In early 2014, I was more or less compelled by my psychiatrists to see a psychologist. This psychologist works with people diagnosed schizophrenic at the same clinic- I knew of him a little before I entered into a formal relationship with him and had already formed the opinion that he was a know-all who entertained the delusional belief that he could understand his patients better than they understood themselves. Consequently, at my first session, I decided to define the parameters of our conversation. I said, a couple of times, that I was straight. His eyes took on a weird shifty look. He said, "You shouldn't divide the world into homosexuals and non-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and heterosexuals?" He said, "No - I mean homosexuals and non-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and bisexuals?" He again said, "No - I mean homosexuals and non-homosexuals".
Obviously, my psychologist and I possessed very different world views. At a later session, after he had regrouped from the shock of a patient actually saying that was straight, he asked me, "So you seriously believe that if a person has one homosexual experience, they must be gay?" I replied that I did. He asked did I believed in "bi-curiousity"? I replied that I didn't. Now, it may seem to you, dear reader, that I was being somewhat inflexible in my world-view. But by expressing myself in this way I was trying to tell him that, not only was I straight, that I had never had a homosexual experience. I had nothing to hide.
In fact, my psychologist and I were committed to two very different ideologist, two very different ways of looking at the world, two very different ways of defining sexuality. To be honest, I subscribed to the exact opposite view of this psychologist. I don't divide the world into homosexuals and non-homosexuals; I divide the world into heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals. In this I am very similar to my 'imaginary' friend Jon Stewart - like him, I abhor homosexuality so much that I tend to regard anyone who has had a single homosexual experience as a homosexual. It is an extreme view. It may seem disloyal to Jon Stewart to suggest that he is secretly homophobic - he endured hell fighting for marriage equality after all - but this attitude is not uncommon among people on the left. Kurt Cobain was both intensely compassionate for gay people and intensely homophobic, and his inability to reconcile these two aspects of his personality may probably have a large part of the reason he killed himself. (This aspect of Cobain's personality, that he was secretly quite homophobic, is often swept under the carpet by biographers, as happened with the documentary "Montage of Heck", but it is still true. For a discussion on the contradictions inherent in the Left, see my post "The Disease of the Left".)
Obviously I did not have a very good relationship with this psychologist. Rather than trying to help me, he seemed to want to coerce me into accepting his perspective on the world, to bully or bludgeon me into submission. As time passed, my relationship with him descended into a kind of war. One time, for instance, he told me that sexual identity is "fluid" and called me "aspergerous" for refusing to believe him. What world, I wondered, did he live in? Because he obviously wasn't living in the same world in which I lived. I suspect that, for whatever reason, he was trying to coerce me to confess some kind of homosexual experience or desire, perhaps because of whatever theory of schizophrenia was now in vogue now among psychologists, or perhaps because he had been fed false information. Rather than trying to help me, he was making me worse. On another occasion, to give a revealing example, I described a story I had heard - a Gay magazine in the UK had written a headline saying that George Clooney was "gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, issued a press release saying, "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying I am not gay, but the third gay seems a bit excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I am definitely not gay, gay, gay." After I told this story, the psychologist said, "Why don't you say that?"
Now, although I said that I regard anyone who has had a single homosexual experience as gay, in fact I have modified this belief over the years. I now regard anyone who has had a single consensual homosexual experience as gay. Once, when I was about twenty-two, some five years before I my first psychotic episode, I was drinking and smoking pot with work-mates at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron. One of my work-mates, not one I knew well, asked if I wanted 'seconds'. This meant that he would blow cannabis smoke in my face and I would inhale. It was about 4AM. I agreed. When he exhaled, he put his lips against mine. I neither wanted nor enjoyed this intimacy with another man and, in fact, it has caused me some distress over the years - especially in the time since I have talked about it. In my last session with the psychologist, I mentioned this story to him - in fact, I thought he already knew about it because I had written about it before in an essay I had given to a psychiatrist. I decided to mention it for two reasons, first because I always try to be honest and, second, because I still thought his role was to help me. Instead of reacting with sympathy, his reaction was unmistakably one of triumph – perhaps because I hadn't expressed myself clearly enough but mainly because it was what he wanted to hear. He said, "You see- there's a little homosexuality in everyone."
Over that summer, after a year of this incredibly sensitive and helpful therapy, I gave serious thought to killing myself. To spend a year saying one is straight, a year of trying to talk honestly about one's life and why one had became unwell in the first place, and not to believed, is an awful thing. I was under the Mental Health Act and no one seemed willing to recognize that a mistake had been made and that I shouldn't be under it. I worried that my psychologist might be deliberately misrepresenting me to others. Instead of suicide, I tried to find another solution – I wrote an abusive email to my psychologist, saying some vile things and discontinuing our relationship. I won't describe this email because it is not really fit for public consumption. It didn't go down well. The psychologist succumbed to what can only be described as 'homosexual panic' and complained to a supervisor about 'sexual harassment'. I find this quite ironic, coming from this man whose job is obviously based around a kind of sexual harassment.
I would like to make a more general point now. In 2013, there was a news report in the local newspaper about the suicide of a young army officer. This young man had apparently had some kind of 'homosexual experience' and had told several people about; shortly after, I think about a month later, he suffered what could only have been a psychotic episode, told a fellow male soldier that he loved him and, immediately after, returned to the barracks where he shot himself. In the aftermath, his family said that they had no idea that he was gay. The point I want to make should be obvious. If, as the result a 'homosexual experience', a person suffers a psychotic episode and then kills himself, that experience simply can't have been deliberate or consensual. People don't suddenly turn gay. The attitude of people, such as this psychologist, to sexuality beggars belief.
I should spell out one final irony. This psychologist I described, who was incapable of identifying himself as 'straight' or even of using the word, is married with two children; I, who have suffered the agonies of the damned over many years trying to convince people in the Mental Health Service that I am not gay, or even secretly gay, have been without a girlfriend for some considerable time. Not because I don't want one but because it is difficult to get one when one is unemployed and quite often seriously depressed. It makes me wonder about karma and what I must have done wrong in a previous life.
For a post that relates to this topic, I recommend "Concerning Recruitment".
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