"Christopher Nutter shares his personal story with candor and honesty, providing insights and observations that are sure to help other gay men no matter where they happen to be on their own journey."
-Neil G. Giuliano
President, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation

"Written with humor, insight, hope and faith, The Way Out may prove to be an enduring 'post-gay' survival guide for the twenty-first century gay man."
-Jack Drescher, author Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man

Christopher Lee Nutter came out of the closet in 1994 with a bang in a brutally honest essay for Details magazine, thrusting him into the spotlight as an unofficial mentor to gay men across the country.

Twelve years later in this edgy memoir, Nutter chronicles his journey from closeted Southern boy to gay New York bartender and party boy, sharing everything he's learned about how gay men are taught to see themselves in a fundamentally destructive way. Assaulted with programming from the "gay" and "straight" worlds alike, gay men are left to ask themselves, Am I the coolest, sexiest, trendiest thing ever, or an illegitimate cancer on society?

Nutter contests that gay men are neither, but rather conscious beings on the path to realizing that they have the power to create their lives according to their own will rather than the will of the world, or the illusion of their fears. Part memoir, part philosophy, The Way Out gives tools tailored to the reality of gay men's daily existence-whether it's in the boardroom, the bedroom or the steam room- so that they can connect to this power, and in the process, discover the love, freedom and happiness they long for and deserve.

"The Way Out is a guidebook written specifically to assist gay men in breaking out of the self-imposed prisons of 'straight' and 'gay' into an authentically powerful life of compassion and wisdom, but the insights it contains are essential to breaking out of all self-imposed prisons."
-Gary Zukav, author The Seat of the Soul and The Dancing Wu Li Masters

"The Way Out is a practical and refreshingly honest roadmap for gay men whose journey just begins with 'coming out'. Christopher Nutter's own self-exploration identifies real challenges for gay men, and gives insights and tools to help us be our best selves."
-Alan Van Capelle, Empire State Pride Agenda

• Called “the gay Dr. Phil,” and “a new player in the great American debate about values,” the author is becoming the first gay self help guru.
• The Way Out has been featured in the virtually every major gay media outlet in the country, including Out, The Advocate, Genre, HX, IN Los Angeles Magazine, The San Francisco Bay Times, and Bay Windows, and major mainstream publications, including The San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Miami Herald.
• The Way Out is the first work of spirituality for gay men to be endorsed by Oprah’s guru and Seat of the Soul author Gary Zukav; GLAAD president Neil G. Giuliano ; Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Committee of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Jack Drescher ; and Executive Director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, Alan Van Capelle ;
• The author recently became the first gay spirituality author to teach for the Learning Annex.

Introduction: Finding My Way Out

I have spent my entire life looking for the way out of pain. However, no matter what form it took—fear, depression, bitterness, anxiety, jealousy, loneliness, addiction, anger, judgment, self-criticism, you name it—and no matter how much it hurt, for most of my life I didn't think of it as pain. Rather I qualified these feelings as symptoms of my imperfection. In other words, I thought the pain was me.

As an adolescent growing up in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, in the '70s and '80s, I was in a lot of pain. But by the time I was sixteen, I was sick enough of being listless and depressed to do something about it. I decided that I wanted to be happy. And I was certain that the way to do this was to correct my imperfections.

The most serious of these imperfections was my homosexuality— it was my fatal flaw, my original sin that I had not chosen to commit. Though by my midteens I had accepted that this condition was never going to change, I could not really accept that I was gay. To me that would have meant accepting that I was a lonely, pitiful and defective human being, that I was not loved by God, that I was less than straight men, that the only others like me were shadowy discards from society. Doing that would have meant accepting that I was never going to be happy, so that was out of the question.

My sexual attraction to men, however, was by no means the only imperfection I needed to cloak. Compared to the fabulous Pretty in Pink teens I grew up with, I was absolutely riddled with imperfections—I wasn't beautiful; I wasn't rich; I wasn't masculine; I wasn't confident; I wasn't athletic. As I became hyperaware of these inadequacies, too, I slowly became both ashamed and embarrassed to be me. To remedy this I became devoted to getting gorgeous and becoming popular—in other words, to getting "perfect." And college became the set where I was able to successfully act the role of a privileged pretty boy. Playing this role felt like the very first shot of morphine after a lifetime of debilitating pain, and I often felt high. But whenever the morphine wore off, I would find myself hurtling back into the void, and it was as if I had never left. Meanwhile, my sexuality was literally in the closet—that's where I kept my gay porn, on a high shelf in a small closet blocked off by a large chair. I even did such a number on myself that, whenever I saw a guy I thought was gay, I would find myself thinking, "Ugh, how horrible that would be." Then I would momentarily move into a kind of twilight zone of awareness of the fact that I was this person I pitied. I was in a state of shock over my own being.

Then in 1993 I made a monumental shift in how I experienced my life when I rebelled against the depression that still tormented me and looked inside myself for the first time for its source in the form of my own thoughts. Not only did learning how to fight my thoughts mark the beginning of the end of depression for me, it awoke a nascent awareness of my power to change the reality of my life by looking inward rather than outward. As a result, the way I lived my life began to change.

First I ditched my plans to go to law school and decided instead to follow my lifelong dream to become a writer. Even more significant, for the first time in my life I began to question my belief that I couldn't come out of the closet and be happy. There were few images of gay people in the media then, so it was still a very lonely time to be gay. And I couldn't even say the word "gay" out loud, so I was at a total loss as to how to go about coming out. Then opportunity struck. One night I read in Details magazine that they were starting a new section that readers could submit stories for. And I had a revelation: I would write an essay about life inside the closet and thereby come out in the process. As much as going through with it scared me, and as much as it seemed an impossible long shot that it would be selected, I became aware of a silent, certain knowledge about what to do next: write that essay. And so I did.