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1868
The “homosexual,” as a socially definable identity, is introduced into the lexicon of society. State-sanctioned power is exerted over him—his subjugation and vilification is necessary within the domain of an “opposite sex” society in order to normalize and reinforce its counterpart, qualified a few years later as the “heterosexual”—but in the naming of him, in the demarcation of his sensibilities, the homosexual’s own sense of agency emerges.
1905 to 1923
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, writes on the subject of homosexuality, often contradictorily, over a period of nearly 20 years. He supports the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1930s Germany and Austria, believes that normal heterosexuality consists of sublimated homosexuality, and that all homosexuals also experience some heterosexuality. The one time he writes explicitly on the topic of an attempted change to a person’s sexual orientation, in “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” he states: "In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much prospect of success than the reverse, except that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.” The outcome to his treatment with the patient is to tell the parents to have their daughter continue therapy with a female therapist. He does not view the young woman in question “ill”; neither does he consider her homosexuality a neurosis, “but a difficult-to-treat psychic disposition,” supporting his earlier theory that expression of homosexuality is a stunted psychosexual stage of libidinal development. Freud’s reluctance to treat or even his belief in the impossibility of changing homosexuality does not dissuade the psychiatric community, especially following Freud’s death in 1938, from presupposing the only innate, non-pathological (biological) sexual orientation to be heterosexuality, that is, dictated by procreative anatomy and the institution of marriage, and then to go about theorizing the etiology of homosexuality.
The homosexual, meanwhile, begins to speak on his own behalf, to demand that his legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories, by which he is now medically disqualified.
1930’s onward
Psychoanalysis or “talking therapy” comes to represent homosexuality’s most common “cure,” while theories about the etiology of homosexuality abound: circumcision leads to less homosexuality in Jews; the illness of the homosexual and that of the dwarf are comparable in that both have been stunted in their growth; passive homosexuals threaten to lure straight men away from their opposite sex spouses; childhood prohibition against masturbation causes homosexuality; homosexuality can be cured through 40 sessions of hypnosis; homosexuals are predominantly anti-social, vindictive, and hateful of all people; gay men and women can be “made straight” by watching childbirth in hospitals; homosexuals are really just confused straight people who wish to incorporate the therapist’s penis orally in an effort to appropriate his omnipotence. Various methods and modalities of enacting change to a person’s sexuality include, through the years, aversion therapies, psychosurgery—otherwise known as lobotomies—and, of course, as Peter himself will come to experience first hand, inhumane use of psychopharmaceuticals.
1948
Alfred Kinsey, an American sexologist, publishes his now famous book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Among his many findings, Kinsey is quite explicit when he writes: “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” A binary worldview, of Sheep vs. Goats, for most of everyone rolls on regardless.
Early 1950’s
Two the most influential medical establishments in the world classify “homosexuality” as a mental illness: the World Health Organization, in their International Classification of Diseases; and the American Psychiatric Association, in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), whose first printing in 1952 is developed by the American Army, under the rubric “sexual deviation” within the category of “sociopathic personality disturbances.”
December 1964
Peter Gajdics is born into the wholly invisible and utterly pervasive matrix of subdivided sexual orientations in Vancouver, Canada. Though he doesn't know it at the time, it’s assumed by everyone that he is heterosexual.
Late-1960’s to early-1970’s
Peter learns that his father is from somewhere called Budapest, in a country called Hungary, and his mother, a native German, was born in a country called Yugoslavia. Both countries, he’s told, are on the other side of the planet, behind something called an Iron Curtain. Talk of communism and fascism, concentration camps, Hitler, Tito, and World War II pervade Peter’s upbringing; so do Catholicism, “The Wizard of Oz,” and poppy seed strudels. At home, homosexuality is never discussed. A growing sense of unease creeps into his veins.
1968 to 1973
In the reissued DSM-II, “sexual deviation” is moved beneath the rubric of “personality disorders” (and includes homosexuality, fetishism, pedophilia, transvestitism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and “other sexual deviations”), where it remains through six reprints, until The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association votes to remove “homosexuality” from its list of mental disorders. Millions of men and women go to bed the night before the vote still mentally ill, only to wake the next morning magical cured.
Peter doesn’t know anything about any of this. He joins “The International Wizard of Oz Club.”
Mid-1970's
Peter spends way too much time alone, taping all his favorite songs off his portable AM/FM transistor radio: Vick Lawrence’s “The Night That The Lights Went Out in Georgia,” Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin’,” Mocedades’ “Eres Tu,” Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” the Original Caste’s “One Tin Soldier,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Carpenters’ “Superstar,” Skylark’s “Wildfire.” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” scares him. He’s also scared of himself, and learns to live behind something of a “curtain.”
1974 to early 1980’s
“Sexual Orientation Disturbance” remains in reprints of the DSM, categorized by “individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward people of the same sex and who are either disturbed by it, in conflict with it, or wish to change their sexual orientation.” In other words, the homosexual, who has long been diagnosed as pathological, is no longer considered to have a mental illness so long as he is not disturbed by his homosexuality. Peter, meanwhile, is disturbed with the fact that he seems to be becoming as his last name, Anglicized by his father upon immigrating to Canada and now pronounced “gay-dicks,” implies. He decides that when he grows up he will change the pronunciation of his name back to its origins: “guy-ditch.” Much despair. He reads a lot of Anne Sexton. The TV movies “The Day After,” about nuclear Armageddon, and “An Early Frost,” about a new gay disease called AIDS, seem to him to be about essentially the same subject. To assuage his fears, Peter listens to the soundtrack of "Cats" repeatedly on his Walkman.
1980 to 1987
A biological model of psychiatry is fast supplanting the previous Freudian model of mental illness while psychoactive drugs—drug treatment—proliferates the marketplace, thereby supporting the psychopharmaceutical industry. No longer is the DSM used solely by psychiatrists within the shielded world of psychiatric practices; the DSM is now used by insurance companies, hospitals, courts, prisons, schools, researchers, government agencies, and the rest of the medical profession. Medicine becomes a medical-industrial complex, and psychiatry’s increasing use of pharmaceuticals is no exception. American psychiatrists also continue debating as to whether the latest reissue of the psychiatric bible, otherwise known as the DSM-III, should include a diagnosis for homosexuals distressed by their sexual orientation. Finally, they agree to include the category of “Ego-dystonic Homosexuality,” definable when “A. The individual complains that heterosexual arousal is persistently absent or weak and significantly interferes with initiating or maintaining wanted heterosexual relationships,” or “B. There is a sustained pattern of homosexual arousal that the individual explicitly states has been unwanted and a persistent source of distress.” By 1987 the reissued DSM-R (Revision) drops the classification of “Ego-dystonic Homosexuality,” and in its place includes “Sexual Disorders Not Otherwise Specified” under the heading “Other Sexual Disorders,” an example of which includes the same diagnosis: “(3) persistent and marked distress about one’s sexual orientation.” Peter is still oblivious to this minefield. He discovers Albert Camus and reads The Stranger more times than he will admit.
Also in 1987
Peter tells his family that he is a homosexual. The news does not go over well.
December 1989 to August 1995
Distressed by his homosexuality, or perhaps his family’s rejection of his homosexuality, or his inability to come to grips with the fact that he will never measure up to their expectations, or even his nagging feeling that he is a “crippled heterosexual,” Peter seeks out professional help in the person of psychiatrist “Dr. Alfonzo.” At the doctor’s insistence, he moves into a “therapeutic” house, called “the Styx,” with several other psychiatric patients. All of his life’s unhappiness, the doctor explains to him, is because he thinks he’s a homosexual.
The doctor teaches Peter his form of treatment based on the principles of primal therapy. He prescribes multiple psychiatric medications, like Surmontil, Rivotril, Sinequan and Anafranil. After some resistance, Peter accepts what the doctor says, and prescribes. The doctor sends “out” patients to the Styx for three-week “intensives.” Peter and the other permanent house members cook their meals. The doctor says he needs his new “family” to cook his meals, too. Peter and his now “brothers” and “sisters” at the Styx want nothing more than to please the doctor, who they view now as a mentor, and father, so they cook his meals and deliver them to his home. As a form of treatment during each of their “private” therapy sessions in his office, the doctor begins injecting them all with Ketamine Hydrochloride, or K. During one of his own K-enhanced regressions in front of the permanent Styx members, the doctor says that he is a reincarnation of Christ, which Peter and his “soul siblings” accept without question. Now taking well in excess of the recommended limit of five concurrent psychiatric medications, one day at the Styx Peter suffers a medication-induced breakdown. The doctor adds the anti-psychotic Nozinan to Peter’s regime of daily medications. Over the coming days and months, the jigsaw puzzle that had been Peter’s mind breaks apart as time ceases to exist. Peter is no longer homosexual, in the same way that he is no longer anything.
Eventually, however, the doctor decreases Peter’s daily prescriptions. Fog lifts; sexuality, once again, stirs.
The doctor disbands the Styx, and everyone goes their separate ways.
Peter emerges from the past six years shell-shocked, though every bit as “homosexual” as when he first met Alfonzo. He is sure he will die of anxiety and grief. Bottles of wine help put him to sleep, which is now all he wants.
Most of 1996 into 1997
Peter still has never heard of the idea of “reparative therapy,” but books like Larry Kramer’s “Reports from the Holocaust” and his play “The Normal Heart,” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” change the way he sees himself. His sense of desolation, like a passing storm had decimated his life, shifts to one of anger. Fire is good.
August 1997 to May 1999
Peter writes a five-page letter of complaint about Dr. Alfonzo, objectively detailing his years in the therapy and the doctor’s actions, and mails it to The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. Instead of vindication, which Peter anticipates, even expects, he encounters a whole other level of medical bureaucracy. As his surname suggests, he tries to dig himself out of one ditch after another.
September 1999 to December 2002
Because he doesn’t know how else to make what happened to him real, and move on with his life, which is what everyone he knows tells him he should do, Peter files a medical malpractice suit against Dr. Alfonzo claiming, among other things, that the doctor had treated Peter’s sexual orientation in an effort to “change” him from homosexual to heterosexual. In the midst of the lawsuit, in 2000, the American Psychiatric Association reissues the DSM-IV-TR (Text Revision), in which it is still the homosexual’s “persistence and marked distress about [their] sexual orientation” that is considered a disorder, corroborating Alfonzo’s defence that he had not treated Peter’s homosexuality, per se, but his “marked distress” about being homosexual. A web of bureaucracy follows: letters, phone calls, meetings with lawyers, interrogatories, depositions, interviews with yet more psychiatrists, all of which is very real but none of which ultimately gives back to Peter what was taken from him. A hole in his gut cannot be paved over.
Spring 2004, while in Budapest, Hungary
More an act of reconstructive surgery, Peter starts to piece his life before, during, and after the therapy and lawsuit back together by beginning to write a book about it all. Peter loves his time in Europe. Like his parents before him he is a foreigner; he feels as he always did back home: displaced. Only now there is right reason to explain his isolation: He is not at home. He has no home. He is an outsider, and free. Homeless in the birthplace of his father. In a strange way, he fits in.
February 2007
The American Psychological Association establishes the “Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation”; their 2009 findings include such statements as “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm.”
Beginning in 2008
Peter studies gender theory at the local University. Various post-modern theories about the “performativity of gender,” like from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, twist his brain into all sorts of knots, but one by one he unravels them all in order to understand, for the first time in his life, the difference between sex, gender, and sexuality. Sex, Peter learns, relates to the sexed body, definable by primary sex characteristics such as chromosomes, type and level of hormones, genitalia, and procreative organs. Gender, on the other hand, relates to the assignment and “uninterrupted performance” of masculinity or femininity onto the male or female sexed body. Finally, sexuality relates to the erotic desire for members of the “same” or “opposite” sex. No longer, it is now widely understood, does sex determine destiny—a person who was born in a female sexed body could end up self-identifying as the masculine gender; a person born in a male sexed body could end up self-identifying as the female gender; while still others could end up self-identifying as both, or neither, male or female. Gender also does not determine sexuality—a “masculine” woman, who at one time would have been assumed to be lesbian, could now just as likely be drawn erotically to members of the opposite, as to her own, sex. Likewise, feminine men are no longer assumed to be “gay.” In other words, sex, gender, and sexuality, which at one time had been all fused into one Being, had now been divisibly deconstructed as separable and uniquely identifiable.
This “separation” of sex, gender and sexuality from the previously unified Being reminded Peter of how he’d tried to change his sexuality in the therapy. Though Peter had “moved on” with his future, questions had lingered about his own behavior in the past; a contradiction had remained in his mind whereby he’d never not been sexually attracted to another man, while mid-point in his therapy he’d believed, resolutely, that he was “not homosexual”—not that he’d necessarily ever “become heterosexual,” but that he was not, at essence, homosexual. What had this meant? Were homosexuality and same sex desire even the same? Could homosexuality and same sex desire be “separated” from one another, Peter wondered, much the same way that gender was now understood to be separate from sex, or sexuality from gender? Because if homosexuality and same sex desire were, in fact, dissociable—like two divergent roads that had been culturally and personally conflated—a person could come to believe—as Peter had in his own therapy—that they were “changing” one (their homosexuality), all the while experiencing, dissonantly, the unalterable other (their same sex desires).
Peter likened this separation of homosexuality from same sex desire to the difference between a map and a territory. Homosexuality was the “map”—labeled at a certain point in time (1868) as a means of separating one group of people from another. Conversely, same sex desire—always present, unending—was the “territory” that the map of homosexuality had pointed to. “A map is not the territory it represents,” the philosopher Alfred Korzybski had once commented, and the same could be said for the difference between homosexuality and same sex desire—both had been conflated in people’s minds, but they were not the same. The map was not the territory it represented.
“Chasing symbols is like settling for the map instead of the territory,” writes Deepak Chopra in his book The Seven Spiritual Law of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams. “It creates anxiety; it ends up making you feel hollow and empty, because you exchange your Self for the symbols of your Self.” One such way of “chasing symbols,” Peter could see, was through the exchange or conflation of the territory of same sex desire for the map of homosexuality. Many individuals, of all sexualities, conflate their social map with their inner desires and end up, as poet Anne Sexton once wrote, “running after the hands and never catching up.” The hands toward which these individuals run, ceaselessly, reiteratively, are their citations—socially projected maps of who they think they are, or have been told they should become; and they never “catch up” because the hands, being citations, “are out of sight—that is, offstage.” Many people remain concretized as maps throughout their lives, and while they may never experience cause to doubt their veracity, a sense of unease and anxiety, so characteristic of chasing symbols of the self, remains endemic to their lives. Others, such as those in forms of conversion therapies who try and “change” their sexuality from homosexual to heterosexual, enact on the stage of their lives a displacement of one social map of identity for another. Both groups of individuals are, to a greater or lesser extent, “running, running to keep up, but never making it.”
To say that the theoretical model used in conversion therapies—such as the one Alfonzo had used with Peter—was flawed, that it engendered dissonance and would thus collapse in and of itself—or continue causing an acute sense of depersonalization and alienation to those who practiced its teachings—was assumed. What could not be dismissed, however, was the difference between the map of identity and the territory of desire that conversion therapies unearthed. It was not that those who experienced same sex desire could not learn to identify—and identify sometimes quite believably, even to themselves—as heterosexual; it was simply that the identity of heterosexuality was reflective of opposite sex pairing and not necessarily of opposite sex desire, and erotic desire did not change as a result of changing identity. Territories did not change as a result of changing maps.
May 2012
The Pan American Health Organization issues the Position Statement, “Therapies to change sexual orientation lack medical justification and threaten health.” By this time the traumatic effects of “sexual orientation change efforts,” or SOCE, as it is now commonly referenced, have been well documented. Every leading psychological and psychiatric organization now denounces SOCE.
2013 to 2015
California becomes the first state—and worldwide jurisdiction—to pass legislation banning “conversion therapy” for minors. Other states, including New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois, and District of Columbia, follow suit, with more than 20 others introducing similar legislation. In April 2015, President Obama denounces therapeutic efforts to “change” the sexual orientation of LGBT youth. Even in Canada, Ontario becomes the first province to ban conversion therapy for all LGBT youth. Efforts to classify conversion therapy as a fraudulent practice and illegal under the Federal Trade Commission Act move forward.
May 16, 2017
The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, Peter's book about his experiences undergoing a bizarre form of conversion therapy, is published by Brown Paper Press.
Post-2017
Peter speaks out, as often as he can to whomever will listen, about what he's learned. But to family, ironically, he still feels invisible.
The “homosexual,” as a socially definable identity, is introduced into the lexicon of society. State-sanctioned power is exerted over him—his subjugation and vilification is necessary within the domain of an “opposite sex” society in order to normalize and reinforce its counterpart, qualified a few years later as the “heterosexual”—but in the naming of him, in the demarcation of his sensibilities, the homosexual’s own sense of agency emerges.
1905 to 1923
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, writes on the subject of homosexuality, often contradictorily, over a period of nearly 20 years. He supports the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1930s Germany and Austria, believes that normal heterosexuality consists of sublimated homosexuality, and that all homosexuals also experience some heterosexuality. The one time he writes explicitly on the topic of an attempted change to a person’s sexual orientation, in “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” he states: "In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much prospect of success than the reverse, except that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.” The outcome to his treatment with the patient is to tell the parents to have their daughter continue therapy with a female therapist. He does not view the young woman in question “ill”; neither does he consider her homosexuality a neurosis, “but a difficult-to-treat psychic disposition,” supporting his earlier theory that expression of homosexuality is a stunted psychosexual stage of libidinal development. Freud’s reluctance to treat or even his belief in the impossibility of changing homosexuality does not dissuade the psychiatric community, especially following Freud’s death in 1938, from presupposing the only innate, non-pathological (biological) sexual orientation to be heterosexuality, that is, dictated by procreative anatomy and the institution of marriage, and then to go about theorizing the etiology of homosexuality.
The homosexual, meanwhile, begins to speak on his own behalf, to demand that his legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories, by which he is now medically disqualified.
1930’s onward
Psychoanalysis or “talking therapy” comes to represent homosexuality’s most common “cure,” while theories about the etiology of homosexuality abound: circumcision leads to less homosexuality in Jews; the illness of the homosexual and that of the dwarf are comparable in that both have been stunted in their growth; passive homosexuals threaten to lure straight men away from their opposite sex spouses; childhood prohibition against masturbation causes homosexuality; homosexuality can be cured through 40 sessions of hypnosis; homosexuals are predominantly anti-social, vindictive, and hateful of all people; gay men and women can be “made straight” by watching childbirth in hospitals; homosexuals are really just confused straight people who wish to incorporate the therapist’s penis orally in an effort to appropriate his omnipotence. Various methods and modalities of enacting change to a person’s sexuality include, through the years, aversion therapies, psychosurgery—otherwise known as lobotomies—and, of course, as Peter himself will come to experience first hand, inhumane use of psychopharmaceuticals.
1948
Alfred Kinsey, an American sexologist, publishes his now famous book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Among his many findings, Kinsey is quite explicit when he writes: “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats.” A binary worldview, of Sheep vs. Goats, for most of everyone rolls on regardless.
Early 1950’s
Two the most influential medical establishments in the world classify “homosexuality” as a mental illness: the World Health Organization, in their International Classification of Diseases; and the American Psychiatric Association, in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), whose first printing in 1952 is developed by the American Army, under the rubric “sexual deviation” within the category of “sociopathic personality disturbances.”
December 1964
Peter Gajdics is born into the wholly invisible and utterly pervasive matrix of subdivided sexual orientations in Vancouver, Canada. Though he doesn't know it at the time, it’s assumed by everyone that he is heterosexual.
Late-1960’s to early-1970’s
Peter learns that his father is from somewhere called Budapest, in a country called Hungary, and his mother, a native German, was born in a country called Yugoslavia. Both countries, he’s told, are on the other side of the planet, behind something called an Iron Curtain. Talk of communism and fascism, concentration camps, Hitler, Tito, and World War II pervade Peter’s upbringing; so do Catholicism, “The Wizard of Oz,” and poppy seed strudels. At home, homosexuality is never discussed. A growing sense of unease creeps into his veins.
1968 to 1973
In the reissued DSM-II, “sexual deviation” is moved beneath the rubric of “personality disorders” (and includes homosexuality, fetishism, pedophilia, transvestitism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism, masochism, and “other sexual deviations”), where it remains through six reprints, until The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association votes to remove “homosexuality” from its list of mental disorders. Millions of men and women go to bed the night before the vote still mentally ill, only to wake the next morning magical cured.
Peter doesn’t know anything about any of this. He joins “The International Wizard of Oz Club.”
Mid-1970's
Peter spends way too much time alone, taping all his favorite songs off his portable AM/FM transistor radio: Vick Lawrence’s “The Night That The Lights Went Out in Georgia,” Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” Kenny Nolan’s “I Like Dreamin’,” Mocedades’ “Eres Tu,” Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” the Original Caste’s “One Tin Soldier,” Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Carpenters’ “Superstar,” Skylark’s “Wildfire.” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” scares him. He’s also scared of himself, and learns to live behind something of a “curtain.”
1974 to early 1980’s
“Sexual Orientation Disturbance” remains in reprints of the DSM, categorized by “individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward people of the same sex and who are either disturbed by it, in conflict with it, or wish to change their sexual orientation.” In other words, the homosexual, who has long been diagnosed as pathological, is no longer considered to have a mental illness so long as he is not disturbed by his homosexuality. Peter, meanwhile, is disturbed with the fact that he seems to be becoming as his last name, Anglicized by his father upon immigrating to Canada and now pronounced “gay-dicks,” implies. He decides that when he grows up he will change the pronunciation of his name back to its origins: “guy-ditch.” Much despair. He reads a lot of Anne Sexton. The TV movies “The Day After,” about nuclear Armageddon, and “An Early Frost,” about a new gay disease called AIDS, seem to him to be about essentially the same subject. To assuage his fears, Peter listens to the soundtrack of "Cats" repeatedly on his Walkman.
1980 to 1987
A biological model of psychiatry is fast supplanting the previous Freudian model of mental illness while psychoactive drugs—drug treatment—proliferates the marketplace, thereby supporting the psychopharmaceutical industry. No longer is the DSM used solely by psychiatrists within the shielded world of psychiatric practices; the DSM is now used by insurance companies, hospitals, courts, prisons, schools, researchers, government agencies, and the rest of the medical profession. Medicine becomes a medical-industrial complex, and psychiatry’s increasing use of pharmaceuticals is no exception. American psychiatrists also continue debating as to whether the latest reissue of the psychiatric bible, otherwise known as the DSM-III, should include a diagnosis for homosexuals distressed by their sexual orientation. Finally, they agree to include the category of “Ego-dystonic Homosexuality,” definable when “A. The individual complains that heterosexual arousal is persistently absent or weak and significantly interferes with initiating or maintaining wanted heterosexual relationships,” or “B. There is a sustained pattern of homosexual arousal that the individual explicitly states has been unwanted and a persistent source of distress.” By 1987 the reissued DSM-R (Revision) drops the classification of “Ego-dystonic Homosexuality,” and in its place includes “Sexual Disorders Not Otherwise Specified” under the heading “Other Sexual Disorders,” an example of which includes the same diagnosis: “(3) persistent and marked distress about one’s sexual orientation.” Peter is still oblivious to this minefield. He discovers Albert Camus and reads The Stranger more times than he will admit.
Also in 1987
Peter tells his family that he is a homosexual. The news does not go over well.
December 1989 to August 1995
Distressed by his homosexuality, or perhaps his family’s rejection of his homosexuality, or his inability to come to grips with the fact that he will never measure up to their expectations, or even his nagging feeling that he is a “crippled heterosexual,” Peter seeks out professional help in the person of psychiatrist “Dr. Alfonzo.” At the doctor’s insistence, he moves into a “therapeutic” house, called “the Styx,” with several other psychiatric patients. All of his life’s unhappiness, the doctor explains to him, is because he thinks he’s a homosexual.
The doctor teaches Peter his form of treatment based on the principles of primal therapy. He prescribes multiple psychiatric medications, like Surmontil, Rivotril, Sinequan and Anafranil. After some resistance, Peter accepts what the doctor says, and prescribes. The doctor sends “out” patients to the Styx for three-week “intensives.” Peter and the other permanent house members cook their meals. The doctor says he needs his new “family” to cook his meals, too. Peter and his now “brothers” and “sisters” at the Styx want nothing more than to please the doctor, who they view now as a mentor, and father, so they cook his meals and deliver them to his home. As a form of treatment during each of their “private” therapy sessions in his office, the doctor begins injecting them all with Ketamine Hydrochloride, or K. During one of his own K-enhanced regressions in front of the permanent Styx members, the doctor says that he is a reincarnation of Christ, which Peter and his “soul siblings” accept without question. Now taking well in excess of the recommended limit of five concurrent psychiatric medications, one day at the Styx Peter suffers a medication-induced breakdown. The doctor adds the anti-psychotic Nozinan to Peter’s regime of daily medications. Over the coming days and months, the jigsaw puzzle that had been Peter’s mind breaks apart as time ceases to exist. Peter is no longer homosexual, in the same way that he is no longer anything.
Eventually, however, the doctor decreases Peter’s daily prescriptions. Fog lifts; sexuality, once again, stirs.
The doctor disbands the Styx, and everyone goes their separate ways.
Peter emerges from the past six years shell-shocked, though every bit as “homosexual” as when he first met Alfonzo. He is sure he will die of anxiety and grief. Bottles of wine help put him to sleep, which is now all he wants.
Most of 1996 into 1997
Peter still has never heard of the idea of “reparative therapy,” but books like Larry Kramer’s “Reports from the Holocaust” and his play “The Normal Heart,” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” change the way he sees himself. His sense of desolation, like a passing storm had decimated his life, shifts to one of anger. Fire is good.
August 1997 to May 1999
Peter writes a five-page letter of complaint about Dr. Alfonzo, objectively detailing his years in the therapy and the doctor’s actions, and mails it to The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. Instead of vindication, which Peter anticipates, even expects, he encounters a whole other level of medical bureaucracy. As his surname suggests, he tries to dig himself out of one ditch after another.
September 1999 to December 2002
Because he doesn’t know how else to make what happened to him real, and move on with his life, which is what everyone he knows tells him he should do, Peter files a medical malpractice suit against Dr. Alfonzo claiming, among other things, that the doctor had treated Peter’s sexual orientation in an effort to “change” him from homosexual to heterosexual. In the midst of the lawsuit, in 2000, the American Psychiatric Association reissues the DSM-IV-TR (Text Revision), in which it is still the homosexual’s “persistence and marked distress about [their] sexual orientation” that is considered a disorder, corroborating Alfonzo’s defence that he had not treated Peter’s homosexuality, per se, but his “marked distress” about being homosexual. A web of bureaucracy follows: letters, phone calls, meetings with lawyers, interrogatories, depositions, interviews with yet more psychiatrists, all of which is very real but none of which ultimately gives back to Peter what was taken from him. A hole in his gut cannot be paved over.
Spring 2004, while in Budapest, Hungary
More an act of reconstructive surgery, Peter starts to piece his life before, during, and after the therapy and lawsuit back together by beginning to write a book about it all. Peter loves his time in Europe. Like his parents before him he is a foreigner; he feels as he always did back home: displaced. Only now there is right reason to explain his isolation: He is not at home. He has no home. He is an outsider, and free. Homeless in the birthplace of his father. In a strange way, he fits in.
February 2007
The American Psychological Association establishes the “Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation”; their 2009 findings include such statements as “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm.”
Beginning in 2008
Peter studies gender theory at the local University. Various post-modern theories about the “performativity of gender,” like from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, twist his brain into all sorts of knots, but one by one he unravels them all in order to understand, for the first time in his life, the difference between sex, gender, and sexuality. Sex, Peter learns, relates to the sexed body, definable by primary sex characteristics such as chromosomes, type and level of hormones, genitalia, and procreative organs. Gender, on the other hand, relates to the assignment and “uninterrupted performance” of masculinity or femininity onto the male or female sexed body. Finally, sexuality relates to the erotic desire for members of the “same” or “opposite” sex. No longer, it is now widely understood, does sex determine destiny—a person who was born in a female sexed body could end up self-identifying as the masculine gender; a person born in a male sexed body could end up self-identifying as the female gender; while still others could end up self-identifying as both, or neither, male or female. Gender also does not determine sexuality—a “masculine” woman, who at one time would have been assumed to be lesbian, could now just as likely be drawn erotically to members of the opposite, as to her own, sex. Likewise, feminine men are no longer assumed to be “gay.” In other words, sex, gender, and sexuality, which at one time had been all fused into one Being, had now been divisibly deconstructed as separable and uniquely identifiable.
This “separation” of sex, gender and sexuality from the previously unified Being reminded Peter of how he’d tried to change his sexuality in the therapy. Though Peter had “moved on” with his future, questions had lingered about his own behavior in the past; a contradiction had remained in his mind whereby he’d never not been sexually attracted to another man, while mid-point in his therapy he’d believed, resolutely, that he was “not homosexual”—not that he’d necessarily ever “become heterosexual,” but that he was not, at essence, homosexual. What had this meant? Were homosexuality and same sex desire even the same? Could homosexuality and same sex desire be “separated” from one another, Peter wondered, much the same way that gender was now understood to be separate from sex, or sexuality from gender? Because if homosexuality and same sex desire were, in fact, dissociable—like two divergent roads that had been culturally and personally conflated—a person could come to believe—as Peter had in his own therapy—that they were “changing” one (their homosexuality), all the while experiencing, dissonantly, the unalterable other (their same sex desires).
Peter likened this separation of homosexuality from same sex desire to the difference between a map and a territory. Homosexuality was the “map”—labeled at a certain point in time (1868) as a means of separating one group of people from another. Conversely, same sex desire—always present, unending—was the “territory” that the map of homosexuality had pointed to. “A map is not the territory it represents,” the philosopher Alfred Korzybski had once commented, and the same could be said for the difference between homosexuality and same sex desire—both had been conflated in people’s minds, but they were not the same. The map was not the territory it represented.
“Chasing symbols is like settling for the map instead of the territory,” writes Deepak Chopra in his book The Seven Spiritual Law of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams. “It creates anxiety; it ends up making you feel hollow and empty, because you exchange your Self for the symbols of your Self.” One such way of “chasing symbols,” Peter could see, was through the exchange or conflation of the territory of same sex desire for the map of homosexuality. Many individuals, of all sexualities, conflate their social map with their inner desires and end up, as poet Anne Sexton once wrote, “running after the hands and never catching up.” The hands toward which these individuals run, ceaselessly, reiteratively, are their citations—socially projected maps of who they think they are, or have been told they should become; and they never “catch up” because the hands, being citations, “are out of sight—that is, offstage.” Many people remain concretized as maps throughout their lives, and while they may never experience cause to doubt their veracity, a sense of unease and anxiety, so characteristic of chasing symbols of the self, remains endemic to their lives. Others, such as those in forms of conversion therapies who try and “change” their sexuality from homosexual to heterosexual, enact on the stage of their lives a displacement of one social map of identity for another. Both groups of individuals are, to a greater or lesser extent, “running, running to keep up, but never making it.”
To say that the theoretical model used in conversion therapies—such as the one Alfonzo had used with Peter—was flawed, that it engendered dissonance and would thus collapse in and of itself—or continue causing an acute sense of depersonalization and alienation to those who practiced its teachings—was assumed. What could not be dismissed, however, was the difference between the map of identity and the territory of desire that conversion therapies unearthed. It was not that those who experienced same sex desire could not learn to identify—and identify sometimes quite believably, even to themselves—as heterosexual; it was simply that the identity of heterosexuality was reflective of opposite sex pairing and not necessarily of opposite sex desire, and erotic desire did not change as a result of changing identity. Territories did not change as a result of changing maps.
May 2012
The Pan American Health Organization issues the Position Statement, “Therapies to change sexual orientation lack medical justification and threaten health.” By this time the traumatic effects of “sexual orientation change efforts,” or SOCE, as it is now commonly referenced, have been well documented. Every leading psychological and psychiatric organization now denounces SOCE.
2013 to 2015
California becomes the first state—and worldwide jurisdiction—to pass legislation banning “conversion therapy” for minors. Other states, including New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois, and District of Columbia, follow suit, with more than 20 others introducing similar legislation. In April 2015, President Obama denounces therapeutic efforts to “change” the sexual orientation of LGBT youth. Even in Canada, Ontario becomes the first province to ban conversion therapy for all LGBT youth. Efforts to classify conversion therapy as a fraudulent practice and illegal under the Federal Trade Commission Act move forward.
May 16, 2017
The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, Peter's book about his experiences undergoing a bizarre form of conversion therapy, is published by Brown Paper Press.
Post-2017
Peter speaks out, as often as he can to whomever will listen, about what he's learned. But to family, ironically, he still feels invisible.