SEXUAL REPRESSION

     Lois: One female therapist got scared when I became 'gay.' 'I can't treat homosexuals. There's nothing you can do with them.' She made it sound like terminal cancer ... One male therapist kept insisting I wasn't gay, but he told me it's something I'll outgrow ... He told me I'd end up alone and bitter in the gay scene, and that didn't appeal to me. It still doesn't ... Another woman therapist said, 'But men are so marvelous to sleep with! Lesbianism isn't necessary, it's absurd!'
     In a sense, being psychiatrically hospitalized helped me. I'd hit bottom. Now I could be a lesbian, that's not as bad as a crazy ...

[ Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler, PhD, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1972, p. 193. ]

     Doris: Were you sheltered?
     Shirley: No! Come on, girl. Well, number one, I was very confused and frightened about where I was coming from, actually.
     Doris: What do you mean by 'coming from'?
     Shirley: Well, I thought I was one of the sickest persons in the world. You know, I dreaded even thinking about the term 'lesbian' and I used to cope with the situation by telling myself that I was normal, you understand? And the only thing that would take my normality away would be for me to have an actual gay experience. And I also used to tell myself that you're not gay if you never do it. So I didn't, 'cause I didn't want nothing to tread on my sanity. So I pretended to like boys and dresses and parties and all that bullshit.
     Doris: So you were just fooling yourself?
     Shirley: No, no, I wasn't fooling myself, I was trying to live with myself, and I went out with fellas and I let them fuck me...
     Doris: Well, if you didn't want to be a girl why --
     Shirley: That's what I'm saying. The more they did it, the worse I got, and the more I pretended to act normal, the crazier I got. And I mean I was going out of my mind. When my mother died I just stopped pretending to be something that I wasn't because it ain't done much straightness in the world and it put my mind at ease, you better believe it, and I regained my sanity which was slowly seeping away from me, from trying to be ungay and I am definitely gay.

[ Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler, PhD, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1972, p. 201. ]

     As the evening wore on, Tony behaved more and more peculiarly. Despite Bernadette's enthusiasm for the House of Plenty sexuality course, Tony had said next to nothing on the subject, preferring to sit and apparently listen, brooding, But as the conversation turned to more general subjects, he got up and began to prowl the room, almost in parody of a jungle animal. Nobody took much notice; we all assumed that he had been smoking some kind of powerful dope before he got there and was enjoying an interior trip he couldn't share. At one point he went over to Steve, and several times stroked his hair – but it was less a caress than a slap. Later he stalked me, like a cat, and looked in my eyes and said, 'I like you. You know, don't you? You know.'
     I really didn't know, but it's always nice to be told I do, and I nodded at him and he nodded sagely back, and turned away to stalk somebody else. When Tony and Bernadette left, David said, 'Gee, Tony was really strange tonight. Wonder what he's been smoking.' And that's all that was said about it.
     But later in the week I talked to David on the phone and he said things had been very bad with Tony and Bernadette. Apparently the sexuality rap at the House of Plenty had caused Tony to flip utterly. He was manic, as if stoned twenty-four hours a day, never sleeping, always grooving and freaking in this peculiar animalistic way. Little as she cared to, Bernadette took Tony to a straight psychiatrist who said he was schizoid, was in a profound homosexual panic, and ought to be sedated at once. Bernadette would have none of that. She got in touch with Julian Silverman, the Esalen-based shrink who runs the only Laing-oriented Blowout Center in the country, in a wing of Agnews State Hospital near San Jose; Silverman agreed to accept Tony as a voluntary patient. Tony was rarely lucid during discussions leading to his arrival at Agnews, but he was able to agree to admittance and sign the right papers.
     When I next saw Bernadette she was exhausted from dealing with Tony, sleeplessly, for four days, disturbed at what their families would conclude from all this, desperately eager that Tony be able to go through his psychosis quickly and come out, healed, on the other side. And she was fiercely angry with the House of Plenty, even if it had been a rap session only. Obviously, all this auto-erotic, plastic bottle stuff had got to Tony in secret places he didn't know about himself; his response had frightened him into the aforementioned homosexual panic. The House of Plenty people had asked Bernadette to bring Tony back to Oakland. They had seen this response occasionally in the past; perhaps they could help. But Bernadette was having none of that either: 'The bastards should have warned us that the rap was dangerous! It's all their fault.'
     It wasn't, of course, but Bernadette was very tired and distressed, and at that moment I was not about to disagree with her.
     The fault, if you want to call it that, was with the House of Plenty for assuming that everybody attending their basic sexuality seminar was sexually mature. The assumption would have seemed especially justified in Tony's case, on the evidence of his very considerable experience with Esalen and with group encounters of all kinds. But it seemed to us as laymen that the straight shrink's categorization of Tony's state as 'homosexual panic' was correct. The suggestion of sticking a plastic bottle up his ass may have triggered in Tony long suppressed homosexual fantasies. And to have these suggestions delivered – much as Bernadette transmitted them to us – in wholesome, straightforward circumstances, set Tony on a cosmic giggle that we also thought was funny, but threatened with him to last a lifetime.

[ The Bearded Lady, Going On The Commune Trip and Beyond, Richard Atcheson, The John Day Company, New York, 1971, p. 194. ]