Steve,

Well, here goes. I doubt that anything I say — even any essay or book I ever write — can make everything clear to you in one swell foop. So I won't write chapter one of my autobiography yet. What I want to do instead is just begin a friendly dialog about these hidden issues of yours that have lain dormant for too many years. With a casual series of exchanges over the next months (and years) hopefully we'll both learn a lesson or two. I'm hopeful.

Maybe I can start by responding to one of the explicit issues you raised. You asked, "Had I approached you differently, would it have been different?"

As you know by now, children have a hard enough time learning the rules that society demands they follow without also learning how and when it's better to break them. So it's no mystery why you, Allan and I were no geniuses when it came to finding a good way to handle your homosexual feelings. Since I went on a few years later to have my own homosexual relationship, however, I think your question is quite pertinent. To refocus it a bit, why did I respond to Paul and not to you? You were in my peer group, he wasn't. You were a friend before being "a homosexual", he was "a homosexual" before being a friend. You were more attractive physically, he less so. The short answer is that psychic (i.e. relating to the psyche) "attractiveness" per se has nothing whatsoever to do with these social factors. It has much more to do with whether two people sense they are good for one another, whether they come to trust the tacit usefulness of what happens when they are together. If they are polarized (i.e. introverted / extroverted, or in Paul's richer terms feminine / masculine), then they may go farther than this and each learn how to open doors for the other person that he can't open for himself. Thus, together, they become much more than the sum of their parts, and it is on this basis that mated relationships can continue to be useful for years and years regardless of the sexual plumbing involved.

Your homosexuality didn't disgust me esthetically, or offend me morally, surprising as that may seem to you. What put me off was the way you handled it, or failed to handle it. I'm sure we're remembering these days differently from such a distance, so don't over-react to what I'm about to say. But what I remember is a warm, friendly and submissive (in Paul's constructive and creative sense) boy who had an itch he couldn't scratch and who wouldn't stop talking about it. It was as if you didn't want to have these horny feelings, didn't know what to do with them, and wanted me somehow to either make them go away or make them "work right". As much as I sensed that someday I might indeed be able to help people with psychological problems, at that age — and in those circumstances — I had problems of my own that were quite enough to shoulder, thank you. So I quite literally couldn't think of anything I could do to help you except to accept it cheerfully and not hate you for being so neurotic about it.

Yes, Steve, Allan and I accepted your homosexuality. Why did we finally "out" you, then, by telling mutual friends that you were gay? Well, I can't remember the specifics of that (honestly), and I can't speak for Allan. But I do remember a growing frustration that your problem was beyond anything I could help you with and that I wished you would stop dumping it on me and would go talk to a shrink about it. If I risked having a wider world know about your problem, it was because I felt that some responsible adult in that world might then take you aside and put you in touch with the right kind of medical help you seemed to need. It was the behavior of an adolescent, a little helpless and a little reckless, who didn't understand well how little help the medical establishment of that era would have been to you. I actually remember feeling a little like you were stalking me, and at a certain point I just found myself yelling for help. It wasn't thought out, and it wasn't altruistic in its motivations. It's just something I did for reasons that, even now, don't seem particularly malicious or cruel — just dumb in the way that kids are and will always be.

There may even have been a flicker of hope that by "helping" you out of the closet you could stop lying to the two Ann's and find out that they too were indeed still going to be your friends despite your "defect". So much of your misery seemed to be because you didn't have the courage to admit your feelings to others, Steve, and had dug yourself into living a lie. It was just the opposite of how I was learning to live. My life was an open book then, and it's an open book today. As a friend of mine likes to sign off her letters, "I have no secrets, I tell no lies." As a result, I sleep like a baby.

Going to college brought a great unwanted discontinuity into my relationship with you, but kids do what the world tells them they must. So I forgot about all my adolescent failures and tried to bury my head in the Great Books for awhile. It was after two years there, during my summer break, that I checked out this therapist named Paul Rosenfels that a friend of mine was raving about. If you look at his autobiography you'll see how quickly Paul reacted to my special qualities. How did he approach me? With love, not sex. He talked admiringly about the way I had tried to learn about my dominant (again, in the healthy and creative sense) nature by attaching myself to sensitive men like you and Karl, and explained that what was going on inside me was polarized to what went inside people like you, Karl and him. Where they were sensitive and sexual, I was experiential and celebrative. And in order for the creative fruits of polarized relationships to exist, there must be a dynamic balance between the romantic nature of the "feminine" person and the adventuresome nature of the "masculine" person. All of Paul's images about how the human psyche really works made immediate and striking sense to me. He seemed to be the embodiment of all the human wisdom I had been desperately seeking all these years, first by hanging around sensitive men like you and Karl, then by studying the history of Western thought at St. John's. When I went back to St. John's I read the book he had just written, "Love and Power". The more I read, the more I saw what a genius he was. Not a genius in the sense that his theories were complicated like, say, string theory, but a genius in the sense that he managed to frame basic sets of fundamental truths about human nature that had somehow escaped hundreds of thinkers for centuries. (By that time I had dipped into quite a few of their books.)

I didn't immediately get involved with Paul, by the way. It was too scary, and despite reading about the ancient Greek model of man-boy love, I couldn't see for the life of me how a 20-year-old lad could ever be adequate as the lover of such an accomplished thinker and writer who was 37 years his senior. But my feet were planted firmly on a path towards a kind of psychological development that has never disappointed me in all the years since. Not that my sexuality has ever been a simple matter, by the way. I've never stopped being preferentially heterosexual, for example. But I respect the priority of psychic needs over bodily ones, and follow my heart and not my balls. If we want to take our lives seriously, we must constantly and diligently keep clear what level of desire is speaking to us at any moment. It's fine to enjoy the sexiness of people you pass by on the street, for example, but you don't want to take every cutie home to meet your cat!

Maybe that's enough for now? As I said up front, Steve, I'm not trying to "banish all clouds" and "make clear everything that was hitherto occluded". That will take time. But growth, not only emotional but intellectual, is a long-term process I believe in, can easily commit to, and have in fact championed for over 30 years. (I founded the East Village Counseling Center early in 1969.) So don't get too over-reactive about anything I've just said. Just chew on this note for a few days and see if it doesn't stimulate you to think about other things we need to talk about.

Dean