It has been a rough month for everyone. I have decided that the rest of the media have talked enough about the Christchurch mass shootings that I needn't write a post saying much about it. I do want to say that I published the last post after the shooting but before I had heard about it; since then I almost entirely avoided watching the news and reading the newspaper for over a week. I will only say that, from what I have seen, what is striking about the media coverage of the massacre is that all the attention has been paid to the victims and to the Muslim community and very little has been paid to the shooter – a good thing because he doesn't deserve the attention. In the immediate aftermath, Jacinda donned a hijab to show her solidarity with the Muslim community. It is worth wondering if American politicians would do the same thing. The immediate reaction by the media was a concerted effort to bring New Zealand together, with headlines saying, "They are us". The same phrase was used at the end of a school performance of Hair by Selwyn College that I saw the other night. To be honest, this phrasing bugs me a little because it suggests non-Muslims talking to other non-Muslims about Muslims. I saw a poster on New North Road today which was much better. It said, "You are us".
The other day I went to the Mt Roskill Cultural Festival with my mother. In a city, Auckland, that is, as I've said before, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, Mt Roskill is probably the most ethnically diverse suburb. There were food stalls and performances from, it seemed, every country in the world, including Afghanistan. It is a sign of the country's resilience that the festival went ahead and went ahead so well.
For some time now, the main subjects of this blog have been schizophrenia and homosexuality and I want to write about them again. Concerning schizophrenia, I think it important to say that it is impossible to understand psychosis without recognising that the experiences a psychotic endures often have a spiritual or mystical dimension. Karl Jung understood this, in a way – he apparently experienced a psychotic episode at least once, although he didn't characterise his experiences using this word. Some of his major psychological insights were communicated to him by a female voice: this is how he arrived at the concept of the 'anima'. Despite this, based on what I've read it seems to me that Jung often tended, as most modern psychiatrists do, to think of 'schizophrenic' as a category of person rather than as a temporary condition, and consequently didn't realise his kinship with his patients. I know from my own experiences and from my observations of others that psychosis has a mystical dimension. At the same Hearing Voices group at which I met Jess, in 2009, I talked with a woman who had become 'ill' as a result of postnatal depression; she told us that she sometimes heard a voice telling her that she was intended to marry Christ. I immediately said, "You were receiving a calling to become a nun!" Nuns, of course, are called Brides of Christ. But this woman didn't seem, consciously at least, to be aware of this religious interpretation of her delusion. I knew a kid once who, during a drug-induced psychotic episode, hallucinated that there was a path in front of him and that every time he stepped off the path he felt sick. This was, obviously, an intuition of the existence of Fate, the same intuition that is explored in the film Donnie Darko. Even though a mystical or religious interpretation of madness is almost forced upon anyone who takes a sincere interest in it, most psychiatrists and psychologists are tone-deaf to the spiritual aspects of mental illness. Many years ago, I occasionally formed the delusion that I might be Jesus, or like Jesus in some way, a common delusion among psychotics. When I told the psychologist I saw in 2014 about this, he explained it away by saying that Jesus had magical powers and that psychotics often imagine that they also have magical powers. As I've pointed out before in this blog, the psychologist I saw was a cretin. The reason psychotics sometimes think that they are Jesus is that Jesus took the sins of the world upon himself and was crucified.
If I've had a Messiah complex, it's because I've been compelled to write about sexuality even though I know it's a taboo subject that invites disapprobation. When I was young I was aware of perhaps Foucault's most important book, The History of Sexuality, but I was reluctant to read it. For similar reasons I was reluctant to read Ihimaera's Nights in the Garden of Spain or anything by Proust – I thought I might be contaminated. For some reason, however, I was willing to watch films with gay themes like Brokeback Mountain and, later, Milk. Perhaps it is more socially acceptable to watch gay films than to read books by gay writers. When I was young I didn't want to touch works with gay themes but today I write a blog that often deals with issues of sexuality – a painful irony. I hope that my views are worth reading. Others have written about this subject before but perhaps I have a unique perspective that makes my contribution worthwhile.
What can be said about homosexuality? Homosexuality, it seems, has two facets: what it feels like from the inside and what it looks like from the outside. From the inside, homosexuality is an orientation, a romantic or sexual interest directed towards members of the same gender. However, there are also outward behavioural and even physical signs of homosexuality. Gay men display their homosexuality through body language and vocal inflection. Stereotypically, gay men are all supposed to be thin. In Janet Frame's day, lesbians were all supposed to have big arses – Frame must have been aware of this stereotype, although she doesn't make it explicit, because in An Angel at my Table she sometimes mentions how people would tell her she had a big bottom. More recently, received wisdom had it that lesbians all had short legs; my friend Jess, who herself has short legs, preferred to describe herself as 'long-bodied'. Both Jess and Frame were straight but both were acutely conscious of how others might perceive them, an indication of paranoia, probably justified. The outward signs of homosexuality go further than just body language, physique and voice – stereotypically, gay men like opera and ballet and poetry while straight men like rugby and cricket. Society's habit of stereotyping people feeds directly into Judith Butler's theory that gender is performative, that masculinity and femininity are roles you act out by aligning yourself with social gender conventions, rather than being fundamental aspects of who a person is. I don't like Butler's theory. It is literally soulless – it denies that people have souls. And it exacerbates the worst in human society, our tendency to judge people based on stupid prejudices and ignorant misconceptions. Butler is saying that a person is simply how he or she is perceived by others. Even if other people are cretins.
I have for a long time found these two aspects of homosexuality, the inner experience of gayness and its outward manifestation (sometimes called the gay 'lifestyle'), puzzling. Why do the two seem to go together? When I was young, I could sometimes tell that a person was gay even before he or she came out, and so I assumed that the person was subconsciously telegraphing his or her homosexuality to the world though his or her behaviour, a little like a Freudian slip. The person had a gay soul, a gay True Self, which they were trying to repress but which made itself known through his or her behaviour and choices. To put it simply, I believed in the concept of the repressed or latent homosexual, a category perceptible to the alert observer. As I grew older, I sometimes found that people who I had always assumed to be straight had in fact come out as gay and others who I had alway assumed to be gay (often as the result of juvenile gossip) were in fact straight. But this didn't alter my fundamental conviction that people were born either gay or straight and that it was possible to tell which was which. Sometimes, I knew, it could take a while for a gay man or woman to tell his or her parents and the world that he or she was gay but I felt that only idiots or criminals could remain in the closet past their twenty-fifth year. This is yet another reason why I hate the Mental Health Service. I became sick at the age of twenty-seven and was quite evidently diagnosed by my incompetent psychiatrist as a latent homosexual at the first appointment. At the age of twenty-seven. And they still evidently believed it when I was thirty-three.
At some point in my life, I changed my mind – I decided that a straight man could turn gay. I know that in 2009, when I was twenty-nine, having been a patient of the Mental Health System for over two years, I formed the delusion that male homosexuality was caused by a lack of testosterone and became acutely afraid that the antipsychotics I was taking might somehow turn me gay by fucking with my hormone levels. I felt this even though I wasn't in the slightest sexually attracted to men and even though there was nothing wrong with my sex drive. In 2013, I arrived at a different theory – I decided that the cause of homosexuality was the beliefs of those around the person that the person is gay. This is the theory that I have hinted at for a long time in this blog, a theory that obviously has a grain of truth. What I in effect decided to believe was the opposite of what I believed when I was young. I decided that the outward manifestation came before the inner experience. In essence, a person is put under immense pressure for often a very attenuated period of time by the attitudes of those around him and finally buckles, chooses to be gay, makes that decision. To put this conclusion as explicitly as possible, if this theory is true, homosexuality is a choice.
Of course, as my readers will know, I support the Green Party and, if I were American, would vote Democrat. To say that homosexuality is a choice puts me in an invidious position – it puts me in Mike Pence's camp when I would rather side with Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and the Democratic presidential candidates like Beto O'Rouke and Bernie Sanders. To make my theory more palatable to my Democrat readers, I proffer the following analogy. Consider shoplifting. Most people don't shoplift but some do. If we wanted we could say shoplifters can't help themselves, that they are born with a shoplifting gene. We could organise a lobby group to fight for the rights of the shoplifting community. In the real world, this doesn't happen: most everyone presumes that the act of shoplifting is a choice. But it is a choice often made after a person has endured a very long period of pressure. We can imagine someone, a woman perhaps, who has never considered thievery until one day, after enduring years of grinding poverty, she decides to nick a tin of condensed milk and a chocolate bar from her local convenience store. This analogy applies, loosely, to homosexuality.
This theory however, that the outward signs of homosexuality precede the inner experience of homosexuality, runs into problems when we consider real world homosexuals. Both Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon are gay but both don't seem gay at all. One of the Democrat presidential candidates, Pete Buttigieg, a man both highly intelligent and morally virtuous, is openly gay. He also doesn't seem gay, camp, at all. Likewise, although my mother thinks Stephen Fry very camp, he doesn't strike me as camp at all. The greater acceptance of homosexuality today than in previous eras means that we now know that many people we would once never have considered gay actually are, because they are willing to come out publicly. The corollary must also be true: there must be many people who seem gay who aren't. I can think of examples from film and TV, and from my own life experience. For instance, I used to know a chap called Wiremu who I always assumed to be gay based on his body language and voice. In recent months I have wondered if I was wrong. This suggests that there might be no relation between the outward signs and inner experience at all.
There is a second reason why this theory is problematic. In 2010 and 2011, I was aware that the people treating me, my psychiatrist and key worker, thought I might be gay or bisexual but although this sometimes bothered me a little, it didn't make me unwell. I just lived with it. In 2013, I became psychotic again. On 18 January 2014, immediately after the Big Day Out, I woke in the morning feeling as though a patina of gayness had completely covered my skin. Every morning for years after I woke every morning with extraordinarily unpleasant images of homosexuality in my head; this didn't stop completely until early 2016. I struggle to find the right term for this experience. The Calvinists talk about 'regeneration', the process by which a person's defences are broken down before he or she can receive grace. The Catholics talk about the 'dark night of the soul'. The Jungian psychoanalysts talk about ego death or psychic death. Whichever term you want to use, it was terrible. It seemed I needed to endure this hell to realise that homosexuality is a choice, but the problem with this construal of my experiences is that, despite all this, despite the spiritual torture I endured for years, I never seriously considered the possibility that I might be gay. I'll deploy another analogy, one I have used before. Everyone presumes that if a person kills someone else, the decision to do so is an act of free will: our whole justice system is built upon this assumption. But the vast majority of people would never consider killing anyone. Once again this analogy applies, loosely, to homosexuality. I would never choose to screw a man in the same way that I would never choose to kill someone.
The last couple of paragraphs may lead readers to be understandably confused about how much moral opprobrium I am suggesting should be assigned to homosexuality. Is it as minor a transgression as shoplifting or smoking pot? Or is it as bad as murder? What I am trying to say is that, for other people homosexuality should be regarded as a minor, forgivable infraction. For me it would be as bad as murder.
The culture wars that were fought and are still being fought in America often seem to be a war between liberal atheists who support gay rights and religious fundamentalists who are basically homophobic and think homosexuals are all destined for hell. Recently this issue has blown up in the Australasian media as a result of comments made by NRL player Israel Folau, when he said that homosexuals should repent and find Christ or else be destined for hell. What I would like to suggest now, as an alternative to the theory that homosexuality is the result of a free decision, is that the cause of homosexuality is God's will: I would like to suggest tentatively, as an alternative to the rational explanation I suggested above, an irrational one. I would suggest that Fate or God decides who is gay and who isn't; consequently, I think that there should be a reconciliation between religion and homosexuality. Such a reconciliation in fact seems to be going on. There is, for instance, in the Anglican Church a current and fierce debate about the allowance of same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay bishops. Very recently, Buttigieg, who is an Episcopalian, had a public fight with Pence in which he said that if Pence had a quarrel with him about his sexuality he should take it up with Butigieg's creator. There is, in fact, a Christian Left, as there should be, because Christianity is basically a left-wing religion. Stephen Colbert is a committed Roman Catholic but I'm pretty sure he supports gay rights and birth control. Hasan Minhaj identifies as a Muslim but likewise upholds the Democrat moral positions on all the major culture issues. Both Colbert and Minhaj put true compassion ahead of blind adherence to doctrine. The issue of how religions go about accepting homosexuality is incredibly complicated but progress does seem to be happening, and the world does seem to be changing.
At the moment, it is difficult to guess what will happen in the 2020 American presidential election. I don't yet know if Buttigieg is any more competent than the other candidates but it seems to me that to have an openly gay president might be of great symbolic importance in reducing stigma around homosexuality, in the same way that Obama's two terms was a great stride forward in African American civil rights, and so I would tentatively support him. Perhaps Buttigieg would be a brilliant president. If he does become president however we should all expect a backlash from the right that would dwarf the backlash against Obama.
In this post, I have been making two proposals. The first, rational and secular, is that homosexuality is a choice but not a choice that should be censured or condemned; it is a choice often made as the result of an extremely long period of social pressure The second, religious, is that God decides who is gay and who isn't, and so religiously inspired homophobia is misplaced. It is unChristian (and unBuddhist, unIslamic, and so on) to hate gay people.. Either way, methods of treating the mentally ill who have issues with sexuality should change. Suppose a person shows up in the office of a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or a counsellor, and says, "I think I might be gay!" The therapist should say, "Do you want to be gay?" If the patient says "Yes", the therapist should simply say "Okay". If the patient says, "No", the therapist should say, "You can't be gay unless you want to be".
I'll finish this post by talking about something quite different.. In the previous post, I was a little unfair to Bill Maher. Although Maher seems to support Israel over the Palestinians, he also said in the same episode that he recognised that the opposing viewpoint is defensible. It is fashionable, even among leftists, to bag Bill Maher. Some fools even go so far as to say Maher is a racist because he accidentally used the n-word once, when it is obvious that he isn't. Truly he seems to me a very good person. I like Maher – in fact, since Jon Stewart retired, Maher has been my favourite comedian-pundit. He and I sometimes differ but on a whole I regard him as a voice of reason in a deranged world. Maybe I'm a little deranged myself occasionally but I'm simply trying to find the logic in the madness.
