Jonah Hill’s ex was right to stir him up. The queer community should take note -TGN

The Jonah Hill controversy has sparked important conversations about emotional abuse — a phenomenon the queer community needs to reckon with.

Raise your hand if you’ve had therapy talk and social justice jargon weaponized against you by someone so gifted, so skillful in the art of manipulation, that you actually believed them for a while.

When you first met they were Mr Nice Guy, Mx Sensitive or Ms Morality. And I bet that’s still the brand they’re going for – projecting it as their social media persona and racking up likes on false confessions where they expose their tender vulnerability for all to adore.

You are not alone. I’ve been there, and so have countless other gays. That dissonance between what you know someone has done and who they present themselves with can feel crazy. In large part, that’s because the mismatch makes you wonder if it’s all in your head.

Rightly or wrongly, I can empathize with Sarah Brady’s choice to convert Super bad star Jonah Hill on blast through releasing screenshots of several scathing texts he allegedly sent her during their relationship. In it, Hill reportedly asked Brady to remove photos from Instagram showing her “a*s in a thong,” suggesting that her “inappropriate friendships with men” were beyond his bounds. She described the lyrics as “emotionally abusive”; he has yet to respond.

Emotional abuse can cause you to question your perception of reality, undermine your own experiences and, as a result, cause you to default to someone else’s controlling narrative.

If, as Brady claims, Hill was emotionally abusive, she’s broken out of the story he made up and telling her own story. It may be messy, but I have to stan.

‘For Sarah Brady, Jonah Hill’s whole do-gooder-therapy shtick must have felt extremely annoying’

The couple reportedly split in early 2022 and by winter Jonah Hill had released a movie on Netflix called Stutz. Described as a “tender documentary about his therapist”it features a series of conversations between the actor and psychiatrist Dr. Phil Stutz.

As someone who was very interested in psychology, I gave it a try, but eventually returned. Something seemed wrong, or as my people say: mi spirit is never on it.

Intuition? Maybe. A slightly less daring hypothesis is that I subconsciously recognized similarities between Hill’s performative emotional openness and what I had experienced from others who later revealed the growling wolf under sheep’s clothing.

To Brady, Hill’s whole do-gooder-therapy shtick must have been particularly irritating. The queer version might be seeing the girl who bullied you out of your queer home rave about “radical concern,” or watching a self-professed activist demand an end to structural violence while perpetuating intimate partner violence.

It’s sad to think that many of you will immediately recognize someone you knew, or currently know, in this list of queer manipulator archetypes. Without in any way suggesting that the cis-hets, my queer and trans siblings are doing better, we have a problem…

“Hurt people, hurt people,” goes the saying. A bunch of marginalized, traumatized gay guys trying to get along is always going to be messy. And while this does contextualize some of the manipulative and unhealthy antics we see, it doesn’t excuse them.

I will not pretend to be an expert on how we as a community deal with emotional abuse or promote healthier and more responsible behaviors. Others who have studied more than I have taken it upon themselves. But I can share my story, and some of the things I’ve learned to help myself move forward safely.

When I fell under the spell of someone skilled in the dark arts of therapy, it shook my self-esteem to the core — it took over my life like a menacing, dark shadow, clouded my ability to trust myself or my perception of reality, and sent me into spiraling panic attacks for years. Even after that person was gone.

It’s hard to write so candidly knowing they might be reading this – read this and feel a kind of sweet, perverted victory for getting me so off balance. But for me, the victory is knowing I can’t be controlled anymore. It took a lot of therapy to undo the web of lies and breathe free again, but the good thing is, once you know what bulls**t smells like, it’s easier to sniff it out in the future.

So, here’s some tea that I wish someone had told me, tea that might have made me wise sooner.

Some people like to play mind games with others – and they can be very good at it. If things don’t add up, listen to your gut. Don’t just brush away patterns of inconsistency or contradiction. When highly loaded, therapeutic words like “borders” are thrown around, it’s okay to question whether such terminology is being used correctly and relevantly.

Finally, in the words of poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, “When people show you who they are, believe them… the first time.”