I think it is impossible to live a happy gay life without authenticity.  I don't believe it's possible to live your purpose, your vision, and accomplish your goals unless you are completely authentic as a gay man.  So if you are living two kinds of lives, at work you are "straight acting" and at home and with friends you are yourself, you are setting up yourself for a life that doesn't work long term.  This duality kind of life where you switch your mind depending on the environments,  leads to confusion, depression and unhappiness. Additional explanationsWhat do we call such dual existence and why is it so destructive? We call it lack of congruence. When you don't have congruence, eventually your mind will start to create contradictions because in one area of your life you will become person A and in another area of life you will become person B. And when you have this split you will also not be able to be your best self - your highest self. You will spend so much energy on remembering on how you act as person A versus how to act as a person B that you will not have any more energy to grow and become more successful in life. People like that eventually end up losing their jobs, losing their passions and one day wake up with ask themselves - how did I end up like this? Why don't I feel alive and happy? They look at their environment and they cannot find aliveness they cannot find happiness, joy and meaning. Then they become depressed, take medication and keep living a life of split, separation from themselves and others, separation from their highest self and not knowing that that's what they are doing.  And worse -  never being able to connect the dots that everything started with authenticity. Let me illustrate this scenario for you with an example.  If you have a soccer player and a basketball player will the basketball player be successful as a soccer player? Of course not!  If you were born to be a soccer player - stay true to your purpose and stay authentic with who you were designed to become and live through that. If you are a gay man and if you don't have authenticity you really need to start here as your primary focus because without authenticity, everything that we know about psychology falls apart.  Your live becomes an internal conflict between who you are and who you think you are. What happens next?  You cannot live according to your purpose! When you don't live according to your purpose goals, you then respond to someone else's purpose, and that never makes you happy.   If you don't have authenticity you cannot possibly connect to other people, because connectedness, relatedness and intimacy are all based on authenticity.  so your relationships will be a mess. If you program your mind that it was okay for 10, 20, 30 years to be dual - to have a straight life where you have to pretend and hide part of who you are, you will never know what it means to be completely transparent When you are in an intimate situation and the man in front of you says "I love you" you will not know what to do or worse you will run away thinking this is too much to handle for you. And also you will not be able to feel "it" because to feel it you first need to accept it as good and possible for you and if you were shielding yourself from that through pretending you are not gay at any given time, you will have inner conflict about love in your life. Authenticity will affect your career, happiness, your relationships. Conversely, inauthenticity will spread into every interaction, into every endeavor, every area of your life like cancer. So, in closing, I want to challenge you to look at authenticity as your number one priority in your life from now on until forever.  I think the world is also waking up to the concept of authenticity. Not just the gay world but everyone. We live on planet Earth for such a short amount of time