monster theory (lyric essay)

by G. M. Rowbotham

1.

The man I want doesn’t exist—or worse, he does, and he’s straight. Built thick and unthinking. Emotionally fluent in that way men are when they’ve never had to explain themselves. Salt of the earth, whatever that means. Probably votes Tory.

I’m ashamed of this the way people are ashamed of their porn history.

He’s pristine—a Frankenstein assembled from unclaimed parts. No baggage, no body count, no scars from years of the apps. Gay, but untouched by what being gay does to you.

That’s the fantasy: not perfection but preservation. Someone who hasn’t become cynical, efficient, defended. Someone I haven’t already fucked, ghosted, or swiped left on in 2019. Untouched by everything that’s touched me. Which is to say: I want someone who hasn’t had to become what I’ve become.

2.

When people ask what I’m looking for, I say something vague about “shared values.” What I mean is: a man who makes me feel like less of a man, in the way I’ve been taught to want.

I’ve spent so long constructing the ideal I forgot to check if he’d ever want me back.
Independent of his own needs, but dependent on his need for me.

Deep enough to love me despite my shallowness.

To love the shallow requires a kind of bottomless depth.

That’s what makes it holy.

Victor Frankenstein’s error wasn’t the making—it was believing the thing you create will love you for creating it.

3.

I arrived late to myself, so chronically single I had my first heartbreak at twenty-nine—realising I’d drunk away my twenties.

There was no man. I broke my own heart.

There’s no word for that kind of late blooming except stunted, which feels accurate, if unkind.

Delayed animation. Brought to life after the fact, learning to walk while everyone else is running.

4.

Gay bars smell like poppers and loneliness.

I can’t go in.

Not because I’m afraid of who’s there—

but because I’m afraid I’ll stay.

5.

What I love about men: the unapologetic sprawl. The architecture of shoulders. Their talent for being both stupid and capable.

The involuntary reveals: tendons rising like cables when they flex their hands; the unconscious tongue-dart when they’re concentrating; the belt-tugs, the shoulder-rolls, the brief hand to the back of the neck.

The geometry of them — the forearm crease that exists only in motion; the hollow at the base of the throat where cologne settles; the dark whorl in an armpit when they stretch, ribs counting themselves out under skin.

The persistence of scent: coffee breath over toothpaste, shirt-collar musk by day’s end, sweat collecting at the forehead first.

Men sit like they own the air. They breathe like the world has already arranged itself around them.

Golden retrievers who can change a tire.

6.

What I hate about men: that I want the body I was supposed to have.

The psychology is simple. Brutal. Gay men fall in love with their own reflection—only it’s never theirs.

The six-pack I want on him becomes the one I punish myself for not having. The height that attracts me becomes the height I fail to reach.

Straight men want women, compete with men. We do both—desire and competition collapsed into one excruciating comparison.

I want him—so I think I need to be him. It isn’t vanity. It’s desire folding in on itself.

And it’s not even about him. It’s about what I’ve made him mean: that desire is conditional, that love is measured in millimetres and muscle, that to want is to perform worthiness first.

The male gaze turned cannibal.

I want him.

I want to be him.

I hate him for making me want either.

7.

Someone told me you have to fuck first to know if it’ll work. The slow burn is a heterosexual luxury—like teenage heartbreak or voting Conservative without irony.

We don’t have time for mystery. We already spent our teens pretending we didn’t want this at all.

Gay dating is like buying a car: you need a test drive, but circling the dealership lot feels tragic.

8.

I’m afraid of attracting what I’m not attracted to.

More afraid of becoming it.

There’s always that man in the club—desperate in a way that makes you want to shower.

I look at him and think: how many years until that’s me?

The monster’s real fear isn’t rejection—it’s deserving it.

9.

Research says gay men experience “compressed development.”

We’re learning at thirty what straight people learned at sixteen.

Dignified in theory.

In practice: teenage drama with a receding hairline.

I hate that I don’t trust other gays to be kind.

That I assume they’ll read this and hate me for it.

We’re all suspicious of each other—

like the trauma made us mean.

I know this sounds like self-hatred,

but it’s just the weather we live in.

You learn quickly that every confession risks excommunication.

That honesty reads as betrayal.

That being the wrong kind of gay

is still the fastest way to be alone.

10.

I can’t picture him anymore. I used to build a life around someone I’d never met.

Now it’s just a shape. Man-sized. Generic.

Still, I set my alarm for dates.

Still, I hope the body across from me feels like more than a body across from me.

Still, I believe there’s someone out there assembling himself

from the same impossible contradictions—

tired, hopeful, still showing up anyway.

In Frankenstein, the creature begs for a companion: someone to share the loneliness.

Maybe that’s all any of us want.

Not perfection—just someone equally fucked in compatible ways.

Someone who’ll see what we’ve made of ourselves

and stay anyway.

That has to mean something.

But want is its own monster.

I built it, fed it, dressed it in other men’s faces.

Now it follows me from swipe to swipe, date to date,

waiting for me to name it love.

I can’t destroy it.

I can only keep living beside it—

still searching, still wanting, still here.

It waits for me every time I start again—

a perfect, impossible man stitched from everything I hate about myself.

This is what want becomes when it outlives its purpose:

a thing that looks like me,

that refuses to go first.

Photo of G. M. Rowbotham

BIO: G. M. Rowbotham is a writer from the north-east of England. Alongside his writing, he lectures in fashion, has worked as a couturier, and is retraining as a psychotherapist.