herself—a youngish Brit of Palestinian descent. This richly written story is about how such a woman, a divorced London stage actor visiting family in Palestine—both Israel proper and the West Bank—gets sucked into being in a semi-professional classical Arabic production of Hamlet in the West Bank and how it changes her. Do I know how, or even if, it changes her completely? No, because I haven’t finished it yet lol! But I am loving it because it paints a very detailed and complex view of life for Palestinians (including, as in the narrator’s family, Christian Palestinians) in the occupied territories. It came out several months before the events of Oct . 7 and the hellish ongoing aftermath. I like it because it is extremely nonpolemical and subtle even if it is utterly immersed in the external and internal situation of living under displacement and occupation. And the personal/family and broader political aspects of the story are woven together in a very seamless way where it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. And finally, as someone of half-Lebanese descent whose family has not really been in the Middle East for over a century (but who has spent considerable time there myself), I am drawn to stories about people who have been removed from their origins and how they negotiate going back to them, especially when they are free to leave difficult places where other people are stuck.
Also, can I just admit I sort of have an intellectual/aesthetic gay-guy crush on Hammad and find her very beautiful? (She also gives primo “serious unsmiling author” energy in all her photos!)
Okay, enough of that! So this month’s interview is not with anyone famous or even over 60. It’s with my long-ago therapist, gay Belgian-born Jean Malpas, 48, who, in addition to doing a lot of work with trans people (including kids) and their families, has also seen hundreds if not thousands of adult gay men in NYC for more than 20 years, both individually and in couples. I asked him if he wanted to have a long conversation about all the things that come up with them, particularly those age 40 and over—all those things I named in the headline. I really wanted to hear what middle-age and older gay men grapple with on the most private level, and how he helps them. And Jean agreed and gave me a good three hours yesterday and the day before!
I wanted Jean to be very specific and anecdotal with me, to bring issues to life, and he, understandably, wanted 100% to protect the privacy of his current and former clients, even if they are unnamed and unmarked by career, etc. So often here when he is talking about clients, he’s talking about a kind of hybrid client, or couple clients, who reflect the main things that come up. I think what I love most about how Jean works is that he really wants his clients to have the best life possible and wants them to get past a lot of the self-hating and self-policing we do that that holds us back from that. He wants us to care for our inner children, and as clichéd as that is, isn’t there truth to it? Personally I know how much better I feel when I am gentle and compassionate with myself, which, even at 54, isn’t easy to do, because almost always the first voices I hear will be the punishing, shaming, critical ones. But I’m better at it than I used to be, partly because of Jean, and I’d love to hear from you after in the comments to see if the things we talked about resonated with you.
So here’s the interview! I really hope it speaks to you - let me know! xTim
Tim: Jean, thank you so much for talking today. Can you start by giving us some background on you and your practice?
Jean: Sure. I'm going to be 48 in a couple weeks. I've been a practicing therapist in NYC the past 23 years, after arriving in NYC in 2000. I grew up on the French side of Belgium and moved to Brussels to study clinical and development psychology for adults, adolescents and children. In grad school, I discovered couples and family therapy and had a big passion for it, as well as for the field of addiction. I'm very open with clients that there's quite a bit of addiction in my own family, so it's meaningful for me to do something connected to my own journey.
Tim: You don't have to go into details of who in your family was addicted to what, but can you talk about how it affected you?
Jean: It was alcohol, and like many people who grew up in alcoholic families, there was a lot of chaos, a lot of fights and uncertainty, and I think the impact it had on me was twofold. One was a sense of anxiety and uncertainty. A night could go from good to bad very quickly. So the safety of the ground you're walking on could feel very unpredictable. Two, in those systems, you either run away and rebel or you try to help and fix and become a caretaker and are very parentified as a child, and that was more [what I did]. I'm in part grateful for it because it made me autonomous, having to be thoughtful and aware about what people encounter when they come from trauma and can't resolve things.
Tim: How did you address that later in life?
Jean: I don't want to lift the veil 100 percent on my life story, but I think we all internalize in some way pain, fear and angst from our early experiences of our families, communities, etc. Whether the [struggles were] financial, emotional or political, we develop survival strategies to get the best out of life and be as connected as possible. People often come into therapy because the coping mechanisms that saved their life have become outdated. Say, a part of us that always said, "Be nice, take care of others, don't rock the boat, and you will get the most love, or you will fit in, or you will be safer." And at some point the caretaking and pleasing becomes stifling. I'm grateful for having been a thoughtful, autonomous kid, but I also learned not to trust, not to ask for help, to caretake, to problem-solve, to be pleasant. And as an adult, I ran into trouble for not knowing other ways of being with my friends, partners, bosses, colleagues, clients. Generally speaking, you keep having the same fights, or lose your job for the same reasons, whether it's because you're too nice or not nice enough. People come to therapy because they keep getting stuck in the same places. Their relationships don't work, or they're doing too much alcohol or drugs, hence a coping mechanism becomes imbalanced.
So you have to unpack where you learned those behaviors. Where did you learn to say fuck it, to run away, to not say anything, to never trust? Before you implement a new strategy, you need to look inside and understand what the behavior is connected to. It's not always parents. It could be, "I do this because I'm afraid of being rejected. Why am I so afraid of being rejected? Oh, 'cause as a queer kid, I was always told, you can't be yourself—I'll get beaten up or made fun of if I walk, laugh or sing the way I want to. I may get hurt." We internalize this stuff. So I think it's useful to learn what behavior is associated with what protective mechanism is associated with what pain. So that in your current life, you can retrain yourself compassionately and act with the awareness that you're no longer five years old and that you have the ability to protect yourself, to have allies, to be authentically masculine or feminine. That you're different now from when you were growing up as a powerless child, so you can tap into the skills and resources and confidence that you've developed.
Tim: Do clients say what that feels like when they learn to do that?
Jean: I'm thinking about a client who really had learned to see himself through the identity of being in a couple. He'd been blessed with this really beautiful long-term relationship for several decades but hadn't developed his own identity or an ability to say, "No, I don't want to do that, and it's not because I love you less." And when he finally did that, on one hand, he felt liberated, like he did not lose his partner and the world did not fall apart. But also there was a certain sadness and grief that he hadn't been able to do that for so many years.
Tim: That's powerful, his realization of all the years he had not done that.
Jean: It's like when people enter sobriety, there's a lot of turmoil at the beginning around being able to change, but also then a sense of relief and joy that a new life is possible. But a lot of what the habits were masking appears and in that there can be a lot of pain. That's the other part of therapy, learning to love ourselves, including being compassionate with and integrating that pain. I don't think we can ever fully erase trauma, pain, rejection, violence or hurt—but we can learn to slow down and be kinder to ourselves about them.
Here, Jean tells me about his experience conducting group therapy with gay men, particularly around crystal meth addiction, and I ask him: What is it about the group dynamic that is so powerful?
Jean: Two things. One is that you enact in a group the things you do outside the group—personality traits, coping mechanisms. The group is like a lab where you can see, then say, "Oh shit, I just did it again. Someone was coming toward me warmly and I got prickly or rejected them because I can't tolerate the intimacy." You start seeing the stuff you do in your personal life. But two, it's the power of a subgroup, of not being alone with something or feeling like you are the only one who feels something. When I started doing group work work with the parents of trans youth, they would say to one another, "I love my child and will do everything to protect them, but I'm also really grieving, anxious and afraid." It was a place where they could name all the things they could not say to their own kid, or that weren't P.C. enough to say publicly. Once they could talk to each other and say, "Oh, you feel that as well? I can love my child and know that [gender transition] is the right thing for them and also be crying looking at [pre-transition photos of them in family] albums?"
Tim: That's really cool. But just sticking to basically older cisgender gay men, let's say age 40 and older, because that's the primary readership of this Substack, what are the issues they present with the most when they first come to you? Why are they showing up and what do they want?
Jean: They often talk about life in their twenties being about surviving their family and becoming autonomous and discovering who they are. The thirties are about becoming more differentiated, more themselves. But between 40 and 60, they're often coming to talk about integrating where they've come from and who they've been, about reclaiming their disavowed origins. Or they find they're unable to escape the features and personality traits of their parents. I see it in myself, even after moving across the world to run away from my family.
Older gay men also still talk a lot about self-acceptance. That's not a one-and-done in your thirties and forties. We're still understanding the parts of ourselves that feel abandoned and worthless and how that shows up in work and relationship limitations—heartbreaks, addiction, losses, workaholism.
Tim: I'm struck by what you said about gay men age 40 and over talking about becoming their parents. I can certainly relate to that in different ways. A big thing for me in middle-age has been separating what I got from my parents that is good from what is bad, or at least unhealthy or unproductive, and being proud of and grateful for the good things and sort of nonjudgmentally trying to break from the bad things.
Jean: My example is that though my dad and I haven't been as close in my adult life, and though I still have resentment, grief and anger over the things he didn't do right that hurt me and my siblings, he still was very present when I was a child and adolescent. He was a journalist and I would go to work with him as a six-year-old and twirl around—there's really no other word for it—in the middle of an enormous news department. And he never tried to shame me or make me hide who I was. So though I've lived my entire life aware of the sides of him that were defective, painful and angry, more recently I've been able to look at the other side of the coin. And the same for my mom.
I also wanted to talk about the importance of friendship and community with older gay men. I was traveling recently with a number of straight and gay couples who are all dear friends of mine, and the straight couples said to me that they thought the tightness and connection of the gay friendships, the chosen family, was amazing. I'm generalizing to an extent. I don't want to erase loneliness and isolation, because that's also a big theme. But gay men have created so many spaces—dance and nightlife, art, advocacy, recovery, mental health, all the stuff that happens at LGBTQ community centers and in the queer nonprofit world. There's tremendous community resilience and strength.
Tim: I'm so glad you brought that up. I feel like in recent years I've read a lot about straight people realizing that friendships are just as, if not more, nurturing and vital than the relationships that a historically heteronormative society has told us to prioritize—namely, spouses and a nuclear biological family. But of course this has been known to queer people for a long time. I'm really curious, how conscious are your clients of the importance of friendships, or do they tend to give friendships short shrift because we're socialized that way? When I was interviewing the gay author Andrew Holleran, I was really struck by something he said, which basically was, "But isn't the point of friendship not to put too much on them, because they're only friendships?" I couldn't have disagreed with him more. How much do you clients cherish their friendships?