Monday, February 15, 1999

I hope you've rested a little in the last few days and are up to dealing with a note from me.

I really like your last letter. It's strong and firm. It's written by someone who has thought through a lot of things and who insists on her right to be heard. I've always hoped you'd find the confidence to speak to me in this voice, and maybe it took a little trouble in paradise to do that. First, let me allay your major concern.

Jen, I won't abandon you. I've never abandoned anybody in my whole life. People usually walk away from me, not the other way around. I'll always care about you and want you to do well in life — and offer you any advice or information I think will help.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I have to submit to any particular form of domestic partnership that I don't feel is proper for us — anymore than I would automatically sign a marriage contract just because we'd had one romantic experience. The last few months have made me realize that right now we should take a little pressure off us doing well in the "boyfriend / girlfriend" dimension of how people who mean a lot to one another are supposed to relate in this crazy world. "We'll always have Paris," said Boggie. "And we can have Paris again," is what I'm saying, "but first we have to have to get more understanding, and more control, of our mental health."

I think you're being too hard on yourself, for example, and me too. We're allowed to have problems that are not readily solvable with the tools at hand. When a carpenter doesn't have the right tool, he stops building the cabinet for a while and starts building the new tool he needs. He doesn't think of this as proving he's not a good carpenter. When he's finished, because he's got more tools now than before, he has in fact become a better carpenter. I don't dismiss myself as a selfish fool, and I don't think it's healthy for you to see yourself that way either. Blanket judgments like that sound so candid and morally courageous, but they're actually cop-outs because they give us an excuse for not trying to work out the real reasons for unhealthy thoughts and behavior.

The kind of psychotherapy I advocate, and practice, and which is common among "healers" rather than "blamers", is not merely to point to conflicts and diseases in the personality, and give them a fancy medical name, but to help the student better understand himself objectively and to stop judging himself by the standards of a conflicted and diseased society — to stop "internalizing" the shame and guilt that float freely in an ignorant and immoral civilization ready to attach themselves to especially sensitive and vigorous people. If a person is a self-hating gay, for example, you try to interpret his homosexuality as a healthy life-affirming choice and try to get him to believe that he can judge what's right for himself without deferring to the prejudices of some silent majority.

This positive attitude that I use when working with students — this presumption of unrecognized frustrated aspirations that can be revealed through love and tolerance — is not just an arbitrary therapeutic gimmick, by the way, like the "indulgences" that were sold during the Middle Ages — but is a carefully reasoned deduction from data collected during a lifetime of studying growing people. In my estimation, society makes individuals sick, and not the other way around. When people "break down" and misunderstand (or misbehave in) their world, it's often because they have inner needs that are going unrecognized and which need desperately to be addressed. So the real answer to their pain is not to blame them for having symptoms, but to help them first understand and then satisfy those real needs. That doesn't mean that when a boy whose father doesn't love him goes around stepping on kittens, say, that you don't feel sorry for the kittens. It just means that a good strategy for seeing that fewer kittens get hurt is to draw attention away from the child's guilt and figure out how he can get the love that every child deserves and which, once gotten, will be happily passed along to other living creatures.

And this is the same latitude I'd like to apply in interpreting your behavior. I don't condemn you for occasionally needing to run around cracking heads, I just don't want it to be my head for awhile. You may very well have a hidden unacknowledged need that requires you to get away from me right now in order to take the next step in your growth process. I don't know. But instead of pointing fingers at yourself and saying "See, I'm no good after all," or "What stupid children we are," you should try to understand your behavior and seek for alternative interpretations of it that can be tested, rather than just getting embarrassed and denying that your symptoms ever happen.

Although this may seem something of a cliche at this point in the history of gay liberation, have you ever thought that the intense conflicts with your mother which have defined so much of what your adult growth process might better be worked out in a love affair with a woman rather than a man? I'm not one of those gay activists who condemn heterosexuality as second rate, as you know very well, except when I'm just kidding around with other gays. But neither do I think it's a closed question whether some people really do need to go through a purely homosexual stage in order to resolve especially troublesome issues with their same-sex parent. I don't think I would have welcomed you so completely into my life had I not enjoyed the healing benefits of a healthy relationship with Paul for nineteen years. Before Paul I used to obsess about my father and my friend Karl. After Paul I had much better things to think about. It was that simple.

Clearly, your intermittent and unpredictable tantrums have everything to do with your mother and almost nothing to do with me. In that sense, you have to ask yourself where this need to re-enact violent crises is coming from and why. Once you have that answer you'll see that you no longer have to take out past injustices on a man who loves you and who has only your best interests at heart.

Yes, I do have to admit I feel a little numb right now about the thought of seeing you. I got my head kicked in on November 14 and I still don't know why. What did I do to deserve that? You haven't offered so much as a theory. In fact, as I look back on your messages to me, you haven't even mentioned November 14 once. Do you realize that you're acting as if it never even happened? There has to be some meaning behind that which you're not ready to face.

But that's okay. And that's really the larger point I'm trying to make here. You shouldn't be victimized by the dictates of any particular relationship-model or psychological time-table — or the demands of any particular suitor for that matter — any more than I should. Nobody can grow just because another person demands that they suddenly "grow up" or "act normal."

To relate some of my own history for a moment, my father used to try to get me to conform to his belief that male children should act like "little men" by warning me that I should at all times "be presentable" in my dress and manners. To whom, I'd wonder, a firing squad? I had nothing but contempt for the monolithic forces in society that set themselves up as judges and juries of children. I eventually enjoyed competing for good grades at school, but that was about it. I knew full well that I was just using talents I was born with to fool those idiots into thinking I was buying into their depraved and inhuman value system. Sometimes my father would yell at me to "straighten up and fly right!" But I eventually learned to enjoy ignoring his false power trips. It helped solidify my independence. He was all bluff and bluster. Ultimately, he had no real feeling for the positions he thought he had to take. I resolved never to be as alienated from myself as he was in whatever life I chose to live. To this day people are amazed to see how quick I am to reject any attempt to make me conform to arbitrary and pointless rituals. Even among outlaws I rebel. That's why I enjoyed so much flouting the gay heterophobia at the Ninth Street Center by showing that I was in an important relationship with a woman.

So you and I have to kick back for a moment, count to ten, and do a personal inventory. Then we'll be ready to start tinkering with the Dean/Jen relationship model — purely for our own felt purposes — and let other people think what they may. It's not like we have a lot of other people standing around clucking at what's become of that "lovely couple" or anything. And I'm not saying you shouldn't go to the social events that I go to. It would be great to see you at Bob's group or John's group. (And do you think you should continue to deny the value those groups have had for you just because we're not getting along?) Nor should you deny yourself the possible benefit of reaching out to people like Laurie, who likes and is interested in you more than you think but who feels embarrassed about making the first move.

But I'm not making ultimatums. My power doesn't grow from the barrel of a gun. It comes from having a toolkit of ideas that help people improve the quality of their lives — the offering of which is predicated on liking and caring for them — and which over the years has drawn a small number of people to me. Not as many as were drawn to Paul, certainly, but at least for the same reasons. And it's this "wanting to let the other person in" which is why I don't want to rattle on too much longer in this letter, either. It's why I want you to write back and tell me what you think about all this, and why I look forward to the next steps we're going to take in our historic exploration of our own personal New World.

I hope you realize by now that many images of what heterosexual fulfillment is supposed to look like are programmed by conventional expectations. These images often have little or nothing to do with what people really need from each other in the moment. I always think of the book "Savage Messiah", which was made into a film by Ken Russell that you should see. It offers a good example of two troubled people who really needed and helped one another even though they were unable to achieve a romantic union in the few years given to them.

You and I can continue to find our relationship nourishing and protective too — but on a higher level than before — during this period when we seem to not be getting along well in person. In fact, we'll need to. How long will this period last? I honestly have no idea. The point is never to predict the future, but to do your best to manage the present. That's how we must help one another now. And I am as dependent on you in this process as you are of me. In this way, I need you now more than ever before. Please remember that.