My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

large office in the rear of the building. These rooms do not open directly onto each other but are connected by a narrow passageway with doors at either end, so that privacy is assured.

In these days before white noise machines and Muzak, it is the archi-tecture itself that assures privacy. I don’t recall the content of our conversations or of any play that I might have engaged in. But I do remember that near the end of this session, I admire a tiny balsa wood model, no more than two or three inches long, of an old sailing ship replete with linen sails and painted designs on the side. I am fascinated by this model and, before I leave, Dr. M asks me if I would like to have it. I hold the boat carefully in my hands as I rejoin my mother in the waiting room. Deeply satisfied with my gift and our visit, I do not mind at all when she leaves me alone in the waiting room to 132 n jonathan g. silin

have a private conversation with Dr. M. Later, on the street, she pronounces me perfectly healthy and happy. Shortly after, the bed-wetting stops.

My second meeting with Dr. M is as deeply unsettling as the first is satisfying. I have just dropped out of college, am living at home again, and have become ensconced in an affair with a married man more than twice my age. I know I am homosexual by age thirteen but begin to live out my gayness only when I start college. There I em-brace my homosexuality with such fervor that there is little energy left for anything else. My erotic and affective life are all that matter. Despite the best efforts of a well-meaning college psychiatrist, academic pursuits quickly fall by the wayside. Paralyzed by two unsuccessful relationships, I eventually leave school, but not before the psychiatrist can make one final pronouncement about my prospects. “On aver-age,” he cautions in his most concerned tone of voice, “homosexual liaisons don’t last more than a few weeks or, at best, several months.

Only in the rarest cases do they last two years, the outer limit of same-sex relationships.” After summarizing these latest research findings on homosexuality, he telegraphs two seemingly contradictory messages in the Morse code of therapeutic jargon: I have willfully chosen this road to ongoing suffering and disappointment; I am only going through a difficult stage, a developmentally appropriate adolescent identity crisis. Whether I am simply the victim of development gone awry or a free agent who is making a perverse choice, however, the doctor reassures me that the course on which I have set out can be reversed with proper professional help. “Help,” fortunately, that I do not find.

At the same moment that I am learning my fate in one office of the new 1960s modern health services building that we affectionately refer to as the “Magic Mountain,” a fellow classmate, the writer An-drew Holleran, is receiving similar instruction just next door. In a 1993 interview he describes seeking help because he suspects that he might be homosexual. Although Holleran finds a sympathetic ear at his initial interview, the psychiatrist to whom he is referred, and to m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 133

whom he guiltily reports his failure to make sexual overtures to the woman he is dating at a nearby woman’s college, resorts to more cur-mudgeonly if direct advice, “Well, next time, go kiss her!” No need to cite the latest research, to become entangled in needless self-doubt, or to return for future sessions.

Recently, I learned that after years of marriage, children, and the heterosexual life, my own Magic Mountain doctor has finally come out. He is living happily with a man who is considerably younger than he is. Perhaps he spent too long seeking proper help, as did Dr. Ralph Roughton, the prominent psychoanalyst profiled in the New York Times who came out at age sixty-three after two long analyses in which he tried to become straight. While I recognize that most people may go through some struggle in coming to terms with their sexuality, I cannot help but feel bitter irony when Dr. Roughton’s 1998 act is described by his peers as courageous. My own admiration is reserved for the gay activists of 1973 who successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and for the first openly gay doctors who entered psychoanalytic training in the early 1990s.

But back in 1963, despite my determined efforts to find romantic happiness, I am not feeling very courageous or admirable myself. Upset by my extreme mood swings that alternated with long periods of inertia, my parents send me to see Dr. M again. I agree to go because of my favorable memories. Notwithstanding the college psychiatrist’s assessment of my prospects for future happiness, I had become very attached to him and do not want to begin therapy with someone totally unknown. Dr. M is already part of my world and seems an obvious choice.

In the end, however, Dr. M proves too much a part of that world.

Although my father’s analysis concluded before I was an adolescent, his work with Dr. M did not enable him to treat me with equanimity.

The heat of our relationship reflects the intensity of our mutual attachment. My father acts as an emotional lightning rod, attracting the electricity that breaks through the storm clouds almost always 134 n jonathan g. silin

hanging in the air. The resulting sparks set off countless brushfires that require all my mother’s mediating skills to keep them from spreading out of control.

Not shy about my gayness, at least in the therapeutic setting, I am soon telling Dr. M about my feelings for other men and the pleasures I find in their arms. He listens carefully and thoughtfully. At first he seems to be the patient, nonjudgmental father I long for.