Lonely Loneliness

Ian Young article from N.Y. Native

Question:

: Please forward comments, if any, to him. : New York Native, Sept. 12, 1988. : HEADLINE: Prescription for suicide; gays, AZT and mind control. : BYLINE: Ian Young :  During the strange period of American history the 1950s, there was a : twisted and virulently homophobic psychiatrist called Edmund Bergler. : Like Dr Goebbels, Bergler was a master of propaganda, and after an initial : shot or two at writers and other dissidents, he directed his propaganda : primarily at homosexuals.  Homosexuals, he kept repeating, were all very : sick people; they were "injustice collectors." Dr. Edmund Bergler!  A pit stop on the march to Promised Land. His chief claim to fame was his adamant insistence that all homosexuals could be cured (by his therapy, of course) if they only wanted to be. My parents found out I was gay in 1959.  First clue: large package of love letters from a married man.  My parents were inveterate snoops, so it’s interesting to speculate who was zooming who in this deal.  Not only was this paramour a man, he was a Catholic (we were RC’s and RC’s didn’t do those things) and he had three kids.  I’m not even sure if my parents knew what we did in bed since they had a disasterous sex life, and I was conceived by Immaculate Exception. In any case, they got a referral to a shrink and pleaded that I see him before departing the busom of the family to live as an adultress in New York’s evil Green-witch Village (as my parents called it.)  To give myself some peace I went, naively believing that this shrink might actually know something about homosexuality. Wrong.  He was hand-picked disciple of Bergler — whom I had never heard of.  I got a five minute precis of Bergler’s theories.  I was really an incredible wimp back then, but also innocent enough that I often saved my own ass with a simple-minded naivete that totally flummoxed other people. I told him I understood perfectly, and he could be of great help to me and my parents.  As I had no interest whosoever in being cured, clearly the best thing he could do would be to explain to my parents that I was incurable and that would solve everything.  Lo, these many decades later I can still see the look on his face.  Somehow we had failed to communicate that I could see, but damned if I knew what went wrong. I was given a reading list of Bergler’s books for my edification and left his consulting room.  As I went over to my parents, my mother eagerly asked, "Are you better now?" They had their turn with Dr. Bergler’s disciple.  When we were driving home my mother volunteered that he had said that I did not have "a mystical type of intelligence like most homosexuals."  This was a real kick in the kimono because for years I had gotten the highest marks in Christian Doctrine in both Catholic parishes in town.  So much for following in the footsteps of Theresa of Avila; evidently I wasn’t even to be the 20th Century’s answer to Marjery Kempe. Once in NYC I discovered that Bergler was about as close to a cult as it gets, and that his reputation was getting to be that of a crank in his profession.  He croaked, none too soon, and his wife made it her life’s work to carry on his they-can-be-cured crusade.  Seems his wife bit the dust not too many years ago still clutching the by now throughly discredited banner of her late husband.   If you have read this far, does anyone remember if Bergler was the guy whose "movement" was called "Esthetic Realism" (I know that sounds improbable as the name of a therapy, but it was for real.) There was homophobic therapy cult that met in the Village in the early, early 60’s with that name and methinks it was this crank.  He was a real nine-day wonder. A sad footnote:  His one piece of advice to my family was "Never give even the slightest indication that you accept anything about your son’s homosexuality, fight it all the time."  It completely destroyed our family because they stuck to it, and ultimately the only way to have peace of mind was to cut them out of my life.  Such were the fruits of Dr. Bergler, one might say. Jack Carroll         "I have all the defects of other people and yet                       everything they do seems inconceivable to                       me."                                                  E.M. Cioran

Response:

Please forward comments, if any, to him. New York Native, Sept. 12, 1988. HEADLINE: Prescription for suicide; gays, AZT and mind control. BYLINE: Ian Young  During the strange period of American history the 1950s, there was a twisted and virulently homophobic psychiatrist called Edmund Bergler. Like Dr Goebbels, Bergler was a master of propaganda, and after an initial shot or two at writers and other dissidents, he directed his propaganda primarily at homosexuals.  Homosexuals, he kept repeating, were all very sick people; they were "injustice collectors."  As a teenager, eager to read all I could on "the subject," I came across one of Bergler’s books.  I remember throwing it into a garbage bin in Queen’s Park–partly out of disgust, partly because I didn’t want any other teenager to read those lies about himself and believe them.  I knew even then that what Dr. Bergler said was not true and that Bergler was evil.  But I have to admit that I was bothered for another reason too.  I was bothered by the part of the truth that all good lies contain.  Many of us–in those days and since–have been injustice collectors, self-identified victims.  We had been programmed to be.  We paid $60 an hour (when $60 was worth something!) to lie on Dr. Bergler’s couch and listen to his hatred and cruelty every week, didn’t we?  Until one day the mind control finally detonated, and we jumped out of a window.  By the ’80s, times had changed.  By 1982 it was "not fashionable any more, let alone politically correct," wrote the New York poet and novelist George Whitmore, "to link ’self-destructive’ and ‘gay’ in the same sentence."  Nevertheless, he admitted, "the bodies piled up around me.  The roster of gay dead lengthened."  Times had not changed enough to stop that.  The plain fact of it is that this society wants homosexual people to die.  It kills us directly, as it killed Harvey Milk (who prophesied not only his own murder but the method his murderer would use), or indirectly, in a variety of ways.  One of the most time-honored and effective of those ways has been suicide.  When I was compiling a bibliography of gay literature, I perused many hundreds of novels.  An astonishing number of them ended–or began–with the suicide, murder or premature death of a homosexual.  It was thought to be the only way such a story could end in a society which offered no place whatever for its gay people.  There were no morality, no code of conduct, no social roles, no guidelines of any kind.  Except suicide.  The gay liberation movement was meant to stop all that.  And things did improve.  As World War II had done thirty years earlier, gay liberation ended the isolation of many gay people, and so opened the closet door for millions.  Unfortunately, for many of those millions, emergence from the familiar closet into a starkly unwelcoming society was no liberation but only a change of loneliness.  George Whitmore was able to describe that loneliness too, from the inside.  In a 1975 article entitled "Living Alone" (published in the Allen Young/Karl Jay anthology After You’re Out) he wrote about "an invisible piece of furniture in your apartment that you stumble over all the time–it’s a mass of loneliness."  And that loneliness itself became for many yet another addiction.  George Whitmore again, in the same piece: "Many of us who have put sex in its place are troubled by its frequent coincidence with love.  Love," he said, "screws everything up."  Whitmore suggested that coming out means "severing" yourself from your own past, becoming "unmoored," "floating" and continually warned that gay society is, to use his now chilling phrase, a "leper colony."  "We were branded the enemy, exiled, ultimately invisible and isolated.  Some of us are dead.  That’s the final kind of alone."  And in his conclusion, Whitmore counted himself among those who "have found the means of being alone for the rest of our lives"–an honest observation that did not bode well.  BURROUGHS WELLCOME STANDS TO MAKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS FROM SALES OF AZT  Whitmore realized then, as many of us did not, that "Stonewall might have coincided with Judy’s death, and the party line might have dictated that there were no more victims, but the phenomenon of gay self-destruction, of course, did not disappear."  We in the gay movement certainly realized that we had implacable enemies (not the least of them the medical establishment, for Dr. Bergler was by no means alone in his views) but what we did not realize was the depth of the psychological damage done by thousands of years of repression, sex-negativism and self-hatred, and by deep wounds inflicted on young lives by families and others–wounds that in many cases would never really heal.  For many the closed door opened only into a prison.  And in such dark places, there are many ways to commit suicide, with or without the help of doctors.  Whitmore saw what many less troubled observers preferred to ignore, and a later article published in The Advocate, "After a ‘Career’ in Suicide: Choosing to Live" provided some painful insights into the condition of many homosexual men in this society.  In this piece, written in 1982 just as the AIDS epidemic began to impinge on gay consciousness, Whitmore wrote of his own three attempts at suicide, the first when he was only seventeen.  In an attempt, he overdosed on drugs prescribed to "calm" him. Suicide was something, he says, that he applied himself to "with dedication…Like so many others, I was doing everything I could not to come to terms with an identity I’d been carefully taught to abhor."  He wrote wryly that when he came to New York City and came out, since he "was no longer teetering on window ledges high above traffic, I didn’t really appreciate the sophisticated means of suicide at my disposal.  Now, when I do think of what I did to myself, the crap I poured into my system, the lost weekends, the risks I felt compelled to take–everything we considered ‘normal’ in the process of coming out–it makes my hair stand on end.  I can only conclude that accidentally I continued to live…For I was judge, jury and executioner the likes of which the Moral Majority would fervently applaud."  He was just one of many homosexual men who–still–internalized self-hatred and embraced victimhood.  Whitmore continued his "After a ‘Career’ in Suicide" piece with some more up-to-date experiences: "It is 1981 and I am in the basement of the Mineshaft (a New York gay sex club).  Like most everyone else here, I have come to prove a point.  The point is that we can do this without flinching.  Oh, we might say we come here to have fun or let off steam, but there is an undercurrent here, a subtext.  It is the element of risk. It is not just the risk of disease.  It is that we have learned to witness certain acts with a jaded and skeptical eye…It looks dangerous, but is it really?  This is the phenomenology of risk, and we are expert at it."  WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED THAT…GAY MEN WOULD BE WAITING FOR THE SHRILL SOUND THAT WOULD SIGNAL THEM TO SWALLOW POISON?  The Mineshaft and other bath-houses and backroom bars wedded, in Whitmore’s words, "nihilism to lust" in a kind of synthetic pornographic rebellion, in living color.  For "how long," he asked, "could you live in the constant anxiety of placating a stern and unforgiving God knowing how warped, imperfect, how queer you were?"–until finally, with gay lib, we got the chance to act like rebels.  "The Rebel," George wrote, "Is a consummate symbol of reaction, because that’s all he does; his life revolves around rebellion, fury and denial."  He is "a Pyrrhic symbol of our revolt, an emblem of misdirected rage…If society tells him the only way he can be gay is to crawl around on his hands and knees in a sewer five nights a week, the Rebel will oblige…And having fervently embraced the role assigned to him–that of outcast and pariah–he must never relent, relax or weaken.  He is, instead, driven to further extremities of alienation.  Intimacy becomes impossible, even the one-night stand variety.  The only actual relationship is a dim, ironic camaraderie with his fellows."  Few recognized as George did in those days that "this is how many gay men have misunderstood and internalized the message of gay liberation: sadly, losing themselves in the process…Almost all our common commercial institutions have been set up to promulgate a Rebel lifestyle.  The most visible aspects of gay life are his, and the ones glorified by most of our magazines and even out ideologues."  This new lifestyle George called a "new kind of victimization, this unexamined life."  He might have put it another way, quoting his own essay on loneliness of seven years before: "Love screws everything up."  For there remained in the ’70s and ’80s a perverse need on the part of so many men to gravitate to dark and dangerous places and faceless partners, as if still trapped in a lingering nightmare of past oppression.  Whitmore remarked early in the ’80s that "self-delusion makes it mandatory to rationalize" this behavior as merely a matter of taste; he saw it instead as having "a great deal to do with how we perceive ourselves collectively and as individuals."  "We are now," he wrote, "a minority characterized more for our diseases and disabilities than for our achievements and aspirations; we are still handy victims, used to the role" and still "Not necessarily obliged to question" specific "substances or behaviors."  George’s articles were the kind of tough, painful, critical (and self-critical) pieces that appear all too seldom in the gay press.  I remembered them, and would have occasion to return to them years later, at a time when victimhood and death are more prominent than ever in our minds.  The AIDS crisis has delivered yet another generation of

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Filed under: Loneliness

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