The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I said in the last post that that one would be ideally be my last about sexuality but I feel I need to write one more before I can move on from this awkward subject onto other fields. I feel I need to say something more about love. In that previous post I argued that historically and even today there have been different ways of defining sexuality, definitions that privilege different criteria. We can define sexuality in terms of experiences, or relationships (or lack thereof), or the criterion Kurt Cobain alluded to in "All Apologies", sexual arousal ("I wish I was like you/ Easily amused"). But none of these capture what is today considered the essence of sexuality. The prevailing wisdom these days, it seems to me and I'm sure I'm right, is to define sexuality in terms of love: heterosexuals love individuals of the opposite gender and homosexuals love individuals of the same gender. This way of pin-pointing the essence of sexuality has been around since at least the late nineteenth century, since Oscar Wilde coined the phrase "the love that dare not speak its name"– never mind that Wilde's intent in coining this phrase was utterly misunderstood at the time and has been misunderstood ever since. Homosexuality was the love that could never be made public. Until relatively recently this view of the essence of sexuality meant that some kinds of love were condemned as being degenerate or corrupt or morally reprehensible. Today though the love that once dared not speak its name has been 'rehabilitated' – we now celebrate love between two men or two women as an unequivocal good. This change is not altogether surprising. In contemporary culture we tend to elevate romantic or erotic love above all other virtues, regard it as the highest condition to which a person can aspire. Almost all our popular music today takes as its subject erotic love and so there is considerable incentive to view all love as admirable, beneficent.

Readers of my blog will know that I dislike defining sexuality in terms of love. Partly this is because the word 'love' is deeply ambiguous as I discussed in the post "Concerning Love". Partly it is because defining sexuality in terms of love can lead to serious disasters – as I shall show later in this essay. I thought in today's post I would spell out finally why I have such a serious objection to this approach to characterising sexuality. I feel first though that I should say something about my methodology. Philosophers such as Heidegger and Levinas, to pick at random two examples, simply make assertions about nature and reality and psychology without corroborating facts but this does not seem to me a persuasive way of arguing. Social scientists base their assertions on controlled studies and scientific experiments; Michel Foucault drew on written archives when writing his 'archeologies'; Derrida performed deconstructive interpretations on philosophical and literary texts. Apart from the serious philosophers, all these theorists seek to provide evidence in support of their claims. I feel that when proposing a hypothesis one needs to spell out the reasons why one believes it, and my preferred method is anecdotal. That is, I base my arguments on stories from my own life, from the lives of my friends, from what I know about the lives of public figures and on what I can usefully mine from literature. In other words I basically talk about myself. This methodology is not very scientific but autobiography has some utility I hope.

I am unsure how I defined sexuality when I was young, before I experienced my first psychotic episode in 2007. Like most ordinary heterosexuals, I didn't give it much thought. Sometimes I thought of sexuality in terms of experiences, sometimes in terms of love, sometimes in terms of public presentation, but I made no attempt to analyse or clarify my understanding of this dimension of human nature. I had no reason to. And then in 2007 I suffered a terrible psychotic episode; it felt at the time that homosexuality was being forced on me in some terrible way. I am not going to explain here what happened then but I do feel I should say that I understand now more or less the reasons for this catastrophe. At any rate, I formed the paranoid delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, sometimes in that first year believing that there were more gay people in the world than straight people.

In that first year of my illness, 2007, I thought of sexuality more in terms of identity than anything else. People were either gay or straight and I made no effort to dig deeper, to define what these descriptors meant; I simply applied the label to people in my mind, divided the world up into Us and Them. I thought George W. Bush was gay. I decided, based on an episode of David Letterman's show early in 2007 in which he interviewed Dr Phil, that Dr Phil was gay. I never told anyone that I thought I was living in a world of semi-closeted homosexuals because I thought if I outed anyone the people with power would have me killed. It was ridiculous of course, this all encompassing paranoid delusion, a delusion that spanned all history and global politics, this belief in a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals. But there is a deep truth in the idea that sexuality is most fundamentally a matter of identity – although I shall not explore this idea in this post.

In later 2007, because I believed that there were more gay people than straight people in the world, I became hyper-alert to all possible signs of it, looking for indications of homosexuality among all those who made up both my immediate and extended environment. I started to define sexuality in terms of relationships rather than identity. I found something suspicious in all same-sex friendships. I decided, for instance, that the hosts of Mythbusters, Adam and Jamie, were in a homosexual relationship simply because they gave appearances of being such good friends. Yes, I know I was being stupid – but it is a stupidity that is fairly widespread (particularly, I might say, in the Mental Health Service). Just as there are people who argue that Leonardo de Vinci and Friedrich Nietzche must have been gay because neither married, there are people who find often something suspicious in close same sex friendships. For instance, those unsympathetic to John Nash see something untoward in his close relationship with another man in early adulthood (I apologise for not giving details about this but if the reader does a little research he'll find mention of it in articles about Nash). In the period just prior to his death by overdose, Philip Seymour Hoffman was the object of rumours that he was in a homosexual relationship with a close friend, David Barr Katz. This rumour was published by the National Enquirer and was discredited after Katz sued the paper, but the rumour must have been fairly prevalent before his death because it was reported by my local newspaper just after Hoffman died. In late 2008, as I described in the post "Just Some Stuff", I believe that my psychiatrist decided I was in a gay relationship simply because I had a male friend that I made the mistake of talking about with my therapist. The ridiculous thing about what happened then is that the friend I had at the time wasn't even a particularly good friend. What this suggests is that my delusion was simply an exaggerated form of a more general delusion, the idea that all same sex friendships have a sexual component.

In 2008 I was well and in 2009 I became 'ill' again. The psychotic episode I suffered in 2009 was very different from the episode I suffered in 2007. The delusion that the world was controlled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals featured only a little – but starting either early that year or December 2008 I started hearing voices. It was during 2009 that I adopted Jon Stewart as my imaginary friend. At the end of 2009 I met and fell for the girl I call Jess at a Hearing Voices group and then, over that summer, the summer of 2009 and 2010, I experienced my most intense psychotic episode, an episode to which I can't do justice here but which I have talked about before in the post "Me and Jon Stewart Part 2". During this period, I felt I was speaking telepathically to many people, including Obama, but the two people I spoke to the most were Jon and Jess. Jon was my best friend; Jess was the girl I wanted to be my girlfriend. I heard their voices in my head continuously during this time. The three of us were forever telling each other jokes. Jon's catchphrase seemed to be "dumbass!"; he would say this fairly frequently. When he first started doing it, I thought he was calling me a dumbass and then later I decided later that when the 'real' Jon laughed, I would hear him say "dumbass" in my head. It made me wonder, what did the others hear when I laughed? I decided, and I am a little embarrassed to say this, that what they heard me say was "I love you". So love, whether romantic or platonic, was a central feature of this almost spiritually or religiously intense period. Thoughts of homosexuality were never far away even then but having imaginary friends who knew I was straight helped. As a consequence of years of terrible stress I had retreated into a fantasy world.

The irony which I need to spell out is this. During my first episode I had seen all close same sex friendships as suspect. And I now had an imaginary male friend who I talked with almost continually – when I wasn't talking with Jess. It was fine, though, because I knew for a fact that Jon was straight and because Jess was usually present as well. One night when lying in bed I remember having an earnest conversation with Jess about the pros and cons of different forms of contraception. It was a silly and oddly innocent conversation. Jon took no part in the dialogue but I knew he was listening in and finding it quietly hilarious because every now and again I would hear him say "dumbass!" Bear with me reader – pretend with me for a moment that in some strange way I was speaking telepathically with Jon Stewart at that time– and ask what he got from his friendship with us. For me, I had a girlfriend and a straight best friend at a time in my life when I desperately needed them. For him, perhaps, he got to be sponsor and mediator of a twisted but strangely sweet love story, a love story between two very clever schizophrenics.

Towards the end of this period, Jess faded out and I was left with just Jon and Barack Obama. One night I felt that I needed to try to work out the cause of homosexuality – for some reason these two seemed to expect me to know and wanted me to explain it to them. Both of them seemed also to believe in something like a homosexual conspiracy. Shortly after this night, something fucked up happened and my friendship with Jon soured. The voices faded out entirely over the course of a couple of weeks. I put the fucked up experience in a box in my mind and didn't talk about it, or even think about it, for four years.

In itself this story is enough to suggest that defining sexuality in terms of love is extremely problematic. The episode I suffered over that summer of 2009 and 2010 involved me in an intensely close relationship with two imaginary people, a man and a woman, both of whom I loved. But there is a difference between sex and love. And perhaps one of the causes or distinguishing features of homosexuality is a confusion between the two.

Love by itself is not a sufficient criterion for defining sexuality. I feel I need to tell another story which underscores this claim, that there is a deep problem involved with defining sexuality solely in terms of love, a story not about me this time but about Jess. In 2011 I started occasionally seeing the real Jess in real life. On one of our first times together, she confided in me that she had told her female key worker (the mental health professional she had most to do with) that she loved her. She obviously knew that this was a significant admission because she immediately said, "I can't believe I'm telling you this!" I had been well for a long period of time, had a more normal understanding of the world, but hadn't at this time made sense of my own life, and what she had shared made me suspect that she might in fact be a lesbian. The year progressed and I became reassured that she wasn't. We fell out of contact at the beginning of the next year, 2012. That year I wrote a film about her (The Hounds of Heaven). In 2013, we got back in contact and I found that, in 2012, she had been confined to hospital for eight months and been very ill for much of that time. When I learned this I found it profoundly distressing. We hung out a few times that year and I found that the issue of 'love' was something that greatly occupied her mind and not in a good way. She was still very unwell. She was using the word 'love' quite liberally, for instance addressing her brother as 'love' on the phone. She talked of developing Stockholm Syndrome, the syndrome in which a captive falls in love with the people who are holding him or her prisoner. She asked me ingeniously if  I had 'loved' Tony Fernando, the psychiatrist I had seen from 2007 until the beginning of 2012. (I replied honestly that I had loathed him.) I was dealing with my own issues at the time and I confided to her that in a way I had perhaps loved my best friend in Dunedin, where I studied in 1998 and 1999, but that there had been nothing sexual in my love for him; she visibly recoiled. Love had become a problematic concept for her (as it had for me) and I think even the word 'love' itself had been poisoned for her. I told her that I had readmitted myself to the Mental Health Service to get it on the record, finally, that I was straight and she told me, "I thought I was gay for a while – but now I think I'm just a late developer."

It seemed for a brief moment that we might actually go out but it didn't happen and, at the beginning of the next year,  I was put under the Mental Health Act myself.

I need to venture out from facts to speculation at this point. I need to say what I think happened to my poor friend. I believe Jess had had the same condition as I had, as Kurt Cobain had, a condition I described in the post "An Anecdote; A Description of a Condition": I believe she was oppressed by thoughts about homosexuality without actually being gay herself. I believe that the 'declaration' she had made to her key worker in late 2010 or early 2011 was a statement of platonic love. I believe it had gone on her record. That those treating her, psychiatrists and nurses and social workers and occupational therapists, had decided that it was an expression of erotic love, that she was a lesbian and, unlike me, they had never corrected this mistake. And because she was utterly dependent on these people this misunderstanding had literally driven her mad. And that it was this that had led her to being sectioned and put in hospital for eight months. And furthermore this ongoing situation even at last instigated a crisis of sexual identity– in 2014, as I have said in a previous post, she got herself a girlfriend. It seems a simple thing for me to say but I don't think you, my reader, can fully appreciate the awfulness of the picture I am painting, a picture of a system that has the power to literally manufacture homosexuals.

If I'm right, and I feel I am, this goes to show two things. First, it shows the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the psychiatric profession. I know from my own experience how bad at keeping records these people are, how unwilling psychiatrists are to admit mistakes, how bogus and idiotic are the prevailing theories of mental illness. It is a system, if I can rant a little, entirely run by incompetents, hypocrites and liars. Consider, dear reader, the mendacity of a system in which 'professionals' decide who's gay and who's straight without ever actually asking the patients themselves. And in my case, and this is the thing which makes me think all psychiatrists should burn forever in hell, decided I was gay at my first appointment and continued to believe it for ten years even when I repeatedly said I wasn't.

Second, and to return to the topic of this post, this story again shows the problem with defining sexuality in terms of love. For all my life, I myself have been reluctant to use this word: even with my second long term girlfriend, I never told her that I loved her. Once, during my initial madness, feeling impelled at least to try to do the right thing by her, I told her that I loved her platonically, a bizarre thing to say to a girl I'd been sleeping with for four years. I am a little ashamed of this now but the truth was that I wasn't in love with her. I guess, like Lou Reed, I believe in "love, not given lightly". I'm picky. I loved Jess and, in a way, when I was very ill, I loved Jon Stewart. But people are different and to Jess the word "love" meant something more inclusive than it did to me. In a world in which we should love our friends and our family as well as our significant others, a world in which one should try to love one's neighbour as ourself, 'love' becomes a perilous word on which to base one's understanding of sexuality.

In this blog I have often had reason to talk about my life and I have told much of it in dribs and drabs. I might say one more thing to fill in at least one gap. When I became 'ill' again early in 2013, having found out that she had spent eight months in hospital in 2012,  I was consumed by fear for Jess. My psychosis that year almost entirely revolved around my concern for her. I became involved in the System again, having spent a little over a year seeing a GP monthly instead of psychiatrists, because I wanted it finally on the record that I was straight – but more than that I thought by talking about Jess I could somehow help her, that I could vouch for her, that what I said about her would 'percolate' through the system and correct a false impression of her. At one of my hearings, this was reported about me as evidence of my supposed 'illness'. Perhaps, I admit, I was obsessed. But I believe I was right. Jess's madness, like mine, was not the result of faulty brain chemistry. Madness is a reaction to one's environment, to those around one; it is caused by profound existential stress. I failed to help her. I don't believe, through, that this was entirely my fault. I failed to help her because no one would believe me.