I started to get bullied at secondary school, not because I told anyone, but because I wasn’t into sports and preferred drama and music.

In the decade and a half since Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on national television and the openly gay sitcom Will and Grace first aired, much has changed throughout the world regarding the acceptability of being gay.But the vast majority of the cases involved clients that were clearly going down a wrong path: multiple partners, additional boyfriends that slept over and were expected to be acceptable, lies, gossip, over infatuation with the youthful chiseled male body, etc. There are some diamonds in the rough here and there (the pathology of the need to conform, being validated for pretense, etc.

The first stage is "Overwhelmed by Shame" and includes that period of time when he remained "in the closet" and fearful of his own sexuality. I’d always known I wanted to work with flowers and plants so I left school at 16 and went to work for a large florist in Victoria. Glad I read it because I keep seeing it everywhere, and also because there are some general insights that were useful, but mostly I’m disappointed and irritated by this silly framing of the most privileged and visible queer men as the standard by which all queer men can be understood. I first had a sexual experience at school – boys just mucking around – and I didn’t think much of it.As a 76-year-old straight woman, for the first time I feel I have a better understanding of the gay life. But The Velvet Rage is not fiction: it addresses the myth of gay pride and, after three decades of post-Aids concentration on gay men’s physical health, turns inward to their mental wellbeing. Shame became embedded into the trunk of our ever-expanding personalities, affecting everything about us, and yet so minutely close to the core of our being that we are helpless to see it as different than "me. You imagine that if the book brings greater awareness of gay mental-health issues, that can only be a good thing.