I have learned to name myself early: out, gay, visible. Saying those words in public gave me relief, a line of light in the dark. Yet the light—warm and honest as it feels for me—has not been a cure for this recurring ache: the ache for a companion who knows the small architecture of my days, a person whose presence would make my ordinary hours feel like home. I pursue that person the way someone might follow a familiar street at night, hopeful that this time the door will open. It rarely does. There is a paradox at the heart of my life: I crave union with a partner every single day, and yet I fear the very intimacy I long for. When I meet people, the meetings begin with an easy optimism—chatting, laughing, the familiar exchange of histories and small confessions. But an old pattern reasserts itself. I discover, slowly and in the way you discover coldness from an open window, that some of these encounters are arranged around another’s joy rather than mutuality. I become useful—a one-night solace, a reheated kindness for someone else—and the feeling of being used follows me home like an odour I cannot scrub away. So I withdraw. I close myself in loneliness and label my retreat “solitude,” because solitude sounds noble and chosen, but the retreat is not chosen so much as compelled. This push-and-pull is not unique to my private story. Research shows that sexual minorities face particular social stressors—prejudice, worry about rejection, internalised stigma—that increase vulnerability to loneliness and mental distress. The minority stress model helps explain why being visible in the world, even when it is an act of bravery, can also amplify isolation. Studies of gay and bisexual men report high rates of loneliness and link that loneliness to worse physical and mental health outcomes. In some samples, more than half of gay and bisexual men reported significant loneliness; other work has shown loneliness can mediate the relationship between stigma and depressive symptoms or suicidal ideation. These findings are not abstract to me—each statistic reads like a quiet confirmation of what I already know when the nights are long. There is another paradox: we are more connected than ever and lonelier than ever. Dating apps promise possibility and often deliver performance—profiles, curated chat, the sudden slippage into ephemeral encounters. They can make it feel as if everyone is near and nobody is near enough. For many of us the network of chosen family replaces strained family ties, but chosen networks are not always a perfect bulwark against loneliness; they sometimes trade permanence for intensity and then vanish. Research on social networks shows that sexual minorities often rely more on friends than on biological family for support, a strength that still coexists with higher loneliness. Art has mapped this ache better than I could alone. Films like Brokeback Mountain and Moonlight are less about romance than about the cost of being denied sustained belonging—how desire can become a private wound when the world offers no safe place to graft it. Call Me By Your Name captures a different facet: how longing itself can be luminous and corrosive, a memory that softens you and also erodes you. These stories hold up mirrors: my loneliness is personal and also cinematic, shaped by wider social patterns of shame, exile, and longing.