Definitions of Sexuality Part 2

First, I should warn the reader that I am going to write another post about sexuality – ideally it will be my last on this subject. It hope it will be written well enough. I feel my previous post was a little approximate, a little rushed, unedited. In describing some aspects of my life, such as how I presented myself to others when I was ill, I am unsure if I got everything  right.  I don't really know how others perceived me then. One difficulty I have I think is that I am a good deal more intelligent than most other people which means that people I associated with may have had difficulty understanding me. If readers have seen the film Ideocracy, they may know what I'm trying to get at.

When I was younger I may have been quite good looking – I can't be sure. This relates to the issue of how others perceived and behaved around me. In Montage of Heck, Courtney Love says about Kurt Cobain that he was better looking than Brad Pitt but was completely unaware of it. It is possible that the reason he decided everyone in the world was gay except him (I discuss this in the post "An Interpretation of A Couple of Rocks Songs.") was because even straight men were attracted to him. I don't know if this is a plausible explanation for his condition but I raise this hypothesis because it is interesting.

Some think that everyone is at least a little bisexual but I don't think this is true.

In this post, as I said, I am again going to talk about sexuality. We tend to split the world into the gays and the straights. What is homosexuality? It seems that homosexuality has two aspects: sexual attraction to people of the same gender and a lack of of sexual attraction towards people of the opposite gender. It is odd that these two features tend to go together. I have a friend, a woman, who once expressed her puzzlement that gay men didn't screw women as well. "You'd think one hole would be as good as another". It was an interesting remark that I have thought about since. Perhaps there are men who identify as 'straight', who only screw women, but are no more attracted to women than men, men who don't deep down discriminate between holes (to put it crudely). Yet, setting this possibility aside, we tend to view homosexuality as always having these two aspects. There has been growing recognition, in recent years, that it is possible for people to be bisexual or asexual – yet, nevertheless, in practice, people still tend to divide the world into the straights and the gays, to subscribe to this binary opposition and to suppose that people are only attracted to one gender or the other.

The first time I found out that someone in my life was gay happened when I was about fourteen. I used to sit next to a boy called Jonathan in a science class, a violinist who would expatiate on the misadventures he'd got up to during music trips. One time he said to me, "With all this sex I've been having, I hope I don't get AIDS!" I tried to reassure him, saying "Don't worry about that Jonathan – it's only gay people who get AIDS." He said, for the first time, and as if I was an idiot, "Andrew. I'm gay". I'd had no idea. Presumably he thought I already knew but it still came as a shock to me. Walking home from school that afternoon I tried to process this revelation, thinking about my uncle (who I have discussed in the post "A Sketch of My Uncle") and my parents' divorce when I was seven. It is fair to say that this first 'coming out' greatly affected my burgeoning understanding of sexuality. I lived in world then, and would want to live in a world later, where people were openly one way or that other.

In later years when I was still at high school, my friend Shannon (who I mentioned in the post "The Confidence Man"), who stayed at Jonathan's house for a while because he had no-where else to live, said to me once, "For a gay man he sleeps with a lot of women!" It was a hard concept to grasp, the idea that gay men might sleep with women as well. I don't know whether this influenced my view of the world but, based partly perhaps on Jonathan's 'lifestyle' and partly on the film Brokeback Mountain, I decided that gay men did at least sometimes sleep with women. It was a problem for me though. I tended to assume that, if they slept with women, they must do so reluctantly, without enjoyment. The world was dived into the straights and the gays and, in my opinion,  one homosexual experience was proof sufficient of homosexuality: I didn't believe in 'experimentation' or 'bi-curiousity'. I didn't believe a man could ever have a homosexual encounter unless he was gay or else in the closet. I have changed this viewpoint in recent years but only slightly – I now suppose that proof sufficient of homosexuality is one consensual homosexual experience.

My view, that a single homosexual experience is proof sufficient of homosexuality, in fact has wide currency. If a man (and to a lesser extent a woman) who has had a homosexual experience talks publicly about it, much of the world will immediately judge that person gay. This is why men and most women don't talk about such experiences. But this way of defining sexuality, in terms of experiences, is of relatively recent origin, is not the only way to define it. In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the defining criterion was marriage. If a man was married, he was straight; if a man was single he was gay – or at least considered suspect. A 'confirmed bachelor' was deemed definitely gay. The novelist Henry James may perhaps have drifted into a kind of homosexuality because of public speculation about why he wouldn't marry. This way of defining sexual preference relates to the second aspect of homosexuality – the homosexual's supposed lack of desire for the opposite sex. In those days, homosexual acts were illegal and so, if they happened, nobody knew about them (unless the participants ended up in court). Homosexuality was attributed therefore to those who seemed to show no interest in coupling up with someone of the opposite sex.

Today we no longer assume that the reason men and women are single is because they want to be. We no longer live in an age where marriage is almost the universal norm. I don't think I ever believed that all bachelors are gay as many people once believed – but I have tended to assume that men who are in relationships with women but who aren't sleeping with them are somehow 'suspect'. This prejudice naturally relates to the second aspect of homosexuality, the idea of it being a sexual aversion to those of the opposite sex.  Of course, it is hard to know if a couple are fucking or not – but I have sometimes had friends (and one ex-girlfriend) who have divulged some intimate details about their current relationships, details that made me suspicious of their partners. One feels sometimes a prurient interest in others' relationships. Did Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf fuck? They had no children. But, on the evidence of Orlando, I feel sure that Virginia was quite sex-positive and was very fond of men; her feminism was all about female empowerment and had nothing to do with any animosity towards the male gender. Perhaps they fucked but used contraception. Perhaps it is best not to assume too much about others' relationships when we have so little to go on.

This issue, of the two aspects of what is bundled under the term ' homosexuality', are difficult to separate but perhaps we should make the attempt. We should perhaps divide gay men into two camps – those who are gay because they don't like women and those who are gay because they like men too much. I feel I should say that I have avoided both groups my whole life; even with Jonathan I didn't hang out with him much. I think I worried that  gayness could somehow be transmitted. I imagine this admission reflects badly on me but I am trying to be honest.

At this point I would like to turn from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Sometimes men and women feel the need to try to prove that they are straight. Often this is because they are the victims of malicious rumours, slanders or libels, as happened with Tom Cruise; it may also sometimes happen when the person has got too close to the homosexual community and needs to get out. It is an invidious position to be in, the situation in which one feels forced to prove oneself straight to others, because the person has to demonstrate two things. He has to prove that he has never had a homosexual experience (and of course he could always be concealing something) and he needs to prove that, in his relationships with women, he was having heterosexual experiences (and he could be lying about that as well). It is a horrible dilemma to be in, because malicious rumours can be hard to debunk, because those who have spread falsehoods may seem credible, because people are credulous, because the more one fights the deeper into the mire one sinks, because to prove oneself straight one has to expose one's deepest soul to others. I feel myself that I have been the victim of false reportage and have battled it for years; I have discussed this in previous posts. Being myself quite an honest person, I have found it unbelievable, even appalling, that others can be so dishonest. I wish I could say that the answer is to always take people at their word but in a world equally divided between liars and truth-tellers, it is hard to know whom to trust. Personally, although I don't know the details of the defamation case he won in the 'nineties, I believe Tom Cruise is 'innocent'. And it seems time has turned the tide at least a little. At the Baftas a couple of years ago, Stephen Fry, no less, introduced Cruise as "Tom fucking Cruise!" which goes to show that he was on Tom's side. It seems ridiculous that Cruise has fought this battle for so long but we live in a ridiculous world. Possibly, and I offer this proposition very tentatively, eradicating homophobia is a good thing not only for gay people but for straight people – which may partly be why Cruise now regularly appears on the Graham Norton Show. In a world which genuinely embraces homosexuality, why would someone feel the need to conceal his gay-ness, to stay in the closet? There is a paradox involved here. But I can only repeat something I said in an earlier post, "Concerning Oscar Wilde and Kurt Cobain" – that hatred creates the thing it hates.

I once had a dream in 2007 in which George W. Bush said to me "We try to keep our club quite... exclusive." When someone has been outed, truly or falsely, it is almost impossible for that person to get back in.

This way of defining sexuality, in terms of experiences both heterosexual and homosexual, is what I always used to believe – but this is also a poor way to define sexuality. A person can be gay or straight without ever having had any kind of sexual experience at all. The Forty-Year Old Virgin is such an important film because it shows this– Steve Carell's character is a straight man who doesn't get laid until he is forty, not because he doesn't want to, but because he is unlucky in love. A man doesn't need to have had a girlfriend to be straight. Sexuality has a great deal to do with sexual desire but sex itself does not encompass it. I have had two people in my life very close to me who have both said the same thing in exactly the same words "I thought I was gay for a while – but then I decided I was just a late developer". This exemplifies a deeper problem. I admit I once toyed with a theory along these lines myself in a film I wrote, that a person's sexuality might be determined by their first sexual experience, that a woman could be recruited to heterosexuality in the same way that homosexuals are supposedly recruited, but I now think this idea is incredibly stupid. Sexuality runs deeper than experiences. A person does not suffer sexual confusion because he or she is taking longer to have sex than he or she wants; a person becomes sexually confused because other people have messed with his or her mind. Psychologists and psychiatrists are very much to blame for this, for destabilising people's senses of self.

In this post I have discussed two ways of defining sexuality, in terms of experiences and in terms of marriage. The most common way of defining sexuality today though is in terms of love. In an episode of John Oliver's show a little while ago he did just this in passing. I am unsure if this a good way of characterising sexuality but, it seems important to me that if we do define sexuality in this way, we distinguish between platonic love and erotic love and relate sexuality to the latter and not the former.

I feel I should say one more thing. I was asked by my psychiatrist a couple of months ago, not the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and January 2012, I can't remember her precise words, if I had ever suffered any sexual uncertainty myself. (It was the first time I had ever been asked this.)  At the time, I said "No' and I meant it.. The fact is that I did suffer very unpleasant psychotic symptoms for a long time, symptoms that started in 2013, that were at their worst at the time I was put under the Mental Health Act in late January 2014 and right before New Years at the end of the same year. These symptoms didn't fully go away until this year. It is difficult for me to talk about these symptoms – but I mentioned them in the post Me and Jon Stewart Part 3 and a song that captures a little of what it was like for me is "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" by Faith No More. I always knew these symptoms (I can think of no other word than 'symptom' to describe them) came from the outside somehow and didn't reflect who I am. This may seem difficult to understand I appreciate but it is almost impossible for me to talk about them.

I found out a couple of days ago that the psychiatrist who treated me between 2007 and 2012 has just retired or resigned. This is a very good thing.

If a person feels that he has to prove he's straight to others, he often feels he needs to define what 'straight' means, as I have done in this post. In All Apologies, Cobain effectively defined homosexuality in terms of sexual arousal – he suggested that gay men are more "easily amused"' than straight men. He needed to assert a definition of homosexuality in order  to say what he wasn't. My own view, today, is more complicated than this. But I don't know if I'll ever be able to express it directly.

Just Some Stuff

I try in this blog to be as exact as possible in my use of language but sometimes I slip up. I tend often not to go back to posts and revise them and this is not the place to give an inventory of slight errors. But I'll mention one: in the previous post I said that I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend in 2009 party because he was the straightest person I knew. In fact, there were lots of reasons why I became imaginary friends with Jon. And it felt at the time more like he adopted me than I adopted him.  There is a second thing I should mention. Readers may have noticed a more sizeable inconsistency in my last post. I began by attacking psychology and then later employed psychological ideas to attack a psychologist I once had. Perhaps this is permissible. Maybe the best way to arraign a psychologist is to wield his own weapons against him.

I know my readers may be more interested in posts about The Sandman and Virginia Woolf than posts about my own life but I have this year in my blog often had reason to describe it and in this post I feel the need to clear up as best I can one last puzzle. I have said that in 2007, at the age of 27, I was diagnosed homosexual and that this misdiagnosis has only been 'corrected' (if it has) this year. I was diagnosed as a homosexual who wouldn't come out. I have also been diagnosed schizophrenic, officially in 2013. I feel I need to explain two things: why I believed that I was diagnosed homosexual in the first place and why at least some of the people treating me thought it.

In 2007, I had a serious apocalyptic psychotic meltdown. When I first arrived at the Mental Health Clinic at which I am still being treated, I said among other things (I can't put down here all I said that first day in this blog) that I wanted to "come out as straight". What I meant was "I have always been straight and I want people to know it". Unfortunately a statement like this is open to misinterpretation. Another possible reading of it is that I was a gay man who wanted to turn straight. It was an unfortunate ambiguity that could have been cleared up by honest communication. This never happened. At my first appointment with the psychiatrist he talked sarcastically of my "breakthrough" – presumably he thought my saying I was straight was a delusion. At this appointment or the next he told me  to "stop avoiding". It was terrible for me. I had been immediately diagnosed as a repressed or closet homosexual.

Now, I'm unsure if it is possible for a gay man to form the delusion that he is straight but it seems unlikely. This misunderstanding, that I was a gay man who had formed the mistaken belief that he was straight, could easily have been corrected if someone had had a proper conversation with my mother, who actually knows me quite well, but I don't know that people did. The severe delusion which possessed me in 2007, in fact – the delusion which dominated my thinking – was the belief that a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals controlled the world. There were often times that year that I believed that there were more gay people in the world than straight people. In such a world, the statement "I want to come out as straight" makes more sense.

In 2007 I was very ill. In the horrible situation in which I had found myself, a situation in which I had said that I was straight but hadn't been believed, was continuously being doubted, I became acutely afraid of somehow outing myself accidentally, by drinking the wrong brand of beer perhaps. The world I had found myself in offered me only one way out. My belief in a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, together with a delusion that my glasses were bugged and that others were listening to everything I said, made me censor myself. I didn't use the words 'gay' or 'straight' again, with anyone, except maybe my mother, publicly, until 2012. 2007 was a terrible year. In 2008 I recovered somewhat from the episode I had suffered the previous year, and was more or less well. (In notes used about me at one of my hearing it says that  I was ill that year. This is quite false.) What might seem unbelievable, considering my diagnosis, was that I was actually still more or less going out with a girl at this time, in 2008, a girl I'd gone out with since maybe 2003 or 2004.  Although we lived in different parts of New Zealand, I would drive to Katikati occasionally to visit her. In the second half of the year we broke up conclusively, ending a relationship that had lasted about five years. Shortly after I broke up with her, an old friend called me up and I sheltered him at my house for a period. Later I would visit him at Piha, a beach on Auckland's West Coast. At this time he was my only friend.

During this year, I was receiving 'therapy' of a sort from a nurse at the clinic. We never discussed sexuality, my family, or anything significant. During this period, I talked about my friend. What I suspect is that this friendship, which was entirely platonic, coming on the end of a relationship with a woman, was misconstrued as a sexual relationship. On the basis of this friendship it was decided that I was openly gay. I had, despite my efforts, accidentally 'outed' myself. It seems unbelievable but this is what I believe happened. In December of that year, I became psychotic again, ending my friendship with this chap, and, shortly after, for the first time, started hearing voices. The psychotic episode that started then, in December 2008, lasted until early 2010 and was the worst I ever experienced. (In notes written about me at one of my hearings, I should say, it was said that I was well in 2009.)

I should repeat something that I said before in a previous post, that from when I was admitted as a patient in 2007 until August 2009 I was taking 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone. In August 2009 I was allowed to discontinue it because I threatened to kill myself and after this was well for about a month or two. The psychosis I experienced at the end of 2009, and during the first period I took Olanzapine, was a little more intense but far less terrible than the psychosis I experienced while taking Rispiridone.

It may seem incredible that those treating me could have concluded that I was a practicing homosexual because I talked about a male friend. But this is possible in the toxic environment of the Mental Health System. In a culture in which no-one is asked if he or she is gay or straight, same sex friendships are always suspect; no-one is straight and no-one is gay. I have observed this stupid attitude among Mental Health Workers concerning other patients - patients who give every indication of being straight. Workers in the Mental Health System often simply assume, as a kind of default position, that their patients are sexually muddled. I believed in conspiracy of closet homosexuals and I was in a culture that encouraged this delusion.

Just because a person has a good friend of the same gender doesn't mean he or she wants to fuck that person.

So, how did I know that this 'outing' around December 2008 had happened? To be honest, I just sensed it, somehow psychically. Often it was more a matter of body language more than anything else. The clearest evidence that it happened is when my psychiatrist asked me in 2009, as I mentioned in the previous post, if I "stood up for myself" or was "a people pleaser." He was asking me if I prefer to give or receive blow-jobs from men. At the time I didn't know what he meant but, because I was scared of him, I said "people pleaser". In effect he had put me in a double-bind – perhaps deliberately.

Often psychiatrists assume that they are dealing with patients who are gay but haven't come out to their family or to anyone else. They try to talk around the family. But this is wrong. The proper attitude is to suppose patients know their sexuality and to ask.

So why did they think I was gay at all? I think this psychiatrist came up with his diagnosis immediately, upon first meeting me, and then simply never corrected it. Perhaps partly this was because of my body language at the first appointment; perhaps partly it was because he never made any real attempt to understand me. Perhaps this psychiatrist believes that all of his patients are gay. I decided immediately, at my first appointment with him, that he was a member of the Homosexual Conspiracy and perhaps my fear expressed itself oddly. In those early days I thought sometimes that I would have to pretend to be mad and sometimes that I would have to pretend to be gay not to be assassinated by members of the this conspiracy. Later, in 2009, I found that my body language seemed to betray me against my will. Because people seemed convinced that I was gay despite my having said that I was not, both directly and indirectly, this caused me to become acutely self-conscious, to behave camp-ly even though I didn't want to. It was a terrible psychotic symptom. I felt as though I had been possessed by some tormenting demon.

An anecdote gives some illustration of this split between who I was and how I sometimes presented myself. My job then at the TAB involved taking bets on horses over the phone and, during a shift, I would take a couple of calls a minute. Sometime I think in 2009 I started doing something bizarre. When I received a call, I would make a snap judgement as to whether the caller was gay or straight. If I decided he was gay I would put on a gay voice. If I decided he was straight I would use my own voice. After a week or two of doing this, I became aware that I was doing it and made an effort to stop. On the next call I put on an Australian accent. My co-worker sitting next to me turned in some alarm to the chap sitting on the other side and said, "He's doing an Australian accent now!"

Those days were terrible. I thought I had to make a choice between being a closet homosexual or an openly gay man – when in fact I was straight through and through.

There is another reason why people may have thought I was gay. It is possible that they thought it because I was so innocent. I mentioned previous girlfriends sometimes to those treating me but I didn't talk about sex or pornography or masturbation. I didn't disclose that I actually quite like sex with women. I shouldn't have had to. I talk more candidly now, in my blog, because I feel subjects like sexuality need to be more openly discussed. I believe now that sexual desire rather than love is the essence of sexuality but I didn't always hold this belief – that the essence of sexuality is sex not love. In late 2009 I fell in love with the girl I call Jess in this blog: at that time I had decided that the fact of my falling in love with a girl was the best proof of my heterosexuality. In early 2010, I told this psychiatrist that I had fallen in love. He said, "A boy or a girl?" It was the first and only time he had ever enquired directly about my sexuality. I said "A girl." It was a relief to be able to say it. What I now know was I that I was just playing the game. What I should have said was, "Of course a girl, you evil faggot." But, then, I was coming off the end of perhaps the most terrible year of my life.

I said in a previous post that from 2010 until early 2013 I simply lived with the idea that people in the Mental Health Service thought I was gay. I am unsure if this is true or not. It may have been simply that they thought I had been sexually muddled at some time but now wasn't or they may have thought that I was gay man who wouldn't come out. I don't know for sure but I think now the later. And different people in the system may have believed different things about me. In the beginning of 2013, I wrote a letter to the newspaper (about the idea that there might be a correlation between lead exposure and crime) and I suffered another episode immediately afterwards. My life had reached a crux. What I suspect but don't have evidence for is that I was publicly outed at this time, perhaps by persons in the Mental Health Service. I should say now that it is possible that I had a certain notoriety among a certain set of New Zealanders and so people know my name and took an interest in me. I say this because, at the beginning of my first episode, I was volunteering for a popular radio station, writing news stories. (A period of my life that might possibly make an interesting subject for a future post.) When I re-entered the Mental Health Service in 2013, it was because, as I have said before, I needed it finally on the record that I was genuinely straight – because I thought people still didn't know.

To finish this post, I should say that the culture among psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals is totally wrong. In the previous post I suggested that people always start off straight and then, if they turn gay, turn gay later in life; nevertheless, it is wrong to assume that patients are all sexually muddled. Such an attitude creates the condition it expects. When someone first presents as a person requiring treatment, one of the first questions that should be asked is, how do you identify in terms of sexuality? It is a horrible problem I admit and there is no easy answer. But one answer might be simple common sense. I was twenty-seven when I first became ill, had had two long term relationships with women, no sexual relationships with men and had said that I was straight when I first entered the service. What more evidence should be required?

This may not be my most compelling or easily understood post. But I think it is important.

The Myth of the Repressed Homosexual

When I was younger, I was fascinated by the concept of the ‘repressed homosexual’. How could a person be gay and not know it? How could someone not know that he or she is sexually attracted to people of the same  gender and not of the opposite gender? It seemed incredible to me then and still seems incredible to me now. A person would have to be immensely stupid, arguably mentally retarded, not to know his sexual orientation from puberty. And yet, if we accept the idea the notion that people are born one way or the other, we must accept either one of two interpretations: either the person knows that he or she is gay but doesn’t want to tell anyone, perhaps because he or she is afraid of prejudice or stigma or isolation; or he or she is gay but somehow doesn’t know it. It is this second interpretation that leads directly to a human kind beloved of Freud and other psychologists, the category of the latent or repressed homosexual.

And yet this conception is indeed ridiculous. It is absurd to think a man doesn’t know that he is sexually aroused by men, rather than women; it is absurd to suppose that someone can be gay from birth and not know it at twelve. The solution, the escape from this absurdity, is to abandon the theory that sexuality is determined at birth (or in early childhood), and to accept that, in reality, people start off straight and then turn gay later in life. I know it seem incredible. I have met people myself, people who later came out as gay, who, if looked at from the perspective of a traditional psychologist, might be described as ‘repressed homosexuals’. These people aren’t, however, in my opinion, suppressing some kind of essential identity; rather, they are rather repressing their knowledge of what others think of them or of what they believe others think of them. It is people thinking one is gay for long enough that turns a person gay. I believe that if a person’s sexuality is indirectly questioned for enough time they can at last crack under the pressure.

I think of Kurt Cobain’s song Lithium with its chorus “I like it, I’m not gonna crack; I miss you, I’m not gonna crack; I love you, I’m not gonna crack; I’ll kill you, I’m not going to crack.” And the last song he recorded before he killed himself with its title You Know You’re Right.

A couple of years ago, my then key worker mentioned a patient she had known. This unfortunate man told her he first ‘knew he was gay’ when he started having erotic dreams about men. My questions would be, first, if he didn’t know he was gay until then, what was he before? And had he experienced wet dreams about women when he younger and forgotten them? I suspect that others in this victim’s milieux, most likely those treating him, had believed him a repressed homosexual; he had known this subconsciously and repressed it; this repressed awareness of what others thought had at last expressed itself in nightmares; and it was these nightmares that convinced him that he must be gay. Perhaps he saw a psychotherapist versed in Freud’s central thesis that dreams are all about suppressed desire and was told that the dreams he had proved that he must be gay. I don’t know if this happened to this man but I can imagine it happening.

If people start off straight and then turn gay later, where does the theory of the ‘repressed homosexual’ come from? It has two origins. Psychiatrists and psychologists presume that identity is stable, tending to look for enduring symptoms and traits, rather than facing the fact that people change over time. Consequently, they assume that people who turn gay have always been gay. Second, it comes from homosexuals themselves. When men or women decide that they are gay, they reappraise their memories and reinterpret their lives from the perspective of their current identity. They were always gay, they decide, but just didn’t know it in the past.

I have some personal experience of this. In late 2013, six years after I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service and four years after the sadistic and hypocritical psychiatrist I was then seeing had asked me, with my parents in the room, if I “stood up for myself” or was “a people pleaser”, I had a nightmare that someone ejaculated in my mouth. In the nightmare, I turned my head and spat the semen out. I was under a great deal of stress at the time. As you might expect, this nightmare upset me – I know something about Freud myself and I became afraid that it might be a sex dream, that it might be a sign that I might turn gay. This dream, or to at least try to be more accurate, the idea that people might think I might want to give men blowjobs, continued to upset me right up until a couple of months ago when I heard a voice say “Time to spit it out”. This was the last time I heard a voice.

The fundamental problem that has engendered the idea of the ’repressed homosexual’ is the Freudian idea of a personal unconscious, an unconscious formed in childhood. This idea has caused untold harm. Psychologists often approach patients assuming that they can understand the patient’s unconscious mind better than the patient himself and they often fail to recognise that they often meddle perniciously with a person’s sense of self. They tend not to acknowledge their own biases, or counter-transference, or the fact that the patient is reading the psychologist as much as the psychologist is reading him or her. They fail to recognise that identity is situational and relational, rather than individual, discreet. In a previous post, “Definitions of Sexuality” I described the sessions I had with a psychologist in 2014 and the distress it caused me. What I did not mention in that post is that a significant reason for the anguish I suffered as a result of this ‘therapy’ was that the psychologist I saw kept telling me that sexuality is ‘fluid’ (and called me ‘aspergerous’ for refusing to believe him) but quite evidently didn’t believe this himself. He even went so far as to mention in passing the idea of a ‘gay phenotype’, suggesting that he subscribes at least implicitly to the idiotic fairy story of a ‘gay gene’. He was trying to manipulate me or encourage me, I think, into coming out. 2014 was a horrible year for me and during that year my refuge was The Daily Show; it was my life-preserver. During that year Jon Stewart, I think it important to say, took the precise opposite position of my psychologist. Being a man of considerable intellectual integrity, Jon must have known, as I knew, that a straight man can turn gay, if subjected to enough coercion, but, night after night, he argued that sexuality is fixed at birth. I think this year was as hard on him as it was on me. I owe Jon Stewart an enormous debt of gratitude. He might have saved my life.

Because I have been treated so atrociously by the Mental Health Service, it is tempting to slander people - to say, for instance, that when this psychologist I saw ‘makes love’ to his wife, he closes his eyes and imagines he’s fucking a man up the arse. But this probably isn’t true. It may be fun to view this psychologist from a psychological perspective. From this perspective, the truth would be that he’s not very smart, not very empathic, and greatly overestimates his ability to understand his patients. I would describe him as having a form of Narcissistic Personality disorder. He has issues with his mother - she didn’t love him enough as a child and so he built up Narcissistic defences as a way of coping with her lack of affection. In addition, he has a major complex about how others perceive his sexuality and so projects sexual confusion onto all his patients. In other words, he is not stable enough to objectively treat his patients. Probably he has some deep seated gender uncertainty but I have only a little evidence of this.

In order to project sexual confusion onto me, his default attitude towards all his patients, this psychologist I suspect may have come up with a tortuous theory. In my first appointment, I said, more than once, that I was straight; I also had reason that year to talk about how I suspected there was at least one closet homosexual (by which I mean gay man who hadn’t come out to me) in my life when I first became ill. I also said in passing, when talking about Hollywood actors, that I was ‘unsure’ about Leonardo DeCaprio. I didn’t say many men were gay; in fact, I am more interested in people like Morrissey and Lou Reed who are thought to be gay but aren’t. I don’t think this is how he made sense of, or recorded, our conversations. The theory I think that he devised (a typical psychological sophism) is that I had homosexual inclinations which I couldn’t admit and so projected them onto the men I supposedly ‘desired’, in this way expelling an unconscious wish that I couldn’t consciously countenance. In other words, and I admit I am being paradoxical, he projected homosexuality onto me by imagining I was projecting it onto others.

It was awful. I was trying to say I straight and try to explain why I had become ‘sick’ in the first place and he was giving me no way out.

I can give an example which illustrates his method of approaching me. One time, he asked me if I thought Jon Stewart was gay or straight. Presumably he believed me a cretin; this is the only reason he could have had for asking me this. I know Jon Stewart is straight. I know this because Jon is married with a couple of children; I know this because I have observed his interactions with his guests over many years; I know this because he is a Democrat and closet homosexuals are all Republicans. I know it because it is obvious. The reason I chose Jon as an imaginary friend in the first place, in 2009, is precisely because I knew he was straight, the straightest man I knew. The fact that this psychologist asked me this question says more about him than me: I have to assume he can’t tell the difference. Judging by his narcissism, I have to assume that, when he masturbates, he fantasises about himself.

I would like now to return to my original subject. To put it in a nutshell, I think that this psychologist had diagnosed me as a repressed homosexual and was seeking as strenously as he could to find evidence to support this prognosis. He couldn’t understand me. Despite my efforts to explain myself, despite seeing him once a week for close to a year, he he couldn't make sense of me. I think partly his incapacity was because I was trying to work out the cause of homosexuality with him and he couldn’t cope with this. Psychologists don’t ever consider the cause of homosexuality; they don’t even seem to realize that homosexuality (like psychosis) must have a cause. But everything has a cause.

If the reader is interested in this subject I recommend the post “An Anecdote and a Description of a Condition”.

Stolen Kisses

Earlier this year I saw on TV the film I Love You, Man. It is both a fun film and a terrible one – terrible because it is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland where the gay men are indistinguishable from the straight men and in which the gay men are emboldened to hit on whoever they like. The film follows Peter, played by Paul Rudd, who has no male friends, in his search for a straight male pal to be the Best Man at his wedding. Early on in the film he participates in a number of 'man-dates' to try to find one. It is a sign of the dysfunctional world in which Peter lives that, when he succeeds in making one (Sydney played by Jason Segel), one of the ways the two bond is by talking about masturbation; in this world, the world the film represents, this is almost the only way that two men can prove themselves straight to each other, by talking about how they fantasize exclusively about women. In a pre-apocalyptic wasteland two men shouldn't have to this to become friends. They shouldn't have to prove their heterosexuality to each other.

I Love You, Man is riffing on the difficulties associated with making same-sex friends in a world where homosexuality is both condoned and visible, where friendly overtures always run the risk of being misconstrued as sexual advances. Early in the film, Peter goes on a 'man-date' with a chap who shows no indications of camp-ness and goes so far as to make a passing comment on the attractiveness of their female waitress. At the end of the evening, this chap kisses Peter on the lips, entirely without prompting; Peter does not react to the kiss at all. When he gets home, his fiancé tells him his mouth tastes like an ash-tray and he tells her what happened. Although Peter did not ask for this kiss, did not want it, he accepts the experience seemingly without distress. In a way the film is performing a worthwhile social service by normalizing an experience that I suspect at least a few straight men may have had and find upsetting, but it lacks verisimilitude by downplaying the discomfort such an experience can engender. One thinks of the scene in The Crying Game in which the protagonist cowers in the shower, trying to cleanse himself, after having discovered that his amore is really a man (a scene parodied in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective). An unsolicited kiss can verge on violence, can be close to a kind of rape.

At this point in the post, I would like to segue to a slightly different topic. I should disclose that I have kissed a few people without permission, all girls, and I would like to describe one such occasion. In 2004 I travelled through Europe and one time I found myself in a train carriage traveling from France to the Czech Republic through Germany sitting opposite a girl with an extremely fine caboose lying stretched out prone, sleeping, on the pew opposite. As the journey continued, she woke up and we embarked on a conversation in English: it turned out she was a Polish physics student who had been visiting the site of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva which was not then completed. We discussed particles and anti-particles for a time and then, shortly before we arrived in Prague, I pounced on her, abridging the distance between us and kissing her impetuously on the lips. I remember, when we disembarked in Prague, she seemed a little discombobulated upon leaving the platform.

Now, for most of my life, I have treasured this memory as something romantic. To kiss a cute Polish girl on a train traveling between Strasbourg and Prague seemed the apex of my European adventure. In later years though, in thinking of this moment, I started to worry that I had done something immoral. I had invaded her space without her explicit consent. It may be that I had mistaken my attraction for her as being something mutual. At this time I was young and was supremely confident of my own sexual appeal: I had been the object of some interest from several girls at the French language school I attended in Montpellier and had enjoyed a fling with a Manchester girl in Provence. But perhaps the kiss I stole from this Polish girl was unexpected, even unwanted. I can no longer be sure. Perhaps I should have asked her first, "Can I kiss you?" And, if I'm honest, I have to admit that her answer at the time would probably have been "No".

My moral scruples about this memory makes me worry that I might have been like Donald Trump. Readers will know what I'm talking about.  When talking to Billy Bush on a bus, Trump said that his fame allowed him to "grab women by the pussy" if he wanted; he also told Billy something like, "I'd better have a mint just in case I feel like kissing her [the female Entertainment Tonight presenter]". Dead centre of his own narcissistic bubble, Trump imagines that his attraction to women must always be reciprocated. It makes me worry if I have a little Tump in me. Am I, I wonder, or have I been in the past a little like America's odious current President-Elect? I can only hope not. One difference, it seems to me, is that in his comments to Billy Bush, Trump appears to implicitly recognize that his advances are unwanted whereas, in my advances towards women, the context itself has always seemed to warrant the attempt.

Sexual politics is a minefield. Of course, "no" means "no" and a woman has the right to withdraw consent at any time. But I have many times been in situations where the lass put up a little resistance, resistance, mind you, that didn't amount to an outright "no", and then acquiesced. It happened early on in both my long-term relationships (the first lasting four years, the second lasting, more or less, about five) and it happened with the girl I had a serious crush on between 2009 and 2014. In my experience, consent does not need to be explicitly verbal to be established. It can be tacit. I hope I can make this claim without coming across as a chauvinistic asshole. I am of course talking about stolen kisses and nothing that goes any further.

One advantage of living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is that it may help a person to see himself from the outside. Suppose Billy Bush had said to Trump "My fame as a television host means I can grab you by the crotch if I want" or said "I better take a mint just in case I kiss you". Turning the tables in this way might unlock something in Trump's head. Arguably Trump might perceive this as a violation of his personal space, a kind of sexual harassment, and, finding himself the victim, cause him to reappraise his attitude towards women. Perhaps it might force Trump to realize that the behavior he brags about is reprehensible. Although, judging by the double standard he has displayed all his life (being at once both extraordinarily thin-skinned and a bully), even this turning of the tables might not register on him or enable Trump to see himself from the outside, as others see him.

The essence of ethics is to imaginatively put oneself in another's place. I argued this in the post "The Person and Her Situation." But to put oneself in another's situation one first needs to understand it. One needs to ask questions, one needs to make the effort. This is the fundamental problem with modern psychiatry – no one even asks questions. And errors compound which are never corrected. How can one treat a patient if one doesn't even understand him or her? At the moment, psychiatrists don't even make the attempt. 

More Corruption in the Mental Health Service

A couple of months ago, I had an independent review of my status as someone receiving compulsory treatment for schizophrenia. It was only yesterday that I opened my copy of the review tribunal's decisions. After I read it, I was left literally shake with anger.

Apparently a person can be fined $10,000 dollars for talking about what happened during a hearing but I am going to take that risk.

At the independent review, I sat with my mother, my psychiatrist, my key worker and my lawyer. Across from us sat the review panel consisting of a lawyer, a lay person and another psychiatrist. This second psychiatrist had flown up from Wellington, I believe, to assess me. Immediately before the review started, when he introduced himself to me, I smelt a strong odor of shit coming off him. I know this sounds a bit flakey but I believe the reason he smelt so bad was because my subconscious mind was letting me know that this man was utterly bogus, dishonest, full of shit, that he had made his mind up about me before the review even started.

As I have said before, I was 'ill' in 2007, 2009 and 2013. In fact I continued to be somewhat ill right up until early this year and have only completely come right in the last couple of months – despite having been subject to compulsory treatment since February or March 2014. During the hearing the psychiatrist seemed to accept that these were the years I had been ill. However in the decision it was said that I had been unwell in 2008 and 2012. This is completely wrong.

I was quite well in 2012 and in fact completed a degree that year, a Masters in Creative Writing.

In the decision it also says the following,

"In March 2013 the Applicant self-referred to the Taylor Centre, with a recurrence of symptoms. He had reduced his dose of Olanzapine from 12.5 mgs to 2.5 mgs, and refused to increase it. By October his condition had decreased even further."

This is an ABSOLUTE LIE. I was never on 12.5mgs of Olanzapine. From the end of 2009 until the beginning of 2012 I was on 10mgs of Olanzapine. At the beginning of 2012, a day or two after the Laneway Festival which was held January 30 2012, I was discharged from the service and, at that time, I received the consent of my psychiatrist to reduce to 7.5mgs. I felt totally well and so I reduced myself to 5mgs. During the rest of 2012, when I was totally well, I was on 5 mgs. In early 2013, I spoke to my GP, asking her if I could reduce to 2.5mgs. She recommended that I alternate between 5 and 2.5. When I started to become unwell again a little later in the year, I increased my dosage back up to 5.

Between 2007 and 2012 I was treated by a psychiatrist called Tony Fernando. I saw him once about the middle of the year in 2013 and he recommended that I increase the dosage back to 10. So he KNEW that when he was treating me, I was never on 12.5mgs, that my highest dosage had been 10mgs, and so the idea that I had been on 12.5 mgs is not just a accidental mistake but must be a deliberate lie - presumably attributable to him.

But the thing in the decision that made me supremely angry is this.

"Finally, somewhat poignantly, he said that he would argue his case better if he knew what the cause of his mental health problems was." 

I never said this. I know I never said this because I know what the cause of my mental health problems were. I didn't spell it out at hearing and this is my mistake, but I know that the cause of all my psychotic episodes has always been people thinking I was gay when I'm not. Yes, I was well between early 2010 and early 2013 but this long period of wellness was the result of me just accepting that people in the Mental Health System thought I was gay when I wasn't. I believe I was 'outed' over the summer of 2008 and 2009 and this was the cause of my worst psychosis that occurred during 2009. Between 2010 and 2013 I just endured others' misperceptions of me. The reason for my illness in 2013 was that this situation, this misperception, had become unsupportable; I needed to get it on the record that I was straight. But the psychiatrists I saw then didn't seem to believe me and continued not to believe me right up until late last year; it is only this year that they have started to recognize that I'm genuinely straight.

My problems can, in the main, be blamed on Tony Fernando, the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and early 2012. I hate this man. In fact, I'm going to say now what I have thought for a long time about him but have been reluctant to express out loud - that when Tony Fernando masturbates he fantasizes about men, specifically he fantasizes about sticking his dick in the mouths of his heterosexual male patients. I don't know whether the psychiatrist who was on the panel is also a closet homosexual but he's certainly a liar - and from the beginning of my illness I have tended to put closet homosexuals and sociopaths in the same category.

Psychiatry and the Mental Health System is based on bullshit. How many suicides are caused, how many lives ruined by false records and by something that amounts to sadism? If, dear reader, you have a family member who becomes 'unwell', my advice to you is to send him or her somewhere quiet and just him get over it in his own time. Don't refer him to the doctors because they will only make him worse. The whole Mental Health System is morally and intellectually bankrupt and the people who run the show, I can only hope, are all destined for hell when they die.

The Great God Pan

I worry that I may have spooked some readers with my last post. I made reference to a very messed-up type of experience. One way to maybe make it more palatable is to approach it indirectly, by analogy, through a short story.

I wrote this short story a few months ago, in the week after I wrote the post "Rationality vs Mysticism". I tried to get it published in a couple of places, Landfall, The New Yorker (!) and more recently I submitted it to Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition, all without success. It was probably too long to have been seriously considered for the Sunday Star Times competition. If I were sensible I would try to get it published somewhere in a journal a little lower down the prestige scale, a little more underground, but, because it relates to subjects I have discussed in this blog, I have decided I might as well publish the story here in my blog. I hope my readers will be as willing to read fiction as critical non-fiction.

 The Great God Pan

        Sofia had been referred to Judith for private therapy by psychiatrists working for the Department of Social Hygiene. Her patient notes were brief. Some six months ago she had been found by the police wandering naked near a public reserve early in the morning; in preliminary interviews she had described an encounter with a number of "tree-people" and a mysterious "goat-man" who had offered her wine from a clay jug and spoken to her in language she didn't understand. Blood tests did not indicate the presence of illicit narcotics. Owing to pronounced thought disorder, general confusion and a family history of mental illness, a provisional diagnosis of hebephrenic schizophrenia had been made and she had been prescribed a high dose of Aripiprazole. Family members having been informed and supplemental treatment having been requested, her psychiatrist, one Dr Bob Chow, had recommended Judith as a capable and sympathetic psychologist who might be willing to treat Sofia for less than market rates.

        Sofia was not unique. Ever since the newly elected Libertarian government had made Atheism official state policy in 2014 and outlawed all other forms of religious practice - Christian congregations, Buddhist retreats, Islamic prayer groups, Yoga classes and so on - the incidence of schizophrenia among the general population had increased four-fold. This was of course an embarrassment to the ruling party. Despite all efforts by the Ministry of Free Speech to censor or suppress news stories about it, rumors of an epidemic or plague of violent crazies were rife and so, its hand forced, the Government had authorized the release of a statement, ostensibly from the psychiatric community, announcing that the schizophrenia gene had finally been located (it hadn't) and reassuring the nation that current forms of treatment, drugs and hospitalization, were all quite sufficient to neutralize this emergent threat to public safety. Everything was fine. The Mental Health Services had been renamed the Department of Social Hygiene and stringent new laws had been passed granting psychiatrists powers they had not enjoyed since the 'fifties. Even so, some psychiatrists weren't averse to ancillary forms of therapy and this was where Judith came in.

        On the morning before her fourth session with Sofia, Judith was in the staff kitchen with one her fellow colleagues, Graham. Graham was making lard sandwiches – recent studies having suggested that a high-fat diet lowered cholesterol. Because the prevailing orthodoxy judged mental illnesses a physical disease, psychologists such as Judith and Graham, who favored nurture over nature, were a beleaguered and often disparaged minority and so sought support from each other; there was no psychological consensus about the causes of, for instance, psychosis though, and so different psychologists tended to espouse different theories. Graham's opinion, Judith knew, was that psychotics exhibited paranoia as the result of disavowed homosexual inclinations, an idea he had adapted from Freud. Consequently Graham saw his role as being to help these unfortunate individuals acknowledge and embrace their hitherto denied bisexuality. 

         "I'm seeing the goat girl this morning," Judith told him.

         "Oh yes? Nymphs and dryads again?"

         "I don't feel up to seeing anyone, honestly. Another nightmare last night. Zombies."

          In the nightmare, the city had been overrun by the living dead. Perambulatory corpses, soulless, seeking to infect with their sickness the few who had kept their brains viable. In the dream, Judith had at last found refuge in Devonport among a small enclave of the living. It was a bad nightmare but at least it wasn't the worst one, the recurring one, the one Judith tried never to think about. 

        "You know what Freud would say. He would say that you secretly desire a zombie apocalypse."

         "Well, yes. Probably." Personally Judith thought Freud was a fraudulent misogynist but she couldn't say this to Graham. Graham, who was married with two children, often exhibited a number of camp mannerisms, something that, together with admiration for Freud, caused Judith some considerable cognitive dissonance – but what was she to do? Graham was a colleague, a comrade in the common battle. 

         "It could be that that dream is an understandable reaction to what we do for a living. It's hard work. Do you know how difficult it is for me to persuade some of my patients that they're latently homosexual?"

        "Well, yes, perhaps," said Judith, evasively. She couldn't tell Graham that, in the dream, he had been one of the zombies.

          Apart from the serious hallucination just prior to her arrest, Sofia displayed a number of other schizophrenic symptoms, subtle and oblique yes, but sensible to any alert diagnostician. She had made reference to voices on at least one occasion. She displayed indications of 'religiosity' – in the current climate, proof sufficient of some kind of neurological disorder. She must surely be under a Compulsory Treatment Order for some good reason. Most significantly, though, from Judith's point of view, was Sofia's description of the "goat-man" she had encountered in the park. He had appeared to her naked with an enormous, erect phallus. Judith's own theory of mental illness owed almost everything to pioneering work by the great Pierre Janet – mental illness resulted from repressed childhood trauma, typically of a sexual nature, that could only be addressed once the victim had remembered the event. Admittedly memories of abuse were often so deeply buried that it could take months or even years of therapy for sufferers to recollect them. Some patients never did at all, although Judith had often found hypnosis useful with more recalcitrant clients. It seemed obvious to Judith that Sofia must have experienced some such trauma in her past.

          The first few sessions were all about building rapport. Sofia was in many ways personally appealing – she presented well, usually wearing to appointments a long turquoise dress, onyx bangles and jade earrings. Only twenty-one, she kept her long blonde hair tied back in a braid. Her speech and opinions were however idiosyncratic to the point of being abnormal. For example, she apparently believed that she could communicate telepathically with plants and animals. She believed that mitochondria were an alien species that had bonded symbiotically with terrestrial organisms. She believed that the Earth's orbit was unstable and that the smallest nudge would send it spiraling into the Sun or out of the Solar System altogether. Judith was little interested in these irrelevant ramblings. Yet it wasn't until the fourth session that she decided to get to the crux of the matter.

        "So what was your relationship with your father like?" she asked.

        Sofia's father was Greek. No, he had never spoken Greek at home and Sofia had never visited Greece herself. Pascoe Stephenolopolous had been a merchant sea-man who had jumped ship in Auckland in the early 'nineties and found work as a florist. Gaining citizenship had been difficult but not impossible. He had met Sofia's mother Kate, a woman some twelve years his junior, through an uncle who also worked in the horticultural industry. Together they had raised five children, the youngest being Sofia. As a child, before she went to sleep, her father would often tell her stories about his life as a mariner – clear nights when an ocean of stars would fill the heavens to brimming, Lebanese chefs who would throw knives at the able seamen when piqued. No, to answer your question, he had never read her any stories from Greek mythology. Sofia knew as little about her cultural heritage as any other ordinary Pakeha New Zealander. A year ago, as the result of a cerebral hemorrhage, Pascoe had slipped away quietly in his sleep. 

       Judith never spoke about her own father with any of her clients

       "Despite what you're saying, I'm sensing some ambivalence in your feelings towards Pascoe," Judith asked. "Could you elaborate on that?

        No, Sofia didn't really have any ambivalent feelings towards her father. At least, she didn't think she did. All of her memories, as far as she could tell, were positive. She remembered one time walking with him down Queen Street, just before the election, and passing a Libertarian supporter in full rant. Her father had turned to her and said, "These people – these people are bad. Dangerous. Never trust the man who says he knows the whole truth. Trust only the one who says he seeks the truth." On another occasion her father had taken her to an opera, the Magic Flute – this was one of the things she remembered vividly about him, his devotion to Mozart. It was one of the many reasons that she had loved him.

        Judith's father was a fifth-generation New Zealander, of Scottish stock originally. In the 'eighties he had invested heavily in property and shares but had been ruined by the bursting of the bubble in '87. Owing to this financial disaster and certain unspecified marital problems, his alcoholism, already bad, had worsened significantly. In 1990, Judith's mother had filed for divorce. Judith had been ten. In later years Judith, an only chid, had tried to maintain contact with her father despite her mother's antipathy towards him, seeing him at least once a fortnight and ignoring his tendency towards alienating behavior. Currently, he resided in a rest home for dementia sufferers. Judith's feelings towards her own father were, to say the least, mixed, but if anyone were to ask she could reply honestly that, no, he, at least, had never sexually abused her.

        At a later session, Judith employed a different tactic. "It's not unusual to have ambivalent feelings towards one's father. Most women do. Did you ever feel uncomfortable around Pascoe?"

        After the divorce, Judith's father had never found full time work again. He had lived alone in a grubby apartment in Glen Eden, allowing dirty dishes to pile up in the sink and always keeping a tumbler of vodka near to hand. Judith remembered visiting him once. At the time she had been halfway through her psychology degree and she had been wondering how to classify him. Did he have Borderline Personality Disorder? Narcissistic Personality Disorder? After a couple of minutes of inane small talk, he had taken a gulp  from his glass and told her, "For me, everything just turned to crap.  Life just let me down. Maybe… Maybe if I'd sold the shares earlier? Or tried harder with your mother? Life… There's no going back. And, honestly, there's no going forward either." He was a shit, yes. But he, at least, had definitely never abused her.

        It was almost immediately following Pascoe's death, unexpected as it was, that Sofia had started hearing voices. She had felt that trees and flowers and hills were wanting to speak with her. She had started sleeping during the day and staying up all night, walking. One night, in a reserve in West Auckland, she had come across a clearing in the forest and found herself witness to a celebration or bacchanal. This was the experience that she had tried and failed to describe over and over again. Lithe women with round buttocks and ample breasts danced ecstatically around a central figure. They were green-skinned and had leaves instead of hair on their heads. Strange music filled the air. The creature who stood in the middle of the dance had the body of a man from the waist up and a goat from the waist down. In one hand he carried a rod tipped by a pine cone and on his horned head he wore a crown of ivy leaves. His penis was huge and tumescent. The almost motionless satyr was the pivot point of the circling dryads' dance. Occasionally one would approach him and he would offer her a draught from the clay jug he carried. Sofia paused and stood at the edge of the clearing. The goat-man turned and fastened his gaze upon her. In a booming voice he spoke. "Sofia, Pan ho megas tethneke!" His voice rang out like thunder. Sofia hadn't the faintest idea what it meant. 

        It was the next morning that Sofia was found wandering naked by the cops and arrested.

        In the 1890s Sigmund Freud had uncovered from interviews with his hysterical patients evidence that childhood sexual abuse was prevalent throughout Viennese society. At the time, the term used was 'paternal seduction'. Often when with Freud's assistance memory of this abuse was restored to them, his patients would suffer extreme distress. Yet later, however, Freud had abandoned his theory of 'paternal seduction' as the cause of hysteria. For one thing he decided that many of the accounts he was hearing could never possibly have occurred. Freud concluded from this that the stories being described to him were actually wish-fulfillment fantasies – that his female patients desired or had desired sexual intercourse with their male parents at some point in their lives. Thus was born the theory of the Electra Complex. Judith believed this theory to be one of the great missteps in the history of psychology, one of the worst and most harmful of errors – the idea that women might actually want to sleep with their fathers. It was positively evil. In Judith's opinion, Freud was little better than Hitler or Stalin.

        "I can't believe you have no negative feelings towards your father," she tried again. "You know it's not wrong to speak ill –"

        "Yes, I get it," Sofia interrupted. "I know what you think. You think I have daddy issues. Of course one of the big reasons I got sick was my dad dying. I know that; you know that. Isn't it obvious? I loved my dad and then he died. Why go on about it? All I want is for you to help me get off this horrible drug."

        In the recurring nightmare, Judith was about eight or nine. She was in bed with the duvet covering her entirely, protecting her against assault by any evil influence in the room. In the dream, her father was outside the door. She knew he was. The door was locked. And she knew he was drunk again. And then he was pounding on the door. "Let me in!" he was yelling. "Let me in!" If she let him in, he would try to rape her. If she didn't he would break down the door. She would awake from the nightmare with her heart pounding. Awake Judith knew this had never happened. It was just a dream. But every time she surfaced from this most terrible of nightmares, she found her skin clammy and her breath ragged and hard to catch. The dream was real – it had happened.–it had never happened.

        It was impossible. Impossible to convince some patients why they were sick. And Judith was tired. Tired to death.

        "Why can't you just admit that your father molested you?" she broke out at last.

        Sofia drew back blinking rapidly several times. A perilous moment hung briefly in the air. Outside the clinic ordinary people were going on about their lives in the sun, bathed in the radiation of a billion cell-phone conversations. Rationalism held sway in a world of doctors and bureaucrats and bank tellers, of nymphs and demigods and djinns, of all those with souls and of all those without.

***
I hope this story is free of spelling mistakes and other errors. I have nor read it for some time. If readers like this story they may want to read others I have published in this blog: 69, Starlight, Beside the Lake, The Good Ol' Days and A Refusal to Mourn. If I am very lucky I may have drawn some spooked readers back into the fold.

An Interpretation of "Evidence" by Faith No More

People have odd rituals when they're drunk. Whenever my best friend in Dunedin had imbibed more whisky than he should have, he would wrap himself in the Welsh flag and watch Braveheart. My own ritual was simpler. Whenever I got drunk, I always felt compelled to play two songs on the stereo: "Come Together" by the Beatles and "Evidence" by Faith No More. This latter song has remained important to me throughout my life and so, in today's post, I thought I would try to interpret it. I hope I am doing the right thing in attempting to spell out what I think it means.

The lyrics are as follows.

Evidence (by Faith No More)

If you want to open the hole,

Just put your head down and go.

Step aside the piece of the circumstance –

Got to wash away the taste of evidence.

Wash it away.

Evidence, evidence, evidence,

Got a taste of evidence.

I didn't feel a thing,

You didn't mean a thing.

Look in the eye and testify:

I didn't feel a thing.

Anything you say we know you're guilty,

Hands above your head and you won't even feel me.

You won't feel me.

Evidence, evidence, evidence,

Got a taste of evidence.

I didn't feel a thing,

You didn't mean a thing.

Look in the eye and testify:

I didn't feel a thing

"Evidence" is a fantastic song. When when interpreting it, we need to start somewhere and the first thing to say about this song is that it is about sex, that it is set, so to speak, in the bedroom. The first couple of lines are surely about cunnilingus and the line "Hands above your head and you won't even feel me" is undoubtedly a sexual image. But to go deeper than that, it is about a man who suspects that the woman he is sleeping with, his partner or wife, has been unfaithful to him but has no solid evidence for this suspicion. He imagines though that he can literally taste her infidelity in his mouth.

Supposing this song is autobiographical, as I believe it is, and that the woman is Mike Patton's wife, the question arises, did he suspect her of cheating on him with a man – or with a woman? I would argue the later and in fact I think this the key to interpreting. A man who suspects or knows his wife is a lesbian may feel he has to play a woman's part when having conjugal relations - "to make love to her like a woman" as a friend of mine who was in the same position as Patton once told me. Hence the reason for an image of cunnilingus. The line "Hands above your head and you won't even feel me" suggests strongly that Patton's partner wasn't that enthusiastic about fucking a man, wasn't that into it. Rather than enjoying sex, the two are just going through the motions. This reading of the song, that it is about sexual insecurity and a crisis of masculinity, seems supported by others off the same album, King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime, the songs I'm thinking of being "Take this Bottle" and "Just a Man".

It is conceivable that Patton, his wife and another woman had a menage a trois but I won't pursue this possibility in this interpretation. 

If we read the song in this way, that it is a song describing sex between a man and a woman who he suspects of having a lesbian affair, how do we interpret the chorus? It seems that Patton is taking his wife's crime upon himself, rather than attributing it to her as he should; he seems to be erasing the distinction between him and her. One approach is to suppose that Patton perceives his wife's infidelity as a personal injury: he is saying to the other woman that she is insignificant and trying to reassure himself, trying to say, in effect, that the adultery might as well have never happened or didn't mean anything even if it did. In other words, it is a cuckold's rationalization. Yet he is still conflating himself with his wife and this is a puzzle that needs further elucidation.

The best songs are often ambiguous and "Evidence" does have interpretations other than the one I have suggested. The ambiguity springs from the chorus. A second interpretation of it is that it is Patton himself, not his wife, who had had the homosexual experience. When he says "It didn't mean a thing" and talks of testifying, he could be defending himself rather than his wife, saying, yes, it was he himself who had some kind of homosexual experience but it meant nothing, didn't count. This raises a strange and mysterious problem. Why does Patton willingly confuse himself with his wife? Is it him or her who has committed the crime? And if he is suggesting that it was he rather than her who had the homosexual experience, is it possible for a person to have a homosexual experience unintentionally, involuntarily, by accident as it were? And for it not to be rape?

To resolve this ambiguity, we need to sail into deeper waters. If a man suspects his wife of having a lesbian affair, it may cause him to doubt his own sexuality. This is a deep truth that few people consider. Add to that the possibility of gossip circulating about Patton's wife's sexuality or extra-marital relationships and we have a recipe for profound psychological distress. After all, the cuckolded husband is himself out of the loop, the last to know, imprisoned in a cone of silence; he suspects but has no proof. And such rumors inevitably cast doubt on the sexuality of the man as well as the woman. Some clues that this is what happened to Patton can be adduced from another song off the same album, "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" (and there is sill another track on the album, not one I can know so well, called "The Last to Know"). Such mental anguish can drive a person a little mad, can manifest in dreams and hallucinations - in other words, it is possible for a person to imagine that he has had a homosexual experience when literally he hasn't. Such a hallucination happened to another friend of mine, not the one I mentioned above, and it happened to me as well, in early 2010 to be precise. It need not occur as the consequence of one's wife having a lesbian affair but this is definitely a viable antecedent.

Patton I feel prided himself on his masculinity, his sexual prowess, and the situation he found himself in I think resulted in a kind of spiritual or religious crisis hinted at in the song "Just A Man". Perhaps Patton himself had such a dream or hallucination.

I would propose that an experience something like this also happened to the novelist David Foster Wallace when he was in college, was the reason for the "spiritual crisis" (as he himself described it) that he suffered then but never talked about, and that nearly led him to take his own life. I have tried to tackle this difficult issue before in an earlier post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". In the film-biopic about Wallace, The End of the Tour, Wallace (or to speak more accurately, the actor playing him) talks of "experimenting" when he was younger – but I believe the film does a disservice to Wallace in presenting him this way, is pandering to those who think they know Wallace better than he knew himself. Talk of "experimentation" or "bi-curiousity" implies volition and the type of experience I am describing is avolitional. I do not believe Wallace "experimented" when he was young; I believe if he suffered such an experience, endured such a delusion or hallucination, it was 'by accident', was non-consensual, if we can use the term 'non-consensual' when no other partner exists. Wallace may perhaps have been the victim of false gossip and perhaps this calumny preceded the experience. I admit this is speculation. However I might say one more thing about it: one might describe this type of dream or hallucination as a kind of rape but the word 'rape' also seems inappropriate – unless a person can be said to be raped by his or her own subconscious mind (or, to give credit where credit is due, raped by the world, by the stupid or the cruel who comprise the victim's milieux).

I know this discussion might make some of my readers uncomfortable. I feel sometimes that I am excavating the secret history of the world. I might finish by saying just this: that although I have loved "Evidence" since I was a teenager, it is only in the last couple of years that I have felt that I knew what it was about and, only now, that I have decided to share what I think it means. 

An Anecdote; and a Description of a Condition

This blog is a strange animal. When I started writing it, it was about narrative theory but, over time, other subjects intruded: I began including short stories I'd written and talking about philosophy more generally. In posts about Kurt Cobain, John Nash, David Foster Wallace and perhaps Virginia Woolf I suggested, sometimes subtly, a different perspective on mental illness – that what drives a person mad is other people's misperceptions of him or her. I also have talked a little about my own life and that's what I want to do again in today's post.

After I left school I studied for two years at the University of Otago. At this time, I was in a long-distance relationship with my first girlfriend. One day, back in 1998, because I missed her, I bought a Cleo magazine, a magazine she liked. My best friend at the time teased me about this but I replied that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a women's magazine without worrying about it. My friend, a Philosophy major who would write his Masters thesis on Wittgenstein, said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing up in women's clothes." I took this as a challenge. We borrowed a dress, high-heels, and a wig from our lesbian friend who lived down the corridor in the same hall of residence, I dressed up in women's clothes and my friends took photographs. It was a fun night and a little boozy.

The point of this story, of course, is that I was secure enough in my heterosexuality that I could dress in women's clothes without worrying what others would think. It was the same logic that lead me to vocally support gay rights when I was older.

I tell this anecdote not only because it is perhaps amusing and revealing but because it had an effect on my life later on. In 2007, at the age of 27, as I have talked about before, I suffered a serious psychotic meltdown. The reasons for this crisis, which included a consideration of suicide, were complicated but a big part of was that it was caused by people thinking I was gay when I wasn't, perhaps because of false rumors, perhaps because of a misunderstanding of something that actually happen. After the crisis passed, I was briefly well but, at my first appointment with a psychiatrist, I felt immediately, rightly or wrongly, that he had diagnosed me as a latent or closet homosexual: an impossible position to be in because there was no way I could tell him he was wrong. Shortly after this, having become a 'client' of the Mental Health Service, I told my key worker the anecdote I related above. It was the only way I could try to explain the catastrophe that had occurred to me.

I don't believe my key worker understood what I was trying to say. I suspect what happened was that it was recorded in my notes that I was a transvestite. Towards the end of the year, having become increasingly panicky about the situation I was in, at a respite facility, I started trying to say indirectly something I shouldn't have needed to say, that I was straight. With a health worker at a respite facility, I talked about a trip I took to Europe in 2004, about all the pretty girls I encountered. She asked me, "Did you like what they were wearing?" I said, "No, I liked the girls!"

In other words, my anecdote had been interpreted the exact opposite of the way I intended.

This condition I had is far from uncommon and I feel it very important to describe it. I have observed it in very many other patients over the years, many diagnosed 'schizophrenic'. It has three principal features: a paranoid fear that others around them are secretly homosexual, a compulsion to find indirect ways to say one is not and an inability to say the words 'straight' and 'gay'. The root of the condition is the inchoate insight, apprehension, that to have the world think one is gay is almost the same thing as actually being gay, is in fact its cause. (Don't believe me? Check out The Good Son by Paul McVeigh, a harrowing read.) This type of schizophrenia is terrible but there are simple ways to ameliorate it, simple ways psychiatrists don't adopt. The culture of the Mental Health System needs to change. Issues of sexuality should be more openly discussed, homophobia should be eradicated, and, most importantly, the straight patients should be reassured that those treating them know that they are straight. In fact, I think that when a patient is first admitted to the Service, they should be given a questionnaire that asks, along with questions like "Did you suffer anything traumatic in your childhood?", the simple query, "How do you identify in terms of sexuality?" Currently this doesn't happen.

The notion that schizophrenia is an organic illness is profoundly stupid and should be abandoned.

It might be interesting to say a little about what it is like to be a patient of the Mental Health Service in this country at this time. I see my psychiatrist for an hour about once every two months. I almost never see the key workers I've had over the last several years – they may well be reluctant to see me because they know I am an unwilling patient. My main involvement with the Service is my compulsory monthly injection of 300mgs of Olanapine, administered via needle in the backside. It's an involvement I would prefer not to have. On the occasions when I do see my psychiatrist, I go in trying to guess what to talk about. The psychiatrist asks no questions, and says very little in fact. If I present with an opinion that might be a delusion, one would expect her to say, "Why do you believe that?" – but this never happens. If there are strange things in my record, as I assume there must be, I am never asked to explain what I meant. I have almost no idea of what my shrink really thinks of me – I find out a little only at Judicial and Independent Reviews of my legal status of which I have had five. At a recent consultation I decided that it was important to explain why I was well from early 2010 to early 2013: I was asked in surprise, "You were well in 2010?" Presumably they must have thought I was ill then. It is important to say that my current diagnosis is baed on reports from my first psychiatrist, who I saw between 2007 and early 2012, a man readers of my previous post will be aware I have a very low estimation of. To put all this in other words, those treating me don't have the slightest idea about my life or who I am. And yet they have the gall to call me 'schizophrenic' and force me to take a drug that makes me feel nauseous all the time, that honestly hasn't been helpful anyway.

The condition I described above, to reiterate, is not uncommon. I believe Kurt Cobain had it. I believe John Nash had it. I suspect David Foster Wallace had it, although he did a better job at hiding it than others. I think what I am saying here is important because psychiatrists themselves do not understand this condition, classified as a type of schizophrenia, although its cause and cure is really quite simple. But I suspect the prescription I have suggested is the exact opposite of what the psychiatric community believes to be the proper treatment of it Which is why so few people actually recover from it.

The Confidence Man

My best friend in my last year of high school was a compulsive liar. I came to know Shannon Singh, as he was then known (he was half Indian, half Irish) in Chemistry class; he had an extremely bad relationship with his father, needed  to move out of home and so I offered to let him live in my house. Through Shannon, I met my first girlfriend and through Shannon I was introduced properly to art-house film. We would watch David Lynch films, drink cheap vodka and sit and smoke pot together on the roof of my house. When I say that Shannon was a compulsive liar, I am not speaking loosely or hyperbolically; he was and still is genuinely a compulsive liar. I remember once arriving at school prepared to proffer words of comfort or solicitude (he'd had some family fight, I can't remember precisely what now) and him upending all my expectations by telling that he'd had a threesome with two girls the previous night.

After we finished school, we stopped seeing each other as much. Shannon changed his name to Gabriel Ash and moved overseas but would return to New Zealand about once a year, always with outrageous stories of  how he was employed in the different countries he ended up in, telling me once for instance that he was dealing narcotics to film stars in Hollywood. Often, I noticed, he would take urban myths and pretend that they happened to him. The last time I saw him, just last year, having returned to New Zealand because of the death of his father, he told my mother and me that he was the Head of the Law School for the University of the South Pacific; my mother, as savvy to him as I was, performed a little elementary research and couldn't find any mention of him on the university's website at all. During this visit, when we were driving around somewhere, he received a call on his cell phone about some mysterious "package": when the call finished, he justified himself to me extemporaneously by saying that he had a heart condition, was in fact at death's door, and that the package was a special device he required to stay alive. I half suspect that Gabe made what little money he had smuggling drugs internationally.

It seems odd to me that my best friend in Seventh Form was a compulsive liar because I am compulsively honest. The foundation of my friendship with Shannon/Gabriel was that even though I knew he lied all the time, I never called him out for it. The issue of fakes, of liars and phonies, has bothered me since though: I was trapped with a psychiatrist for many years who often gave off a palpable impression of mendacity. These days the psychiatrists I see seem to have a problem accepting such simple facts as that, when I first became ill in 2007, I was put on 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone or that I was taking 10mgs of Olanzapine from the end of 2009 until the beginning of 2012. If a person lies with enough audacity, he'll be believed. Unlike my friend Shannon, who lied because he wanted to be respected or liked, some psychiatrists seem to lie simply because they can. In 2013, I wrote a letter the paper saying that this first psychiatrist I saw was a sociopath and, although it caused me serious problems later, I wouldn't take it back.

When one looks at another country's culture, one always does so from the perspective of one's own. New Zealanders seem much more practical and grounded than Americans who seem to me much more adrift in a world of unanchored high ideals and gaudy lights. It's a country of con-men and the dupes they con, of hustlers and swindlers and snake-oil merchants, of deceivers and those deceived. Shannon/Gabriel would fit in well. As that great American P.T Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute" and America has been this way for a long time. The Confidence Man, Melville's last novel and my favorite by him, was first published in 1857. The American penchant for being taken in by hucksters, by con-men and liars, is arguably part and parcel with the American Dream and its blind optimism, Americans' feeling that even if things seem bad now some simple solution must exist that will improve their situation. The American Dream gave birth to Manifest Destiny, Revivalist Christianity and the self-help movement. It results from a combination of personal unhappiness and the conviction that some amelioration of this unhappiness can be easily achieved. It is a culture that enables con-men to thrive.

This strand in American culture has reached its apotheosis with the election of Donald Trump. To say that Trump is a con-man is to say nothing new. Trump campaigned on the platform that America under Obama had never been so bad and that only he could fix the country; he intimated that he had a grand secret plan for defeating Isis which he didn't want to tell anyone; towards the end of the campaign he was pledging that he was the only one who could end Washington corruption, "drain the swamp". "I will be the greatest job-producing President God has ever created" he said once.Trump is certainly a kind of con-man but what goes less said about Trump is that he is just as much a dupe and a gull as a con-man. For instance, he honestly seems to think Putin likes and admires him, although it is obvious to anyone paying attention that Putin really regards Trump as a puppet, a useful idiot, a bit of a tool. Trump is the American Dream personified, the proposition that someone can rise all the way from the position of humble property tycoon to the highest office in the world. Trump is both the beneficiary and victim of this dream and of his colossally inflated ego.

It can seem that the world is completely full of con-men, of liars. One practical way to cope with this is to try to exercise one's critical faculties. Don't get you news from spurious stories posted in Facebook. Don't believe everything you hear. Work out who to trust, such as reputable newspapers and shows like John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, and put your faith in them. Above all, be suspicious of anyone who seems to good to be true. Con-men thrive on gullibility.

I would like to finish this post by giving one of the reasons I had for writing it. I am just in the process of finishing Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell, a book largely concerned with con-men and people's willingness to be conned. It is a fantastic piece of journalism - Martin Amis says about it "If Borges had been a New Yorker, he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret. But this, alas, is a true story." I don't want to give anything else away by talking about this book here but I recommend my readers have a look at it. It's brilliant.