The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  I covered my face with my hands and started to cry. Trapped, I was back in my childhood bedroom and my father had broken through. “Please get out,” I begged. “Please…please…”

  When I looked back up, the door to my room was closed, and they were gone.

  |||||||||||

  Days later, Claude arrived home with news from the office.

  “We’re closing shop,” he announced to us all. “I’ve talked it over with Alfonzo and Yvette, and we feel a break is what we need. It doesn’t mean we can’t come back together down the road, but for now, it’s over. The Styx will end.”

  There was no discussion. The decision had been made. We would all leave the house, but like when Alfonzo closed the other two Styx houses and then reinforced how we, at Styx 1, would still be a “family,” closing the final Styx now had nothing to do with leaving the nest. He was still my doctor, he told me in private, and as far as he was concerned, I would need to return for an indefinite period of time for regular “check ins.”

  Over the next several weeks before we left, on September 1, 1995, Alfonzo called each of us to the office for a tailor-made version of the same speech.

  “The house failed,” he told me during my meeting, reclining in his leather chair. “The Styx failed, and it’s your fault. I’m really disappointed in you, Peter. But I know you’ll be back. None of you will survive away from this therapy. Once you’ve lived in the primal world for a while, the secular world becomes intolerable. Just wait, you’ll find out on your own. You will all wind up needing to come back. You won’t survive on your own, that’s for sure. All those homosexuals out there? The threat of AIDS? You’re not going anywhere. You’re a lifer, Peter, and this is the only game in town.”

  Each for our own reasons we had entered the Styx; now, for one reason only we were calling moving trucks and pretending, as grownups often did, that we would all remain the best of friends.

  Claude and Yuen said they might cohabitate.

  Sebastian said he might return to Quebec.

  Clay said he might move in with Alfonzo and Yvette so he could maintain his medicated “daddy sessions” in Alfonzo’s basement workroom, and sleep on his rolled-up foamy in a pup tent in the forest.

  I said as little as possible.

  |||||||||||

  I moved from the Styx into an attic suite on the top floor of a subdivided Tudor mansion. From my desk, positioned in a bay window, I faced down onto a finely manicured lawn ensconced with twelve-foot hedges. A recent financial settlement with my former homecare employer over my lower back injury provided meager earnings so I didn’t have to find employment right away. I had time and the means to recover—from everything.

  Within days, I resurrected my Smith Corona typewriter, packed away since I’d dropped out of the university, and started writing another play. Scenes from the Life of a Homosexual focused on the relationship between a young man named Joshua; his child self, Little Boy; and a woman known only as Healthy Mother, modeled after my relationship with Alice. Through a series on nonlinear but interconnected scenes, the three revisited key moments in Joshua’s life in an effort to disentangle his history of sexual abuse and subsequent homosexual identity from Little Boy’s fear of Joshua’s “inner sickness.” Ultimately, Joshua’s relationship with Healthy Mother, as a guiding principle in his own healing process, became the play’s central focus.

  For weeks I stopped writing only long enough to visit Shane at the psychiatric ward, eat, and sleep. That I could even translate the last several years of my life into a play was victory, but I wanted “Daddy’s” feedback, so I left a copy of the play in the office for Alfonzo to read, still believing that he would applaud my creative venture. Several weeks later, I met him for a “check-in” session, and prescription, as I was still being weaned off the last remaining medications. We said little throughout the session; then, near the end, he raised the subject of my play.

  “I read your play,” he said, turning to face me in his private office.

  “And?”

  He leaned forward in his chair. His eyes narrowed. “Do you have the faintest fucking idea of how long it’s taken me to perfect surrogate mothering? How many years of my life I’ve sacrificed? If you show this play to anyone, I mean anyone…if you so much as try to get it produced, I will take you to court. I will do whatever is in my means to stop you. Do you understand me?”

  Still under the spell of our weekly nurturing sessions, where I’d believed he loved me as a father should a son, his words blindsided me. Numb, I left the office. Once home, I packed my only paper copy of the play inside an envelope and stored it in a box.

  |||||||||||

  I waited until after Shane’s discharge from the hospital, three months later, before I arrived at his apartment one night, unannounced.

  “We have to talk,” I said, leading the way into his living room while trying to breathe my way through the anxiety. Instead of furniture, he had yellow milk cartons. I sat down on one. “It’s about the therapy. This whole idea that we can ‘correct’ our desires.”

  “What about it?”

  “Sebastian should have never told you about this therapy, that I was trying to be heterosexual.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…it’s a lie. It doesn’t work. I’ve wasted the last six years of my life trying to make myself into something that I’m not. I should have told you sooner, but…I’ve been lying to myself.”

  Shane looked at me, but said nothing. I stood back up.

  “I’m attracted to men. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And so are you. I know you are. You know you are.”

  Then I did what I had wanted to do since meeting him at the Styx. Stepping closer to him than I had ever dared, I took his hand in mine, and I kissed him, gently, on his lips. When I opened my eyes again, moments later, his confused expression stared back at me. I pulled away, afraid I’d made a terrible mistake.

  “No…” he said. Gently, his free hand graced the small of my back. Chest to chest, my eyes fell shut as his lips pressed up against my own: a joining of our breaths.

  We fumbled with our shirts, unbuttoning each other’s as our fingers spread across chests, through hair, over nipples, firm, then up toward shoulders, like the peaks of mountaintops we’d fought years to summit. We gave our bodies to each other, consciously—gave them because in the other each had found himself.

  Later, while lying in his arms, I thought of Alice’s words that maybe it hadn’t been the sex but my feelings about the sex that had caused me so much pain. With Shane I’d felt no guilt or shame, no regret. For the first time in my life, sex, this mingling of limbs and saliva and semen, was not an act of clutching, but one of giving: an expression of love, a communion of gratitude. A dialogue beyond words. Perhaps love, then, was the answer. “The vehicle of love,” as even Yvette had told me. Never before had I felt love.

  17

  BEFORE EACH OF MY remaining visits with Alfonzo, I continued to fluctuate between feelings of outrage over what had occurred in the therapy and a great deal of loyalty toward Alfonzo, my “surrogate father.” The Styx had been too much like my home life to see it for what it had become.

  Then I’d sit across from him in his private office during all of my periodic “check-in” sessions and he’d continue to make derogatory comments about anything to do with my life without the therapy, or him. If I talked about wanting to travel one day, visit Europe, maybe return to university, he’d say that I would “learn” that all of those ideas were only childish pipe dreams. “Why would you want to travel the world when you can travel to the moon on the mattress?” he said, once. All roads—whether literal or figurative—would lead back to him, and he told me so. Eventually, my best defense was to say as little about my life as possible, get my prescription—if he wrote me one—and leave. No sooner was I out the door, however, when I’d start crying.

  Finally, I called Natie, from one of my former groups, and arranged to meet. I’d always r
emembered the way she’d challenged Alfonzo during groups and spoke disparagingly about him behind his back. Her attitude had scared me at the time, yet later confirmed that she’d always seen him for who he was.

  “I thought he was saving my life,” I told her.

  “By doing what? Getting you to cook his meals and deliver them to his home?”

  “I was drowning when I met him.”

  “Define drowning.”

  “Depressed. Miserable. Self-destructive. I hated myself.”

  “That’s the point of oppression: fear of annihilation. Invisibility. Normalization of the oppression. Being a survivor of sexual abuse doesn’t help.”

  Natie was five years old when a friend of her parents molested her while she was staying with relatives. As an adult, she’d made a profession out of counseling survivors. She knew what she was talking about.

  “Alfonzo told you lies about yourself for years. It’s up to you what happens in your life, how you interpret your homosexuality. You’ve just imagined a life of one-night stands and loveless relationships because that’s what you learned it meant to be gay. But you can change that image. You can change how you want your life to unfold. We all end up living the life we’ve imagined, one way or another.”

  “I thought he was going to save me.”

  “From what? In the end, no one saves us but ourselves, Peter. Save yourself.”

  |||||||||||

  The last time I saw Alfonzo was in early August 1996. I dreaded returning to his office. Near the end of our twenty minutes, he turned and faced me.

  “I’m concerned for all my children, especially for you,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” I said.

  He looked at me, surprised, but continued. “The world is filled with homosexuals, Peter, and you’ve stepped back into it. How is that going? It must be difficult.”

  I was nearing the final withdrawals from the medications, taking 50 milligrams of Elavil and 1 milligram of Rivotril each day, but still suffering through sleepless nights. Just as my senses had been anesthetized for years, now they were heightened. His words sent a jolt through my body, as though I was hearing his hatred for the first time.

  “I’m one of those homosexuals,” I said. “And nothing’s going to change that fact. I can’t hide from the world my whole life, and homosexuals are as much a part of the world as anyone.”

  There was an electricity in the room, an anxiousness about what might happen next. I had stood up to the class bully and was waiting for his reaction, staring him in his eyes. He said nothing. A moment later, he turned back to his desk to write another prescription.

  “Besides,” I continued, “I’ve started dating someone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shane. Shane and I are—”

  “You’re what?” His bushy eyebrows looked wilder, more uncombed, than ever before as he leaned forward in his chair, jutted his chin, and placed one hand on either knee. “Do you know how fucking damaged that young man is? Do you have any idea what he’s been through in his life? If you don’t give a fuck about your own life, at least think about that, think about what he’s been through.” He handed me my prescription. “Now get out of here,” he said, after making another appointment for the following month.

  I didn’t keep it.

  |||||||||||

  Shane slept over most nights. Some days we stayed inside all day. One of the many books that I’d recently read was Larry Kramer’s Reports from the Holocaust, a collection of essays during “the plague years,” and so we lay in bed and talked about AIDS, the soundtrack to Schindler’s List playing in the background.

  Many had branded Kramer a self-hating homosexual, a loudmouthed paranoid, because he wrote fearlessly about his own belief that AIDS had been intended as genocide of the homosexual population. Personally, I had no trouble believing it. Genocide had touched my own family history. If psychiatry could still convince us that we should try to change ourselves into something that we weren’t, virtually kill ourselves by whatever means for the sake of so-called normalcy, the idea that AIDS had been intended as yet one more form of genocide did not seem like much of a leap.

  Other times, I wrote at my desk while Shane lay on my bed, flipping through any one of the dozens of books about psychiatry or AIDS that I’d been reading.

  “Who buys a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders?” he asked once, reading passages from the red, 886-page book.

  “I did, obviously.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to know what psychiatry was saying about homosexuality.”

  “They took it out over twenty years ago.”

  “We’re still there, you just have to look. The whole thing is bullshit.”

  “What is?”

  I turned to face him from my desk. “Psychiatry,” I said.

  One night in 1973, I went on, homosexuals all over the world went to bed still considered mentally ill, only to wake the next morning magically “cured” because the guardians of the gate of mental illness—the American Psychiatric Association—took a vote at some conference and agreed that gays were no longer mentally ill. Nothing about the health, or supposed “illness,” of gay men and women had actually changed in reality.

  “The only thing that changed was politics.”

  Another night, the moment Shane arrived at my apartment, I grabbed him by the hand and led him back outside, down the street, and to a nearby grassy field.

  “Where are we going?” he said, laughing.

  “Just come…”

  Mounds of leaves encircled a large oak tree like a border in the middle of the field. And there we lay, spooning near the tree on a bed of leaves beneath a harvest moon. Our bodies, hot and tired, breathed in unison. The comfort of his body reminded me of my sessions with Alice. Intimacy knew no gender or sexuality.

  At one point I pulled his hand up from around my middle and snuggled back against the curves of his flesh. Shell against shell, we fit together as if the two of us had once been one.

  |||||||||||

  While lying at the beach one day, Shane raised the subject of monogamy. “Monogamy is antigay,” he said.

  It was a discussion—or an argument—we’d had before. Sex without love with as many men as I could find, or who found me, was what I’d done as a teenager, I told him; all I wanted now was to make love with one man. All Shane kept debating, given any opportunity, was the idea of an “open relationship”—remaining emotionally committed to one person while also being open and honest about having sex with any number of men.

  “You don’t think a person can be intimate with more than one person?” he said.

  “It wouldn’t work.”

  “But as long as you don’t cheat on each other…”

  “You sleep with someone else, you’re cheating.”

  “Cheating is lying to each other; an open relationship is consensual.”

  “Is this a hypothetical situation, or are we talking about us?”

  “Are you sure you’re even gay?”

  “Fuck ‘gay.’ A lot of people also use promiscuity to escape intimacy.”

  I asked him if he had sex in the park. My question was what I knew we were talking around, so I confronted him with it head-on. He squirmed.

  “No. Not often. Sometimes. Yes.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Peter…”

  “What? You can do it, but you can’t even talk about it?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you…”

  “You wait a lifetime to meet someone to love, and he wants to go fuck a stranger in the park…”

  “I never fuck strangers,” he said, grinning.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better? You would rather suck some stranger’s dick in the park than find out what real love is all about?” As soon as I’d said the words, I heard someone else’s voice inside me. I squirmed.

  “You always get so angry at me.”

 
; “What’s wrong with getting angry? More people should be angry. Maybe you should get angry. Then you might not need to go to the park for sex.”

  “Sometimes you sound an awful lot like Alfonzo. I can’t live up to your ideals.”

  I was beginning to feel the weight of Shane’s history, like a third body, lying between us in bed. Early on he’d told me, unequivocally, “I don’t get fucked.” I never questioned why, because I knew. During oral sex, even while we were kissing, sometimes he’d push me back, mid-act, and say, Stop, and then I’d think of his father, the stitches, scars that never heal. We were on either side of a revolving door, separated by the past, unable to connect in the present.

  One day, he called and asked that I meet him near a city park. He was sitting on a bench at the start of a trail, but stood the moment he saw me.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said, beginning to pace.

  “Do what?”

  “Us. A relationship. Whatever it is we’re doing. I want my autonomy.”

  A rugged man wearing a plaid lumberman’s jacket, blue jeans, and black work boots sauntered out of a nearby public washroom, glanced at us, and continued along the trail and into the woods.

  “Our entire relationship has been a mistake,” he continued.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You lied to me from the start.”

  “I never lied to you.”

  “You told me you were straight.”

  “I told you what you wanted to hear. What’s going on?”

  “I had sex with someone, okay? In the park, here, last Tuesday, and then on Friday I was going to, I wanted to, but I didn’t.”

  “You don’t want your autonomy—you’re scared of intimacy. And every once in a while you need to go blow your load.”

  “Why do you have to say stuff like that?”

  “What would you like me to say, that I’m happy for you? I’m happy you want to get your dick sucked by a stranger in the park?”

  “I can’t talk to you when you get like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You talk to me like Alfonzo talked to you.”