The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “Does this have anything to do with your father?”

  My question surprised him; it surprised both of us.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You are not gay because of what that man did to you.”

  Without another word, he turned and started down the trail. I followed. “Shane…”

  He stopped and faced me. “You can’t just tell me something like that and expect it all to be okay. I haven’t done the therapy you’ve done.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “Okay, I get it. Alfonzo was an asshole. You know maybe the guy was an asshole and he helped you. Did you ever stop to think about that? Whatever it is, I don’t know what you know, what’s been figured out in your body.”

  Shane was right: my body had managed to distinguish between the lies of my youth and the truth of my sexuality today—maybe even in spite of Alfonzo and his therapy. “All the more reason to trust someone who knows,” I said.

  “Know? What do you know?” His voice took a sudden turn. “You’ve just spent how many years in a therapeutic cult? Why did you stay with him for so long anyway?”

  The question was like a wall I’d run up against inside my own mind, and I had no answer. I could barely face it. I couldn’t face him. I turned away, but he continued.

  “Hiding from the world, maybe? From men? Afraid of AIDS? Playing the victim?”

  “That’s not—”

  “Just how many relationships have you been in, exactly? As opposed to getting your dick sucked in a bathroom when you were a kid.”

  “What about you? Crying you don’t want to be gay, feeling sorry for yourself…” Now I intended not just to crush but to scar.

  “Every time you kiss me, I see his face instead of yours. Okay?”

  I was not expecting these final words. The pain on his face was sharp and real.

  “Whose face?” I said.

  “Who do you think? Forget it. I can’t see you anymore. This isn’t going to work. And don’t call me.”

  And then he walked away. Before I’d said another word he had turned toward the forest.

  Once, along the trail, he looked back and forced a smile. Just once. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed. As if that would make it all okay.

  18

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since moving into the Styx, six years earlier, I was on my own.

  With no medication to help me sleep, I’d lie awake for hours every night, wondering whether my love for Shane had been a delusion. Months of insomnia followed as my body fought to regain its natural rhythms. Memories of Alfonzo plagued me as I imagined him screaming down at me that I was an “error in need of correction,” that I would “never be a man” as long as I was experiencing sexual feelings for other men, that gays were “incapable of emotional intimacy,” and that leaving his therapy would result in my own self-destruction. Even Yvette’s voice echoed back: You’ll be dead within the year.

  I knew, at least intellectually, that I was free to live my life, finally, but it seemed to me that there was essentially no life left in me to live, that I was on the outside looking in, going through the motions, putting in time. For almost six years I had believed that we, along with all my “soul siblings,” were part of a “family”—that we were doing “God’s” work, toward the end.

  Far from feeling liberated, my life now seemed to have little purpose or significance, but was just an endless repetition of days. Nothing made sense. Everything seemed comparatively inconsequential. I was back in the world but not of the world. That I could be out in public, shell-shocked, and not have anyone notice the hole that had been blasted through my gut proved to me I really was invisible.

  Even my vocabulary was more like the mother tongue from a lost country. “Triggers,” “take it back historically,” “acting out,” “introjects,” “primals.” So many words and phrases that had been commonplace in the primal world sounded so strange in the “secular” world. Some nights I bought a bottle of wine, drank it down in ten minutes, and passed out on my bed. Sleep was lost to me. I had to be unconscious.

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  Gradually, however, I thawed out from the therapy. I started a part-time job as an outreach worker for a local AIDS organization, facilitating support groups for HIV-negative men and handing out condoms to “men who had sex with men” in public sex environments. I completed a three-month night school course on office administration, learned about something called “the Internet,” and found a second full-time job as a civil servant in the province’s Ministry of Attorney General.

  In new friendships and in work relationships, I was accepted as a “gay man,” and while this assisted in challenging my homophobia, the self-identity of “homosexual” that I’d clung to before the therapy, and still seemed to be the only way of describing my unwavering erotic desires, no longer made sense. It didn’t quite “fit.” I was like a refugee in a new country.

  More therapy was the last thing that I wanted, one year after leaving the Styx, when Natie suggested I see a counselor friend of hers. “Think of it as a dialogue with your soul,” she suggested over the phone. “The word ‘psychopathology,’ after all, originally meant ‘suffering of the soul.’ What you want is to better understand your suffering, right?”

  Her friend, Eva, was a rotund, sixty-eight-year-old lesbian. Every Wednesday night at six o’clock, starting in late 1996, I sat on her cat-scratched burgundy sofa in the living room of her two-bedroom bungalow overflowing with antiques from around the world: engraved trunks, oversized sheesham dressers, mahogany bookshelves packed with first editions, crystal chandeliers, embroidered carpets, and various artifacts she’d salvaged from outdoor bazaars throughout Asia and India. When I finally told her about Alfonzo, three months into our sessions and almost as an aside, she had to stop and ask that I repeat my words.

  “You were with this doctor for how long?” she said, sitting adjacent to me in an overstuffed armchair, her characteristic turban perched upon her bundled graying hair.

  “Almost six years.”

  “Six years? And you wonder why you feel anesthetized? Your body must still be in complete shock from the medications alone.”

  Once, out of nowhere, her fat cat, Sammy, jumped up onto the sofa and clawed his way onto my belly. I liked Sammy. I liked the warmth of his overfed body, the fact that he trusted me enough to make a bed of my stomach. When I rested my hand on his furry back and closed my eyes, everything about Alfonzo and the reason for my visiting Eva was out of mind. I was just a body, feeling the warmth of a cat lying on my belly.

  Until I started talking about it with Eva, I had little insight into what had even happened during my years with Alfonzo; a storm had swept through my life, certainly, but my memory had not yet sorted out the past. If I viewed my time with Alfonzo as a journey, it also seemed to me as though I’d arrived back at, or perhaps had never even left, the exact same spot. I still had unresolved issues with my sexuality, and residual grief and anger over my parents’ refusal to acknowledge not only my sexuality but also my sexual abuse. I had primalled on a mattress and shouted and beat a punching bag in the safety of a “workroom,” but nothing in the “real” world had changed. All I knew was that Alfonzo had betrayed his most basic oath as a physician: First, do no harm. Not only had his actions been counterproductive to my overall well-being, they had most definitely caused enormous harm—to me and to those I loved.

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  After six months with Eva, I decided to document everything that had happened in my years of therapy—five pages of clear dispassionate facts—and mail it to the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

  One week later, a man called me on the phone. He identified himself as Albert, a police officer and now chief investigator with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. He asked if we could meet.

  A week later, I welcomed Albert into my apartment. Before even sitting down, he handed me a pamphlet; most of what it said I already knew, had learned befo
rehand. Protecting patients was considered one of the College’s main functions, it read. The College’s complaints committee, the ones who reviewed complaints like mine, consisted of three members of the public and six senior doctors. If a complaint was found to be valid, the committee either made recommendations to the doctor regarding his practice or conduct; reprimanded the doctor; asked the College to communicate its views on an issue or case to the profession at large; or referred the matter on for a formal investigation into the conduct or competence of the doctor. Only the most egregious complaints were ever referred to a formal investigation, resulting in a fine charged against the doctor, a suspension, or a revocation of the doctor’s license.

  “I should tell you right away,” Albert said, “that Dr. Alfonzo has been given the common practice of fourteen days to respond to your complaint.” By this time, we were sitting at my kitchen table and he had pulled a portable tape recorder from his briefcase. “Once the College receives that response, they will review your case and decide whether or not to penalize the doctor at the end of the summer.”

  For the next two hours I spoke slowly and logically, recounting much of what I’d already detailed in my letter. I told Albert everything he wanted to hear and more and, in doing so, felt not exactly happy but at least relieved that I was finally clear-minded enough to be able to talk about the therapy.

  At one point, I realized Albert hadn’t once asked about the allegation describing how Alfonzo tried to change my sexuality. When I broached the subject, he said that those facts seemed fairly clear to him, and that unless I had more details, there was no reason to discuss it further.

  I explained that Alfonzo recorded all our primal sessions on reel-to-reel, which he’d said he wanted to quote as case studies in a book that I’d been helping him write. When I left the therapy he had hundreds of hours of me talking about “the sickness of homosexuality.” If he ever wrote about homosexuality, I told Albert, I was sure that he would use my sessions as a means to his own end: to prove that homosexuality was a drug of choice, and that homosexuals’ only hope was to remain celibate, to not act on their “insanity.” Quoting those sessions would only perpetuate an attitude of violence toward gays, I told Albert, and I didn’t want any of them used for that purpose.

  The whole time I was talking, I noticed that Albert’s eyes, his kind, blue eyes, either avoided my own all together or lingered one moment longer than they probably should have. I sensed his interest in my case cut deeper than a purely clinical fascination.

  Our interview came to a close. Albert was up and almost out my front door before he turned and looked at me. “You know, Peter,” he said, glancing at the floor, “some things just can’t be changed. Being gay is not a choice. I hope for your sake you’re able to put this whole thing behind you and get on with your life.”

  I smiled, shook his hand, and thanked him for his time.

  19

  I HAD BEEN THINKING of Shane while out walking one night, when suddenly there he was, not five feet ahead of me. I picked up my pace to meet him at a light.

  “Shane…”

  He turned around.

  “Peter…”

  I told him that I’d sent my letter of complaint to the College. He didn’t seem surprised. Then neither of us said a word. The light was red and we waited. We were alone on the street, in the city, the world. For a moment I remembered us together, limbs like vines, wrapped around each other in bed, in bliss, in love. My stomach lurched. I wanted to kiss him. Nothing else mattered. I turned to face him, but he turned away.

  “Would you like to grab a coffee?” I asked.

  He turned back and faced me. “I’m glad you’ve reported Alfonzo, really I am. That man ruined a lot of people’s lives. I hope he loses his license. But I don’t think you and I should talk, ever again. And please don’t call me. Goodbye, Peter. Good luck.”

  The light turned green. I stood at the intersection and watched as Shane stepped off the curb and walked ahead without me.

  Before I could move, the light had turned red again.

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  I hadn’t talked to Claude since leaving the Styx, but he was the first person I called to see who among those I once called “family” might support me in my complaint. And he did seem happy to hear from me, asked me how I was, where I was living, if I was working, felt stable in my life, was off medication? I asked him how he was. He said that he and Yuen were now living together as a couple. Then I told him about my complaint.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking to the investigator.”

  “Is that why you’re calling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alfonzo and Yvette are personal friends of ours. We go on vacations together. All four of us.”

  “Oh. Well, do you know where Clay lives now? I’d like to call him.”

  “Clay lives with Alfonzo and Yvette. He won’t want to talk to you either.”

  Then the call ended, abruptly.

  I spent the next two weeks tracking down and calling more than ten former patients. One of them was Dr. Scarborough, the former intensive who had been Shane’s psychiatrist in the psychiatric ward. He invited me into his office when I arrived for a visit.

  At first I said nothing about my complaint, only that I’d left the therapy and was wondering what he now thought of Dr. Alfonzo.

  “The man shouldn’t be practicing,” he said. “I’d go so far as to say that his form of treatment is unethical. It’s counterproductive and highly problematic.”

  Then I told him about my complaint to the College, but before I could ask him if he’d support it, he opened his office door and, clearly alarmed, ushered me out, saying, “If you tell a soul what I just said to you, I will deny ever having said it.”

  Most of the other ex-patients I found were supportive of my decision to report Alfonzo to the College—as long as it meant not getting involved. But that didn’t stop one woman from telling me that she left the therapy because she knew it was a cult.

  “When did you know?” I asked her on the phone.

  “The moment I walked into my first group.”

  “Then why did you stay?”

  “All sessions were covered under my medical. Besides, I wanted to work with the surrogate mother. That was my real reason for staying as long as I did. I didn’t stay for him, that’s for sure. I left because of him. He got in the way of my therapy.”

  Another woman said she remembered Alfonzo telling me my mother made me gay and that I’d never be happy as a homosexual. She also recalled how he insisted that all his patients take medication.

  “You especially. You were always drugged, spaced out, like a zombie taking orders from on high. We either took the medication, or our therapy was terminated. That’s why I left: I didn’t want to get addicted. When I left, he told me that there was no other game in town but his and it was just a matter of time before I’d be back.”

  She said that Alfonzo was a “megalomaniac, a monster,” that he had “created a sense of hopelessness in all his patients.” She said that she admired the courage it must have taken for me to file the complaint, but that she did not want to get involved—it had taken over three years to get her life back together and only now was starting to feel hope again. She suggested I call Brent.

  Brent and I had not seen or talked to each other since he left the therapy to move in with his newest boyfriend in 1991. Finding him was difficult, as he’d moved three times since then, and, as I soon discovered, changed his name twice.

  Bea and Bea’s half-sister greeted me inside his apartment doorway the following week, an apartment, he explained, he shared with his newest boyfriend, who was three boyfriends past the boyfriend he’d moved in with after the Styx. Any excitement that I’d felt at seeing a former “family” member quickly vanished, however, the moment we started talking. I was not who I’d been while living in the Styx; neither was Brent. And without the veneer of sel
f-deception that had brought us together and maintained the illusion of “family,” we had little else in common.

  “Leaving that therapy was the best thing I ever did,” he said.

  “But you left so suddenly. One day you were there, talking about maybe having a relationship with a woman, the next day you were gone and living with a man.”

  “I was a fag and Alfonzo didn’t like that. I knew what to say and what to avoid. You were different, though.”

  “How so?”

  “I could tell that you wanted to believe you could change. You accepted everything he said to you. You stopped fighting. You gave up.”

  Several minutes into our conversation I couldn’t remember why I was there, why I’d filed the complaint with the College or would want to talk to anyone from the Styx ever again. When I realized I’d been staring at Brent’s mouth but not hearing a word it said, I interrupted and told him that I had to meet another friend for dinner, and I left.

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  In a follow-up letter sent to my home, weeks after our initial meeting, Albert wrote that Dr. Alfonzo had requested an extension for his response to my complaint, and that the College had allowed it. My concerns regarding the doctor had, meanwhile, become the subject of a formal investigation.

  Near the end of August 1997, Albert sent another update. Alfonzo was preparing a detailed and lengthy response to my complaint, Albert wrote, which was expected to arrive at the College by October. According to Alfonzo’s lawyer, my former medical file consisted of approximately 1,500 pages, which Alfonzo was reviewing, along with many old documents and records relating to my various group sessions, before writing his response. Because of these “extenuating circumstances,” Albert wrote, my complaint was taking longer to resolve than the College would have normally expected. He thanked me for my patience.

  October came and went with no word from the College.

  In November, Albert called to tell me that if Alfonzo’s response was not forthcoming in the next ten days, the College would make their recommendation to the board without it.