How My Big Gay Turkish Hair Transplant Transformed My Self-Esteem

Spencer Macnaughton | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter

At 24 years old, when I was interning at ABC News, my colleague took a Snapchat video of the back of my head. For the first time, I spotted a bald spot about the size of a quarter. Over the next eight years, my hair loss progressed. The classic drugs you see advertised from companies like Hims and Keeps worked a bit, but the hair kept shedding on my pillow and in the shower.

As a young gay man working in Manhattan media and living in Hell’s Kitchen, I felt doomed. As a kid, I was made fun of for having a head the size of a bowling ball. And despite my mom telling me that a bigger head meant a bigger brain, I felt that if I lost all my hair I’d look like Mr. Burns at best and an alien at worst.

It shattered my self-esteem. The anxiety I already struggled with transformed into depression.

I felt really ugly and started catastrophizing: I’ll never have another boyfriend, I’ll always need to wear a hat and I’ll need to continue walking out of rooms backwards.

I cried to my best friends and family to the point where they were equally annoyed and concerned.

You may be reading and at this point thinking, “Can he just get over it?” or “What a drama queen. It’s just hair!” And you are most entitled to feel that way. But the problem is these feelings represent an epidemic of body dysphoria and pressure to look and feel perfect that we gay men savagely place on each other.

The stats don’t lie: Gay men are more likely to suffer from eating disorders, engage in compulsive overexercise and use diet pills. We talk about our appearance more than straight men, report greater body dissatisfaction, are more concerned with trying to look like men in the media and place more importance on the prevailing cultural beauty standard, which includes having a full head of hair. Unlike our heterosexual counterparts, intrasexual competition causes us to compare ourselves to our hookups and our boyfriends: Abs, dick size, height, teeth, weight and… hair(!) are all on the table.

As I continued to shed, it was all becoming too much. I knew something had to change. Around this time, my friend Bennett flew to New York to hang out with me about six months after he got a hair transplant in Turkey. We were lounging by a pool and he took his hat off to flaunt his restored hairline. I was mesmerized. I started researching and learned that at least five gay guys I knew (and my straight barber!) all went to the same doctor 5,000 miles away in Istanbul (or Hairstanbul!).

As a nervous nelly, I didn’t know if I could do it. But when one of my straight besties and director extraordinaire, Kenny Wassus, encouraged me to go and said he’d come along to film it, I couldn’t say no.

So we got the documentary green lit by Business Insider, booked flights and did the thing.

The doctors told me I had had too much hair loss to restore everything in one procedure. They promised to restore my hairline but weren’t able to work on the bald spot on the back of my head (though I can go back for a second procedure whenever I like).

A year and a half later, I am thrilled with the results. Even though they are imperfect, going to Türkiye represented taking control of something that was fueling my anxiety and crushing my self-esteem. There is a feeling of pride in having done everything I can to fix something I was deeply unhappy about.

And sure, my biggest wish is that gay men feel less pressure to have the ideal body and that we don’t live in this unprecedented culture of comparison. But it is what it is!

On Saturday, the Business Insider documentary finally dropped. People in the comments section were for the most part ruthless: “the hairline looks like a doll’s.” … “why would you not do the bald spot tf lol” … and “I’m pretty sure that doesn’t look like 4k grafts.”

But unlike before my transplant, I didn’t care. I was busy blasting “Hair” by Lady Gaga and feeling proud of myself for getting the care I needed to affirm how I wanted to look. That affirmation has truthfully silenced my anxiety surrounding my hair loss and in turn has transformed the way I walk through life.

You can watch the full documentary here:

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Over the next week, be on the lookout for new Uncloseted reporting:

• 🆕 SATURDAY: While more than four out of five LGBTQ men voted against Trump in 2024, some gay men are still proudly MAGA. Why? Emma Paidra investigates.

• 🆕 WEDNESDAY: On the next episode of “UNCLOSETED, with Spencer Macnaughton,” I’ll be speaking with Matt Bernstein—or Mattxiv—a progressive commentator with 2.2 million Instagram followers who OUT Magazine has called “one of social media’s most prominent political voices.”

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Thanks for reading! Feel free to email me with questions, complaints and story ideas!

Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com

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