There is a silent wound that runs through many LGBTI people that rarely appears in conversations about diversity, rights or representation. An old wound, difficult to name, that does not always leave visible scars, but that deeply conditions our way of loving, bonding, and even existing in front of others. The wound of having had a clandestine childhood.
Because while others learned love naturally, many of us first learned fear. Fear of being discovered. Fear of disappointing. Fear of losing the affection of those we loved. Fear of being expelled from the group. Even before we knew who we were, we already sensed that there was something in us that had to be hidden.
And growing up hiding leaves marks.
LGTBI people not only go through a complex identity construction; Many times we go through a traumatic identity construction. Personality is formed in dialogue with the environment, and when the environment returns rejection, ridicule, silence or threat, one learns to survive rather than develop emotionally. We learn to read the danger in other people’s gestures. To anticipate abandonment. To exaggerate self-sufficiency or to beg for validation. We learn to adapt so much to the desire of others that we end up losing touch with our own.
And then we reach adulthood with a huge hunger to belong.
Perhaps that is why our bonds are usually charged with an intensity that is difficult to explain. Because we are not just looking for love: we are looking for reparation. We look for someone to finally tell us that there was nothing wrong with us. That we were worthy of being chosen even when we were taught otherwise. But no bond can hold the weight of healing a lifetime of shame and hiding.
Then the fractures appear.
The fragility of many LGTBI bonds does not arise from an inability to love, but from having learned love under threat. How to build confidence if we grew up feeling that being ourselves could cost us rejection? How can we give ourselves emotionally if for years we had to watch ourselves to survive? How do we sustain genuine intimacy when much of our adolescence was dedicated to acting out a character?
There are entire generations of queer people who did not have emotional-sexual education. Not because biological information did not exist, but because we were never taught to inhabit our affections with dignity. Nobody explained to us how to love without guilt. How to wish without hiding. How to set limits. How to identify violence. How to build community. While others had romantic, family and social references to look at, we grew up consuming silences.
And silence also educates.
It educates in the idea that our ties are less stable, less important or less legitimate. Educate in the feeling of provisionality. In the unconscious belief that love can disappear at any moment. That’s why we often live in relationships filled with fear of abandonment, emotional hypervigilance, or a desperate need for external validation.
Bullying doesn’t end when school ends either. Bullying is internalized. It becomes a permanent voice that questions our worth. That compares us. That makes us feel “too much” or “not enough” at the same time. And from this sustained violence is also born the impostor syndrome that so many LGTBI people carry even after having achieved recognition, success or social acceptance.
Because a part of us is still waiting for someone to discover the secret: that we don’t really deserve to take up space, love freely, or be happy. We have a hard time believing in love because we first had a hard time believing in our own legitimacy.
And meanwhile, capitalism does its job with brutal precision: turning our vulnerability into consumption and our identity into the market. It promises us belonging through perfect bodies, aspirational lifestyles and a deeply individualistic idea of freedom. It convinces us that personal fulfillment depends on being desirable, successful, productive, and emotionally self-sufficient. It disconnects us from the collective memory of our struggles and transforms painfully won rights into supposed consumer privileges.
We forget then that our rights were not born from the spontaneous tolerance of the world, but from bodies expelled, beaten, pathologized and murdered. We forget that there were entire generations who could not love in public, start families, grow old together or even survive. And when we lose that memory, we also lose community.
Perhaps that is one of the deepest tragedies of our time: the extreme individualization of LGTBI people. The illusion that we no longer need others because now “we can be who we are.” But no one builds identity alone. Nobody heals alone. No one survives indefinitely without belonging.
The need to belong is still there, intact, beneath all our masks of independence. And when we do not find safe spaces to exist without performance, we end up desperately seeking validation in fragile, accelerated bonds that are often incapable of sustaining so much accumulated emotional need.
Maybe that’s why it hurts so much when a bond is broken. Because it’s not just a relationship that breaks: the echo of all the times that made us feel expellable is reactivated.
However, recognizing these wounds does not mean condemning ourselves to them. There is something deeply political and healing about building conscious connections. Links where we can stop acting. Where love is not constant evaluation or emotional survival. Where we can talk about our fears without shame. Where we understand that many of our reactions are not born from individual toxicity, but from collective stories of exclusion.
We need to recover tenderness as a form of resistance.
We need to stop romanticizing emotional coldness as a protection mechanism. We need to build community, memory and mutual care again. Because a society that forced millions of people to hide during their emotional development cannot be surprised that there are difficulties in bonding safely.
LGTBI ties are often fragile because we were also fragile.
And perhaps the true revolutionary act is not only being able to love whoever we want, but learning—after so many stolen years—that we deserve to be loved without fear.
