LGBTQ

7 Signs of a Closeted Male Narcissist: The Men Who Use Women as a Punching Bag, a Mirror, and a Beard

I wished they’d been able to tell me, so I could've supported them with love: instead, I got trauma.

When I discovered my habits of trauma bonding to sociopathic men due to my parents having ASPD and being groomed as their scapegoat child, there was another pattern that plagued me: most of the men I dated didn’t just cheat on me with women.

They cheated on me with their male friends, and they also groomed and molested children — both of these activities shocked me.

I trusted these people with my life and loved them more than I loved myself (that was the problem…no self love).

I am a staunch LGBTQ ally, and I’m gender queer myself, though I present as feminine. I spent most my youth in the gay clubs, and my best friends have always been comprised of many homosexual men. I began befriending homosexual men at a young age, because I didn’t like the ways they were bullied, and I was often a target of bullying myself.

It pained me deeply that the men I loved were closeted. I wished they could’ve been honest with me about who they were. I would’ve supported them.

My first love died of a suicide due to his closeted sexuality. His secret lover, his best friend who I also dated after my first love’s death, also died by suicide seven years later. Before his suicide, he’d killed a family in a car while drunk driving.

The pains of these men haunted me. Regardless of their sexuality, my love for them was pure. I’d wished they’d been able to tell me, so I could’ve been someone who didn’t shame them for what they couldn’t help.

It’s been my life’s mission to raise awareness for the illness that killed him and gave him so much shame and self hate: Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

My father’s closeted sexuality hurt me most of all, as he’d had a serious suicide attempt when he was middle aged. I always thought, What if he could have loved himself freely? What if he hadn’t been socialized to shame this part of himself by our sick, abusive culture?

I wouldn’t exist, but neither would the extreme pain that was my childhood.

In every way, my existence is purely a manifestation of my parents’ pain.

It makes perfect sense to me why I was my mother’s scapegoat and my father’s invisible child.

My mother needed a scapegoat for two reasons:

She was adopted, so she was abandoned at birth. Narcissists project all their traumas onto others as the ones in control in order to feel better over them, so my mother had to reject her first born at birth as she was rejected.
My mother needed someone to blame for the fact that her husband didn’t pay her any attention or give her love.

My mom spent all day reading romance books, but she married a man as sexually and emotionally frigid as the Antarctic; they were sleeping in separate rooms by the time I was an adult.

One accusation she always hurled at me was that I thought my father loved me more than her. Of course, I didn’t think this — I couldn’t think this. I was too confused over my abuse to understand it, and I rarely saw my father, who worked when I was home from school. The older I got, the less he paid any attention to me. It was like I was a ghost in the room when he was there.

The truth is that what a narcissist accuses is confession: SHE thought my father loved me more than her, and that’s why she had to abuse me.

I was always supposed to be her competition, and my mother ensured that by heaping trauma and neglect onto me from birth, I would be fundamentally miserable and broken, which often relieved her sense of misery and brokenness.

My father, however, didn’t want a female golden child — he hated women and he was upfront about that. He also didn’t need me as a scapegoat: he was well supplied with scapegoats at my birth. He stalked and sexually abused black children in the neighborhood for scapegoat supply. Just like Jeffrey Dahmer, he chose his victims based on what he knew he could get away with, seeing as how we live in a world in which police are as much a threat to people of color as any other sociopath is (they love that career and police in America first began as SLAVE PATROLS for sociopathic colonizers, who were human traffickers and rapists).

What my dad needed was his MASK OF NORMALCY.

And a sweet, little girl helped to make his mask seem real: to the public, he was just an ordinary, STRAIGHT, middle class, family man.

He was exceptionally NICE to neighbors and he was incredibly charming with a boisterous laugh.

Therefore, he had an invisible child in order to make his crimes invisible.

And the invisible children of narcissists tend to idolize their narcissistic parents on a pedestal, and I sure did for most my life. The invisible child then reinforces their sense of grandiosity as well.

I stayed rooted in denial because I needed to believe at least one parent *could* love me to survive my childhood.

But my memories are littered with memories of my dad’s disgusting secrets: it’s actually astonishing when you break denial to realize how much the brain can overlook because it needs love so badly and can’t handle reality.

But reality came to my dreams: lifelong, I had recurring nightmares about a man with no face stalking me.

Those dreams only stopped after I unmasked my father in my 40s.

I think my masculine traits and gender queerness attracted closeted men to me.

There were also other factors that feuld this attraction:

I was groomed by narcissists since childhood, so my habits were to self blame, lack boundaries, stay rooted in denial, and forgive the unforgivable.
I’m autistic, so there were a lot of things I didn’t understand, such as envy and malice, and I took a lot of things at face value and was naieve, overly kind, and easy to exploit until these traits became a matter of life and death — I had to figure out how predators operated or die.
I have BPD, and narcissists attract to other Cluster Bs because we feel like family. Narcissists like borderlines because they’re scapegoat supply who they use to design their masks after. We also have the emotional maturity and empathy to help them regulate their emotions, and we’re prone to walk on eggshells for emotionally immature people.

Later, as I poured over books on ASPD, I finally saw the link: according to multiple studies and many memoirs and testimonies from those with NPD/ASPD, nearly all pwASPD are bisexual.

The reasons for their bisexuality come from their inability to emotionally attach: to a person with ASPD, sex is sex, whether it’s with a potato or a woman. It’s simply sexual supply. There’s no preference.

This is also partially why they can have sex with all ages, from the very old to the very young. They also will sometimes have sex with animals.

Mostly, sexual supply is used for power, control, manipulation, getting their sexual needs met, and sadism supply.

Without empathy and with a love phobia, these are the only things about sex that make them feel high.

I don’t judge my partners for their closeted sexualities — in truth, despite the ways they mistreated me, I have a lot of compassion for them.

Our culture should’ve never shamed anyone for their sexuality, and we should be ashamed whenever we allow it to continue unchecked.

It not only leads to suicides and murder, but it leads to people like me wasting years of their lives with men who are TERRIFIED of coming out of the closet, and men who grow resentful of their partners for that very terror. They also will ENVY us, because they feel their lives would be happier if they could be women and date men, but the shame of our warped narcissistic culture tells little boys that there’s NOTHING WORSE in the world than…a woman.

We should be showing our children that there’s nothing worse in the world than…a fraud, a liar, or an emotionally unavailable person. Our cultural values reveal how prevalent mental illness is in our leadership, our politicians, and our communities.

LGBTQ people are documented in our literature and art going back to antiquity, and we have enough research to understand now that both gender and sexuality are complex things, and they’re not choices.

The abuses suffered by the men I loved — including my father who suffered child molestation from his mother — played a role in their pathologies, and I’d have given anything to take away their shame and instill self love in them, especially when they were confused children grappling these issues alone.

However, I, too, deserve love and sexual affection, and I didn’t deserve to be used only to mask men’s shames.

The ways that they used me damaged me and passed on their own pain: I suffered from STIs due to the cheating, and I had chronic yeast infections for years due to their frequent anal sex with men without protection.

I’ve never cheated, and I felt that the ways my physical health was put at risk was unfair and cruel coming from people I loved whose bodies and hearts I wanted to protect.

Also, some of these men dealt with their resentments over my lack of a penis and feeling forced to cohabitate with a woman by raping me or beating me, projecting their vicious self hate and suicidal ideation into me.

So, to help other women who may be stuck in my same predicament (and it’s WAY MORE COMMON THAN YOU THINK), here are some red flags that your man is on the DL (down low) about his true sexuality.

(Note: women and transgender and gender queer people can be narcissists and sociopaths too, and some things on this list may apply to them as well. Men do experience NPD at higher rates than women, but it’s only because cultural sexism leads to them getting assigned as golden child more frequently. I only speak of men in this essay because I’ve only had sexual relationships with CIS-men).

DL Red flag #1 They’re narcissists

Narcissists are the only demographic of people who lack emotional empathy, and in order to use someone and deny them real love for the sole purpose of securing your fraudulent mask of “normalcy,” a person needs to be able to objectify and lack emotional connection to another person.

If you can sleep in the same bed with someone and share food and labor with them and know that they love you and NOT FEEL A THING to put their body and heart at risk through sex with others, you don’t have emotional empathy.

If you lie without remorse, you don’t have emotional empathy.

If you aren’t authentic to those you live with who love you, you have a mental disorder.

If you identify patterns of NPD in your partner and they abuse you, you are well within logic to also doubt their sexuality.

What a narcissist portrays to their supply is never who they really are.

DL Red flag #2 Homophobic

Narcissists project.

And the thing a narcissists hates and fears more than anything in the world is THEMSELVES.

If a man is vocally homophobic or transphobic, then that man is secretly homosexual or transgender.

A narcissist rids themselves of shame by projecting their self hate onto others and punishing them for it.

This is why the highest murder demographic in America is black trans women: it’s due to all the white narcissist men who are denying their own homosexual desires and trans identities.

They punish black people for it most simply because our culture is racist (due to narcissists) and therefore they know they’re less likely to have consequences for their actions.

When a narcissist feels suicidal and isn’t able to kill themselves, then they murder others as a response.

We severely UNDERESTIMATE the truth of narcissists (and, again, that’s mostly because narcissists dominate and muddy the narratives about themselves in narcissist awareness spaces).

This is why it is IMPERATIVE to destigmatize the shame around gender and sexuality, no matter how much sociopaths kick and scream and throw a fit for you to take away their scapegoats (don’t feed into toddler’s petulance — they don’t know what’s good for them).

Destigmatizing shame saves lives, and those lives include narcissists.

Narcissists are just exceptionally good at doing any and everything against their own best interests because they hate themselves at their core.

DL Red flag #3 PROMISCUOUS with the opposite sex

You’d think someone that sleeps with dozens of women a year would absolutely LOVE women.

Oh no, a person who sleeps with that many women HATES women.

A person who sleeps with that many women is TRYING TO DENY SOMETHING.

They’re overcompensating.

What in the world are they trying to prove?

I had a lover who I was with for years who matched my sexual appetite: we had sex every time we saw each other, for hours, several times a day. I was hooked on him like a junky on crack. It felt so good to have that much sexual attention from a narcissist.

But, depsite how much we had sex, he cheated on me with women EVERY CHANCE HE GOT.

I didn’t understand how he wasn’t EXHAUSTED.

I needed some days off from seeing him just so I could SLEEP. But when I did sleep, he’d cheat.

He cheated with my friends, our coworkers, women on Tinder.

But…even that wasn’t enough.

He got prostitutes too.

And you know what I found out later? His porn history was full of gay porn.

And he’d had an affair with my gay male friend, causing a wedge in our relationship as my friend began to feel envious of me for reasons I didn’t understand were triangulation until he confessed to the affair later.

DL Red flag #4 BROKEN HOMES

In America, a country founded on genocide and enslavement, we have a massive issue with our denial over our mental health crisis as a form of generational trauma.

But our divorce statistics should reveal to us that….we’re not a culture that understands healthy love or attachment.

Toxic enmeshments and trauma bonds are far more common than healthy love. People don’t even know what healthy love MEANS: I know I didn’t.

It’s not rare to come from a home with at least one narcissist parent: it’s common. Sociopaths were the colonizers that came here to commit genocide (scapegoat supply) and establish their religious cults, and they spread their mental illnesses into the cultures they brutalized. Most of us in colonized countries come from ancestors with a legacy of trauma and brutality in some form.

You can’t found a nation on genocide, gaslight that it’s founded on freedom, and then expect a healthy population.

The illness spreads and grows with each generation. We do next to nothing to treat it or even research it: NPD is the least funded disorder for research because so many politicians have it that they refuse to address it just as narcissists refuse to look in the mirror.

And with each generation, our divorce stats also increase.

Narcissists can, and often do, cling to exceptionally broken supply for life: my parents are still married and my grandparents never divorced, despite hating each other.

And while a divorce history can be evidence that you are a VICTIM of narcissists, be wary of men who have a list of MULTIPLE broken homes, MULTIPLE baby mamas, or MULTIPLE child support cases.

If all their exes are all bad villians and they have no compassion for them or any recollection of why they ever loved them to begin with, you better not start wagging your little tail like a flying monkey does.

This is a sign of split thinking and potential projection/smear campaign.

Multiple broken homes should be seen as a red flag for a DL man: this means that multiple women felt the dream they were sold in the beginning turned nightmare.

Often, the reason it turned nightmare was because that baby daddy was playing sugar daddy to some male prostitutes in his free time.

DL Red flag #5 Misogynist

When I first found my stalker and rapist’s — my former apartment maintenance man — social media a year after he traumatized me, I was so confused.

He was clearly a raging misogynist.

If I’d ever had access to his social media before the rapes happened, then we would’ve never been friends. He NEVER spoke this way about women to me. He only spoke of his homophobia. I knew, however, that he’d had a closeted relationship to his best friend, as I’d spoken to his friend after I was raped.

And the ways he spoke about women were even more perplexing for the fact that none of them applied to me. He stalked me DEEP: he had access to my journals, my phone, and he had installed a microphone in my apartment.

I was NONE of the things he said women were AND HE KNEW IT.

He said women were codependent and couldn’t be alone. I lived alone and was seven years celibate when we met.

He said women were irrationally jealous. I’m not a jealous person and he even had a conversation about that with me, marveling that it seemed like I was “gender free” because I wasn’t jealous of other women.

He said women wanted love but didn’t give men respect. I didn’t think I’d ever be loved and didn’t pursue it, and I respected him a lot as a friend.

He said women were naturally of inferior intelligence to men. I was an accomplished writer and professor and I’d graduated with a 4.0 GPA and won many awards. I am autistic and I’m not the smartest in the world, but I know I’m not naturally inferior based on my gender.

He said women didn’t want to stay in their role and do the chores of cooking and cleaning. I not only balanced my career, but I had no help cooking and cleaning. I did it all alone. I’m fiercely independent to the point of exhaustion. I know no other way to survive.

He said women were shallow and only cared about beauty and sex. I was celibate and I care about a lot of things. I had body dysmophia and I do not consider myself pretty. I am also fat.

I kept thinking, if this is the woman you HATE, why rape me??!

Why not find a woman who fits this bill and attack HER?

He knew I was a good person.

THAT WAS THE WHOLE PROBLEM.

He wanted to BE me.

Photo by Sharon Christina Rørvik on Unsplash

All the things he’d said about women were his PROJECTIONS. They’re things that apply to people with NPD, NOT all women.

This is why men like this love narcissist women: those women make them feel like their misogyny is reality.

So, if a misogynist man encounters someone who counters all their projections, they get ANGRY.

They ATTACK.

They suddenly feel shame because of you, so you’re their competition and their predator threatening to shatter their false self.

They’ll seek to break you so you do fit into their stereotypes.

If you are beautiful, they REALLY hate you, because they envy the attention men give you.

They want to WEAR YOUR SKIN.

This is why you need to take a man like this SERIOUSLY and gtfo. This type of man will KILL YOU and feel no remorse.

There’s NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS than a man who wants to be a woman but hates women and envies and blames you for it.

They also likely HATE THEIR MOTHERS and were never able to kill, punish, or control them, so they take out all their parental rage on you too.

And if you live through what they do to you, you’ll wish you didn’t.

Furthermore, a man who doesn’t understand feminism as an equality movement and not misandry — the hatred of men — is likely projecting his own hatred of women when he says that all feminists hate men.

He’s also showing you he has split thinking and lacks the ability to think in nuance. Get away from that man. He’s never going to want you the way you want him and he certainly can’t love you.

DL Red flag #6 Hypermasculinity and a Hero Complex

Another red flag is hypermasculinity and a hero complex. A part of a narcissist’s false self is often linked to their perception of what “normal” is supposed to be.

To them, a man needs to be a rugged, non-emotional, strong, HERO.

They have rigid split thinking, and DL men are overcompensating for their insecurity, so they’ll go to EXTREMES for conformity. They’ll not only be a manly man, they’ll become obsessed with masculinity.

Gym, steroids, trucks, baseball hats, athletic shoes, hunting, money, sports, lack of grooming, lack of emotion, only male-dominated entertainment.

They often won’t groom or shower because they’ll think a real man is DIRTY and only gay men groom.

(But these are just some noticeable trends of things they do to mask: narcissists are as diverse as anyone, and some DL men do give off a stereotypical gay vibe for their grooming habits. A fair amount of them love the mirror).

They’ll act very stereotypical in their interests, even when their real interests don’t align with that. They may secretly watch the Real Housewives daily, but they act like they only care about their car, hunting, and boozing with the boys.

Oh, and they often like to booze with the boys. A LOT. ::wink, wink::

Closeted men often numb their pain through substances, and they also hookup with their same sex when drunk or drugged and then blame it on intoxication to deny it in themselves.

In addition to this, the DL man wants to embody what is considered the epitome of manhood.

They want to be a PRINCE.

No, they want to be a KING.

They want to be your KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR.

They want to be a HERO.

If they’re sociopaths and you’re enmeshed, they’ll often go to lengths to create scenarios that cause you to feel in need of a hero to position themselves as one.

For example, my maintenance man would break my appliances, and he always targeted HUGE issues when he did so, so my dishwasher would flood my kitchen, or my heater wouldn’t turn off and I’d be roasting with my cats, or the hot water heater exploded.

Each time he came to my door for a maintenance issue, he said, “I’m here to save my favorite tenant.”

In lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, one case he represents is a man whose girlfriend left him for abuse.

He came up with the plan to put a homeade bomb in front of her door. He was a former Marine, so he was sure the homeade bomb would result in her calling him to come rescue her. The bomb, according to him, wasn’t supposed to go off or kill her. She was supposed to call him once she opened her front door and saw it. He was waiting in the bushes watching, ready to fling into action and come save her. She would then take him back because she couldn’t live without him and she saw he was a perfect HERO.

What happened instead was that her kids came out of the front door, not her. And they touched the bomb.

And they both died.

Do not underestimate the danger of a DL man.

His desire to be your hero is DESPERATE and mentally ill.

He’ll be your horror, not your hero.

Heroes are fantasy.

It’s possible to have compassion for them, to be an ally to the LGBTQ community, and to also recognize that a closeted man who uses and abuses women is a predator to avoid.

DL Red flag #7 He accuses YOU or his homeboys of being closeted, yet he’s REAL CLOSE to his homeboys…

Again, take everything, and I mean everything, that a narcissist accuses as CONFESSION.

They lack empathy. They can’t see outside of themselves. Even if they accuse others of things that are true, the only things they can accuse people of are what they know inside of themselves because they can’t connect to others emotionally and don’t feel the feelings of others.

My ex husband was obsessed with accusing me of sexually desiring my girlfriends.

I got it through our whole relationship and I got it in the smear campaign when I left.

I didn’t know where it came from: it seemed so absurd. I so clearly lusted for him. He refused me often and the last two years of our relationship, we didn’t have sex at all.

Additionally, he had the strangest relationships to his friends.

I’d come home from work and I’d find them sitting in the living room playing video games, refusing to look at me and not speaking to each other either. They seemed like little kids who were CLEARLY GUILTY of something, and trying to act SUPER casual and nonchalant so as not to get caught.

When I brought it up to my husband, he’d say, “I don’t know why he doesn’t talk. He’s weird. I think he’s gay. I think he wants me. I don’t like him but I feel bad for him so I keep inviting him to play games, but I think he’s closeted.”

Then, just as oddly, their friendship suddenly ended.

I woke up in the middle of the night with his friend’s face in the window watching us sleep and I screamed bloody murder.

My husband said he was playing a prank, and he was going to get him back.

He keyed his car and then slept with his little sister, an underage teenager — which seems to be REAL EXCESSIVE to get his friend back for a prank, especially given that it hurt and betrayed me too.

Don’t worry though — they became friends (lovers) again. His friend even moved cross country for him. Last I checked, they had a video series on Instagram called “Bumpin’ Butts and Brewin’ Beers.”

And no, his current wife doesn’t seem to get the memo that he’s gay just as I didn’t.

So, please — save yourselves.

Be allies to the LGBTQ community and love people in a way that destigmatizes shame.

But don’t get entangled with someone with a man with these red flags, or I promise your heart, soul, and body will be maimed beyond recognition, and you’ll never know true love.

Just accept that they aren’t that into you, and you deserve someone who desires you the way you desire them.

They hate you solely out of pathological envy that they wish they could be you so they’d appear straight and not have to mask and hide.

Now if you’ve read all these flags and thought, WAIT A SECOND, I think our president and the richest man in the world are DL men….

And maybe that noxious transphobe J.K. Rowling goes by her initials rather than her feminine name she got from her mother has a deeper problem than just ignorance and being a c**t….

CONGRATS! You’re getting it! You’re breaking out of the narcissist gaslight! Keep going!

When you step into reality, you’re one step closer to self love and then finding TRUE LOVE.

Freedom, love, and joy are on the other side of the DL man’s warped and twisted reality of projected hatred and shame.

Trust and believe, a man like that can only hold you back from joy and your full potential. Don’t let your world revolve around them. Lick your wounds and keep it moving.

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.