A part of the purpose of this blog is to show two things – that mental 'illness' has causes and that a person changes over the course of his or her life – although when I started writing this blog it wasn't my intention to talk about myself. In today's post, I want to talk about another element that fed into my first psychotic episode. I am going to take the risk of talking about my family a little. It is the only way to prove my point.
Although I am completely heterosexual, I have had an interest in homosexuality for a long time, although this interest didn't lead me to talk about it with others or to read Queer Theory such as the work of Michel Foucault or Judith Butler. From my early teens onwards, I had a fairly simplistic view of sexuality. I thought people were born either gay or straight. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I said that I believed in a gay gene but in fact I never had any clear idea about the cause of homosexuality – I just felt sure that people were born either one way or the other. (Kurt Cobain evidently believed it had something to do with the hormones in utero.) I could generally tell who was gay and who was straight by their body language. As I grew older, I observed that some gay men and women could take a long time to come out of the closet but I believed such men and women were in denial of the True Selves and that they tended to be happier after they had come out. I had no evidence for this belief.
The truth is that the world is far messier than I believed when young. I'll tell a story that illustrates this. When I was twenty-one I had a friend, not a good friend, who I would occasionally go to strip clubs with. This is a period in my life I am not proud of. I believed this chap to be straight. One evening we went back to his place to drink and he said to me, "Did you ever feel like kissing a man?" I got out of the house as quick as I could and didn't see him again for thirteen years. When we caught up again, he was in a relationship with an Asian girl. Although he didn't reference the moment that ended our friendship back when we were young directly, he indirectly apologised saying that at the time his parents were going through a messy divorce.
When I went to study at Dunedin when I was eighteen I made a friend called Sarah McConie. More than anyone else, she has influenced my views on sexuality. When I first knew her, she was a brazen lesbian and was in a relationship with a girl who majored in contact juggling at Circus School. I think in first year, Sarah went to Wellington and slept with a man; when she came back she told us all (my friends and I), "Guess what? I'm not a lesbian anymore!" Soon enough she went back to loving women. After I came back to Auckland, I fell out of contact with her. But then a couple of years later I bumped into her at Borders. She introduced me to her fiancé John. I was surprised and she said, "Oh, that's right! Andy knew me when I was a lesbian!" Sarah and John were married for several years but eventually the marriage fell apart when she fell for someone else – her female riding instructor. When I heard about this, I took it as confirmation of my basic beliefs. Her marriage to John had been a phoney marriage during which she'd been in denial of her True Self.
The problem can be illustrated with a thought experiment. Suppose we have a man who is married to a woman, who even has children by her, but is sneaking off for homosexual liaisons at restrooms and public parks. Such men are not uncommon among Republicans in the US. Two terms are available to be applied to such a man – we can either say he is a "closet homosexual" or we can describe him as "bisexual". The American pundits I like, such as Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee, tend to use the term "closet homosexual". As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, the views of the Left on this issue are conflicted: openly gay men and women are ostensibly praised and commended while closet homosexuals are ridiculed and condemned. The term "closet homosexual" is pejorative across the political spectrum. The term "bisexual" however is problematic for many people, both on the left and the right, because of the belief, that I myself shared, that people go either one way or the other. In fact, there are many famous women today who identify as bisexual – examples include Anna Paquin and Miley Cyrus. But there are very few men who identify as bisexual. The only example I can think of is Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong (and I could be wrong.) For men, coming out as bisexual is a step on the road to coming out, or being outed, as gay. Elton John came out as bisexual prior to coming out as gay, and Freddie Mercury came out as bisexual to his girlfriend before immersing himself in the gay scene; although he never came out as gay this is how the world knows him. I think the difference between men and women with respect to bisexuality has a simple cause: men are prepared to have relationships with bisexual women, but women are unwilling to form relationships with bisexual men.
The beliefs I had are in fact typical of the American Left today. In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, an Indian woman reveals to Raj that she is a lesbian but that because of attitudes to homosexuality in India wants to keep it hidden. She wants to marry Raj because she thinks he is also gay and might like the idea of a "phoney-baloney marriage". Raj says, "My baloney prefers women!" In the episode he considers the idea of marrying her anyway and discusses it with Howard and Bernadette. At the end of the episode, Howard says, "I think gay people should marry gay people." Raj says, "Do you have any idea how homophobic that sounds?"
Even Bill Maher, a straight man who supports gay rights, exhibits the prejudice that people simply go one way or the other. On one of his shows, he had Ryan Seacrest as a guest, and Maher took the opportunity to ask him the meaning of the word "queer", saying that most of his gay guests were in the closet as so he couldn't ask them. Now, as I understand it, men and women who identify as queer do so because their sexual identities are not conventionally heterosexual – it is a term for men and women who have had a consensual homosexual experience or two but otherwise identify as heterosexual. Anthony Kiedis is an example of a man who identifies as 'queer'. Seacrest was bullied by Maher into saying that the words "gay" and "queer" are synonyms, when they're not.
For many years, there has been a debate in the Left between those who see sexuality as fixed and those who see it as fluid. Lady Gaga expresses the first view in the song "Born This Way" while Katy Perry expresses the second view in the song "I Kissed a Girl". Ten or fifteen years ago, people often spoke about 'experimentation' or 'bi-curiosity' but this particular paradigm appears to have evaporated. I think the reason Gaga triumphed over Perry is that the idea of sexual fluidity leads directly to the Republican idea that sexuality is a choice and to draconian forms of treatment such as Conversion Therapy. In 2012, a couple of geneticists published an article in New Scientist claiming that they had discovered the two genes responsible for homosexuality, proving that sexuality isn't a choice. I suspect that there is some kind of problem with their methodology but this isn't something I intend to explore here. As a consequence of this change in the political landscape, 'experimentation' and 'bi-curiosity' have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
At this point, I shall turn to my own life.
In 2001, a friend who had come out as gay the previous year or year before came up to Auckland with a girl I'd also known in Dunedin, Renee, who I'd had a crush on. The three of us went to a gay club – I was curious about such places, not because I was in any way bi-curious but because I am open to experience. The next night Renee and I ended up at my father's place for dinner. Also present was a friend of Jan, Helen. All through dinner Jan and Helen were laughing at jokes like high-school girlfriends but every now and again Jan would direct glares of pure hatred at me. After that dinner I decided two things: first, that my step-mother hated me and second that she was having a lesbian affair with Helen under my father's nose. Of course, I never told anyone about the second suspicion. My subconscious belief, or delusion, that my step-mother was a lesbian, wasn't helped by the fact that for many years Helen was always present at the family Christmas parties and birthday parties. The convention, I believe, is that only family members and partners of family members should be present at occasions like these. But Helen was always there, as though she were a member of the family.
(To round off this story, I should say that during this visit I entered into a kind of relationship with Renee, a relationship that became a long distance relationship when Renee went back to Dunedin, but which completely broke down when I sent her an ill considered email which was racier than it should have been.)
The subconscious conviction that my step-mother was a lesbian is part of the reason I decided in 2007, when I had my psychotic meltdown, that my father was gay. I couldn't understand why a straight man would willingly marry a lesbian. (I need to note, by the way, that the marriage between my father and Jan had been on the rocks for years.) In the interval between leaving the Big House and being put on antipsychotics, I had dinner with them and erupted at them, an eruption a long time coming. I said, "It's not natural." Now, this might seem like a right-wing assertion, that I was saying that homosexuality isn't natural. In fact, I believed that some people were naturally straight and others naturally gay – like Howard in The Big Bang Theory I believed that gay people should marry gay people. I thought it unnatural for a gay man to marry a lesbian woman and have children; I thought homosexuals should all come out.
My opinions on sexuality are today, in 2019, totally different than in 2007. Back then I believed that the world was ruled by closet homosexuals; in 2009 I believed there was a vast community of bisexual swingers having clandestine sex with each other, an idea that horrified me. By 2014, I had changed my views, as shown by the story I have published in this blog, "69". I now think bisexuality exists and is not something to condemned. It should, however, be out in the open, rather than hidden from view. I also spent years working out the cause of homosexuality and no longer regard it as being as natural as heterosexuality. Of course, the one thing that hasn't changed is my own sexuality: I am as heterosexual now as I was then.
Of course, as my readers know, from the beginning I was misdiagnosed. The people treating me thought, I think, that I was sexually confused, when, in fact, my first episode resulted, in a way, from an excess of homophobia. (I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia".) In 2007, I sometimes believed that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. The psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit that they made a mistake. In 2017, I told my psychiatrist that I believed my stepmother was a closet lesbian; I thought it was the kind of thing I was supposed to talk about with my psychiatrist. At the independent review held shortly after, she wrote in my report that I had said my step-mother was bisexual. Given the preceding discussion of the difference in connotation between the terms "closet homosexual" and "bisexual", it should be obvious that this misreporting of what I had said had implications that went against me. Evidently Murphy didn't feel it worth reporting that I disliked my step-mother. This is just one example of the way the Mental Health Service has distorted and falsified its records about me to confirm a misdiagnosis.
In this blog I have said Murphy, a couple of months ago, doubled my dosage. I want to explain what happened because I distrust everything she has ever written about me. At an appointment about halfway through last year I brought in a friend with whom I have been going to a pup quiz since 2010. I wanted a witness who could see for herself how dishonest and incompetent Murphy was. Murphy said almost nothing during the appointment. A day or two later, at my friend's place, we discussed the appointment; my friend had had nightmares about it. She said about Murphy, "She's a lesbian, isn't she?" My friend had decided that Murphy was a lesbian because she was so badly dressed. I stuck up for Murphy, saying that it was unlikely she was a lesbian because she'd been pregnant in 2013 when I first became a patient. A couple of months ago, during another appointment, I reported to Murphy what my friend had said. Before I could tell her that I had stuck up for her, she threw me out of the room. When she allowed me back in, she told me that she had decided to massively increase my dosage. In a letter she told me it was because I had laid a complaint against her with the Disability Commissioner, and told me, being the hypocrite that she is, that the increased dosage would help me. The hypocrisy is that I had given her an opportunity to correct the mistake; people in the Mental Health Service lie about their patients all the time and the patient is never given the opportunity to correct their mistakes.
Because people have always misunderstood the nature of my illness, I live in a kind of hell. I'll illustrate this with a couple of stories. In 2015, I think, I told my older brother about the time a jerk had got in my face when I was about 22 or 23, something I have described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality." My brother said, "Did you love him?" I said, "No, he was an arsehole. But the point is, that's the only homosexual experience I've ever had." My brother flinched. I have a friend, Rene (not to be confused with Renee, the girl I mentioned above) with whom I occasionally meet to drink red wine and discuss philosophy. Last year or the year before last, I was visiting my aunt, a late-in-life lesbian (although I didn't know that then) and friend of Jan, when my mother brought up my friendship with Rene. My aunt said, "Why don't you introduce him to your father?" On two occasions, one of Jan's brothers, someone I see very infrequently, has asked me if I was brought up by fundamentalist Christians. Obviously all three of them, including my brother, completely failed to understand me.
I'll finish this post by filling in a couple of details. My father and step-mother divorced a number of years ago, I think in 2010 although I am not sure. It is possible I was wrong that she was having a lesbian affair, but it is no longer something that occupies me much, because she is out of my life. I wish also to briefly describe what has happened in Sarah's life in recent years. For a long time she has been in a civil union with a woman much older than her called Sue. A couple of years ago (some time after I wrote "69") we caught up and she told me that she had a lover, a man called Gordon. Sarah, Sue and Gordon were in a kind of triangular relationship: they all lived on the same property but Sarah and Gordon lived together in a caravan. Last year, Sarah fell pregnant and recently had a baby. When she was going to antenatal classes, she didn't take Gordon, as you might expect – she took Sue. The schemas we create to try to make sense of the world often fail. The real world can be very messy indeed.
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