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”.
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