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.