Something that may have caused some misunderstandings in some of my posts, and in my interactions with friends and with people in the Mental Health Service, is my claim that I was 'imaginary friends' with Jon Stewart, that I used to talk with him in my head (and still occasionally do). 'Surely', people must wonder, 'wasn't this just a voice in your head that you decided to call 'Jon Stewart'?'. In fact, I feel almost as though I do know him and in today's post I want to try to explain why I feel this way. I also want to discuss Janet Frame again and talk a little about Katy Perry.
I started watching the Daily Show in 2008. (Contrary to my medical records, I was well that year.) The Daily Show screened four nights a week and those familiar with the show will remember that Jon didn't just talk about politics and Fox News but would also talk a lot about himself. So I picked up a lot of information about him. I knew early on, for instance, that Jon was Jewish, married to a Catholic woman and had a couple of kids. I remember an interview he conducted in 2008 with Tony Blair. Blair had converted to Catholicism, perhaps because of guilt about his involvement the invasion of Iraq, perhaps as a reaction to the public opprobrium he had endured since. Jon told Blair that his wife was Catholic. Blair was surprised and brought up the subject of Jon's children. He said, "How's that working out?" Jon replied, "We're raising them to be sad."
When I became ill again in 2009, the facts I had learned about Jon Stewart informed the presence I mentally invoked. If I'm to pretend to be rational about it. This is why I felt like I was genuinely speaking to him, particularly over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Some facts, such as his marriage, were obvious (although I didn't know Tracy's name at the time). Other facts I somehow intuited. In very late 2009 or early 2010, he told me, for instance, in my head, that he was uncomfortable around Wyatt Synach, that he didn't like the way Wyatt looked at him. Just today, I found out from a friend that Jon and Wyatt in reality did indeed have a difficult relationship and that Wyatt has opened up about this publicly afterwards.
A long time ago in this blog I described the evening Jon first spoke to me and though I have told this story before it is worth telling again. I had been hearing voices, typically when I was in bed, since around late January 2009 (although my records state that I was well during this period). Usually the people I heard, such as Helen Clark, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton among others, seemed already to know who I was. One night, however, sometime in 2009 before I went off the Rispiridone, I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I said, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I said that I was, or at least I thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours." We chatted for a bit. The next night, on his show, in his opening remarks, he referred to the conversation we'd had the previous night and then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America." It was extraordinary, unbelievable. Jon was the only person who ever spoke back to me in real life. It was after this and partly because of this that I adopted him as an imaginary friend.
At this point I need to go deeper than known facts. I believe that Jon was then secretly, or perhaps not too secretly, homophobic. I believe in fact that Jon even suffered a little from a paranoia that many of those around him were covertly gay. I know this sounds like projection but I believe something like it to be true. The Daily Show went off the air in New Zealand at the very end of 2009 and came back in early 2014 – and that year I saw Jon change, or try to. All that year he was presenting the case for gay marriage to the straight community; arguably Jon's advocacy in 2014 was instrumental in getting Marriage Equality passed into law in the States a few years ago. Perhaps the stress this advocacy caused him personally, this cognitive dissonance, was why he retired in 2015 to go live in 'a cabin in the woods' (as they say). It seems fucking obvious when you think about it. Not only did he have to battle to overcome his own homophobia, I believe there may have been rumours circulating about him which only made it worse. He had to make the case for gay marriage to the straight community, deal with this rumour and try not to seem a hypocrite while doing so; his choice that year was to argue that people are born one way or the other which is what the straight community believes. In fact, as I have said in an earlier post, his show helped me get through another awful year. It felt as though he had made the decision to argue that people are born one way or the other to help me personally. It was as though he had returned to New Zealand TV to save me.
I consider myself fairly intuitive. I suspect I intuited things about Jon and I suspect I also intuit things about others. I want now to talk about Janet Frame again and discuss my intuitions with respect to her. Frame couldn't be more different from Jon in some ways, for reasons I will discuss later. In other ways they are similar. I have discussed Frame in previous posts but I need to clarify what I have only intimated in those other posts, what my alert readers may have guessed. The first, and most obvious thing to say about Janet was how wonderful a person she was. She was sweet, innocent, sensitive, intensely shy, perhaps naive and for much of her life painfully lonely. She spent I think eight years in and out of lunatics' asylums even though she was never mad – I know there is differences of opinion about Frame on many matters such as the exact nature of her condition but I have decided to believe what she herself wrote in her autobiography rather than what others have said about her. Her treatment in hospital was awful. She received ECT over a hundred times; in those days, inmates were often given ECT as a punishment for misbehaviour. No psychiatrist at any time ever sat down and had a real conversation with her. She wrote a letter to her sister June in which she described the gorse as having a "peanut-buttery smell" – all letters dispatched from the asylums in those days were vetted and the doctors who read it decided her use of this metaphor was further evidence of her insanity. She was quoting Virginia Woolf.
What I believe or intuit is that the psychiatrists had, probably as the result of the sessions she'd attended with the arsehole psychologist John Money in 1945, diagnosed her as a lesbian – and declared her schizophrenic for this reason. I know this sounds unbelievable but I think it true. I think they had diagnosed her as a lesbian but she had no idea they had – and what makes this conjecture even more horrible is that Frame evidently didn't even know what lesbianism was herself. She only found out that homosexuality existed at all in the first few few years after she was formally released from the asylums, in the mid 'fifties, and living in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna. She learnt Sargeson was gay then and met gay men and lesbian women for the first time in her life through him. She says about this period, "My life with Frank Sargeson was for me a celibate life, a priestly life devoted to writing, in which I flourished, but because my make-up is not entirely priestly I felt the sadness of having moved from hospital where it has been thought necessary to alter the make-up of my mind, to another asylum where the desire was that my body should be of another gender. The price I paid for my stay in the army hut was the realisation of the nothingness of my body. Frank talked kindly of men and of lesbian women, and I was neither male nor lesbian. He preferred me to wear slacks rather than dresses. I, who looked on Frank Sargeson as a saviour, was forced to recognise, through the yearning sense of gloom, of fateful completeness, that the Gods had spoken, there was nothing to be done."
When I wrote my previous post about Frame, I hadn't, unfortunately, quite finished An Angel at My Table. There is a chapter towards the end which is significant and which I'll talk about now. A friend of Frank, a woman who calls herself Paul, appears on the scene. Frank tells Frame, "She's a lesbian, you know." Frame goes to stay with Paul at Mt Maunganui. Prior to going, Frank explains to Frame what lesbianism actually is (she would then be about thirty or thirty one.) At Mt Maunganui, Paul makes the point of telling Frame, "I'm a Lesbian" (spelt with a capital L). They discuss poetry and Paul's life. Paul lends Frame The Well of Loneliness, the first book ever written about lesbianism, published in the Victorian Era and the cause of a considerable stir at the time, perhaps one of the books that invented lesbianism. Paul talks of past loves. Frame says of this brief stay the following: "I decided that I liked Paul, that she was just another of the misunderstood misfits of the world. I was repelled by the idea of both male and female homosexuality yet I was learning slowly to accept the sacred differences in people although I was then ignorant of biological and hormonal facts. I knew then only that such sexual differences threatened and hurt those who loved the opposite sex."
The passage requires some comment. First Frame's use of the word "repelled" sounds horribly un-PC to modern ears but, still, it is true that most heterosexuals have an aversion to homosexuality although people don't like to say this out loud today. Second, although Frame talks of "biological and hormonal facts", when she wrote An Angel at my Table doctors then didn't know the cause of homosexuality – and they still don't today. The medical profession is stupid. What I think is that someone provided Frame with a serviceable theory which she clung to to reassure herself that she wasn't a lesbian. Third, when I read this, it also struck me as profoundly sad: Frame clearly loved the opposite sex but apart from one short-lived fling, news of which emerged only after her death (and which I know little about), I don't believe she ever had any relationships with men at all.
The difference between Jon Stewart and Janet Frame is that Jon 'knew' what homosexuality was from childhood whereas Jean didn't find out until she was thirty.
The last person I want to talk about is Katy Perry. Katy has had a horrible year this year I think. In 2007 she became famous for the record "I Kissed A Girl" and I can remember in 2008 or 2009 Perry coming to Auckland and being asked by a reporter if that song was based on a real-life experience. Perry denied it. In the years since she has had a number of high profile relationships with men, including a two-year marriage to Russell Brand. In March of this year, Perry, during an acceptance speech at an LGBT awards ceremony, 'confessed' for the first time that the song was in fact based on a real life lesbian encounter, a relationship which she said had gone further than a kiss. In the months since, she has cut her hair short and dyed it peroxide blonde; she has talked of suffering terrible mental anguish. Perhaps she can't talk explicitly about has happened to her. It seems 'coming out' has caused her dreadful pain.
Queer theorists may at the moment be trying to convince the world that sexuality is 'fluid' but the heterosexual community simply doesn't seem to want to believe it.
I have said that my illness was a choice between Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Katy actually featured briefly in my imaginings back in 2009 and I have for a long time liked Katy Perry more than Lady Gaga. In the end I decided to choose Perry over Gaga. Lady Gaga was wrong and Katy Perry was right – but it is Perry who has been punished. It seems, and this is the point of this post, that the world we live in routinely does terrible things to good people.
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