Boy howdy, this is one hard book to read. Now, maybe you read some of that Freud fellow in college because you thought it was all about sex or because there weren't any Cliffs Notes for Freud, so you aren't too put off by words like "analyst," "analysand," and "transference" and "counter-transference" and the like, but this book, you see, is about Freudian psychoanalysis today which has about as much to do with Freud as Pat Robertson has to do with historical Jesus or Scientology has to do with science—which is to say, not a whole hell of a lot.
I read the title of this book and the whole subtitle, every word of it, and I'm damned if I know how you can get a whole book out of gay self-acceptance. I can tell you all you need to know about the subject, just as I learnt it from my old auntie Bruce in the New Apartment Lounge in Austin thirty-odd years ago. There are three phases of gay self-acceptance and they are: (1) "I ain't no fag"; (2) "Okay, maybe I am gay, but I am not one of THEM"; and (3) "Oh, what the hell." And I reckon you can understand this even if you don't have Bruce, when he comes to the word "THEM," to point his swizzle stick at a truckload of young Fort Worth queens who have just arrived in Austin to let their hair down for the weekend, have got themselves a snootful, and keep shouting that they are a bunch of horny frogs. You can be done with the whole process of gay self-acceptance in a quarter of an hour if you put your mind to it. Quicker, if someone cute shows up.
But of course, Dr. Isay didn't make a whole book of that, because the subtitle is a little out of plumb, and his book is really not about gay self-acceptance at all—unless self happens to be committed to a career as an orthodox psychoanalyst and self is gay as a goose but self's middle name is Denial and self is getting started about thirty-five years ago. Otherwise, this book is about acceptance of gays by psychoanalysts, which is a mere twenty years behind that of the psychiatrists and psychologists and ain't near caught up yet.
Now if you got the drift of the last paragraph, I don't need to tell you that the author starts out so far in the closet that he is on a first-name basis with moths. And since he is going to be a psychoanalyst he has to be psychoanalyzed, so he goes for analysis six-times a week, one hour per day, for a mere ten years, and ends up farther in the closet than when he began. You gotta wonder about this. Of course it would have been inconvenient if he had come out of the closet, because until 1991, a mere five years ago, the position of orthodox academies of psychoanalysis was that homosexuals were unanalyzable and could not enter the profession. So he and his analyst have to proceed on the theory that he is not a homosexual, but a broken heterosexual, because being a broken heterosexual is analyzable, which is to say fine and dandy. Is that clear? I'd go into the deeper stuff, but I'm not wearing my hip boots.
This is the hard part to read. And it is not the big words. If you can tell a healthy nineteen-year-old that his sexual attractions are not as he experiences them to be, but are in fact just the opposite, and get him to believe you—or you can tell any young adult that his or her sexuality, as much a part of a person as an arm or a leg, is hateful to God, and get that young adult to believe you—if you can do these kinds of things with something as strong and as basic as sexuality, then what in the world can't you get people to do in the name of Authority? Not much. And this is pretty much the history of the twentieth century: there is just about no liberty people will not give up, nothing so inhumane that people will refuse to do, no element of identity or personhood they will insist on keeping, if they are asked to do otherwise by a guy with badge, or stack of diplomas, or a snappy new emblem, or a holy book. It's damned depressing.
Got a little carried away there. But it does make my blood boil to read about these guys who are talked into marrying women and starting families on the theory that it will cure their homosexuality. If this was all in the past, it would be another thing, but this is still pretty much the game plan of a lot of psychoanalysts. And what is worse, there still seem to be a lot analysands—the orthodox word for "easy marks"—who will buy it. In other words, this society is still turning out nineteen-year-olds who haven't got the gumption to stand up on their hind legs and say "Enough of this bullshit!"
But I get to the chapter on adolescents, and I see what went wrong with me. Isay recounts the "success" of Selma Fraiberg with her patient "Eric." Her therapy, in her words, kept Eric from "finding a homosexual partner to whom he was bound by love" and thus he could be launched into adulthood with the notion that he was a broken heterosexual rather than developing that nasty, loving, homosexual identity which is so hard to analyze. By finding loving partners I put myself beyond the help of psychoanalysis, and I really had no chance of marrying and thus making at least two lives miserable, not to mention any children. Well, that explains that. If I had restricted myself entirely to quickies in public restrooms I could of got analyzed and maybe become a psychoanalyst—and when was the last time you saw one of them standing on a street corner holding up a sign: "Will analyze for food"?
"Bound by love," that was my problem.
At any rate, you have to be pretty much a real analysis buff to wade through this book. Isay's attempts to find a way of convincing his colleagues to consider even for a moment that homosexual development is normal for homosexuals, even by his own account, is still very much an uphill struggle, and until there is some way to sort the wheat from the chaff, the best advice is to run if you hear the words "orthodox Freudian" at least as fast as you would from a vinyl-siding salesman.
