The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  “Why would you say that?”

  “There’s an intrinsic support system built into our culture for making meaning out of cancer, whereas there is no cultural permission at all, at all, for you to make meaning out of what you’ve experienced. It’s hardly even recognized by society as being anything that even happens to people. Psychotherapeutic cults? Conversion therapy? Who goes through that? And if they do, who wants to talk about it, or believe it? The horror of it all provokes disbelief. Acknowledging what you’ve survived would be far easier if you had some type of public validation for having gone through it in the first place—recognition from your family, or your culture, that what you went through was challenging. Life threatening, even. Cancer, on the other hand, is universally recognized as being a serious, public, catastrophic situation.”

  “So what do you do with it? When you’re alone and there’s no one else.”

  “‘Do with it’?”

  “The fact that you survived.”

  “One of the ways I was able to make meaning out of what I went through was by using the experience itself.”

  “‘Using the experience’?”

  “The process of encountering this challenge, the cancer itself: it was like a wall against which I was forced to hurl myself. Over and over. It teaches you how strong you are. Trauma gives you feedback about your own inner strength that you just can’t get anywhere else. It tests your mettle. No one can take that away from you: who you are because of what you’ve survived.”

  “Remember what you said about suing him?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well…I’ve been thinking about it. It’s all I can think about, actually.”

  “And?”

  “Maybe if he’d admitted to what’d happened I’d feel different, maybe then I could walk away, but…to deny everything…as if none of it was real…You really think I could sue him?”

  “What do you want to do, Peter?”

  “Some days, still…I just want to die. Meanwhile, I don’t know what else to do but sue him. I’m not interested in revenge, but right now, it’s like none of it is real, like none of it even happened. I have to make it real, somehow.”

  Readjusting her doughnut-shaped pillow, Natie sat up an inch taller in her seat. “I think you should do it. Absolutely. He was unethical with so many of us. Part of my own healing from the sexual abuse was reporting it to the police. Saying publicly that what happened to me was not okay. That one act of vindication helped me to let go of much of my anger toward my abuser. This isn’t about revenge, Peter. This is about your sanity. You have to set things right. Unless you stand up for yourself, it will always haunt you. This isn’t just about what he did to you. This goes way beyond you. This is political.”

  |||||||||||

  After calling fifteen lawyers, I was able to summarize the last ten years of my life in less than thirty seconds, a fact I didn’t find particularly heartwarming. I knew I wanted a lawyer in Vancouver, because I’d also been thinking for some time about moving back to my hometown as soon as the lawsuit was filed. Finally, a high-profile lesbian lawyer specializing in human-rights cases, whom I found in an LGBT legal directory, referred me to an attorney she knew.

  “He’s your man,” she told me as I walked out her door. “He’s gay, and he’s a pit bull.”

  |||||||||||

  The attorney, Mackenzie, who was short and round, with a perennial frown across his brow, indeed reminded me of a dog, a gay bulldog, when I met him for the first time in his office in Vancouver’s trendy Gastown district one hot August afternoon.

  He accepted my case on contingency at the end of our meeting, after I explained who I was and what had happened. At our next meeting, where I filled him in with even more detail, I gave him a six-inch-thick binder of material from the College investigation.

  “I also have journals,” I said.

  “What kind of journals?”

  “That I wrote during the therapy. All my primal session reports are in the journals, as well as long passages I wrote after raging at the bat for hours. Many of the pages are ripped because I was still so angry as I wrote. I’m afraid my rants may come across as pretty unbalanced, though, out of context.”

  “I’ll want those from you. We may not want to release them as evidence, but I need to read them.”

  “Has anyone ever sued their former therapist for trying to make them straight?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. This won’t be easy. Malpractice suits never are. And they almost never settle out of court.”

  “I don’t want to settle. I want to go to trial.”

  “This is a long, drawn-out process, Peter,” he said, explaining that he would first need to draft a Statement of Claim and then serve it to the defense, who would then review it and respond with a Statement of Defense.

  Examinations for discovery would follow, he said, wherein both Alfonzo and I would give sworn testimony under oath to be used during the lawsuit. For tactical reasons, Mackenzie said he preferred that my examination take place prior to the doctor’s.

  During one of my many subsequent visits to meet with Mackenzie, I rented an apartment on the ninth floor of a high-rise, overlooking English Bay Beach, in the city’s West End district. I handed in my resignation with the AIDS organization back in Victoria, and arranged with my government job to be transferred to one of the Crown Counsel offices within British Columbia’s Ministry of Attorney General, in Vancouver’s downtown core. On September 1, 1999, exactly ten years to the day that I had fled the city, I moved back.

  |||||||||||

  I tracked down my old friend, Pearl, and discovered that she’d moved to Berlin years earlier. I wrote her the first of what became several letters, describing my years in the Styx and my plans to sue Alfonzo.

  In her response, which I received a month later, she wrote that my withdrawal from her life, and our friendship, devastated her. She talked with friends, some of whom had been my friends, and together they wondered whether she should dive in and rescue me. “Cult,” she wrote, was the word that she and others used to describe what seemed to be happening to me.

  Mostly she talked about our final, brief meeting in the ferry café, in 1990.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” she wrote. “Your eyes looked vacant, like you’d been brainwashed: glazed, absent, not registering a thing I said. Most distressing was that I could find no sense of myself or our past in your eyes or in anything you said. Our parting seemed to cause you no grief, as if nothing of substance had ever been between us. This complete absence of even a memory of me in you made me feel psychotic and sent me reeling. You seemed to be erasing, or perhaps rewriting, our shared history. There was nothing I could find in you to hold on to in myself. It was a nightmare. I returned home that day and vomited, as if to empty myself of our poisonous exchange.

  “I must confess that it is retroactively validating for me to learn about the kind of duress you were under and the amount of medication you were taking. But I am glad that you are now on the ‘outside looking in,’ and that you’re taking action—because Alfonzo behaved criminally, and because you need vindication.”

  |||||||||||

  In my Statement of Claim, which Mackenzie filed later that same month, I sued Alfonzo for the following:

  •failure to act in accordance with general and approved practices in the field of psychiatry;

  •prescribing psychiatric medication (Ketamine) no longer in use in medical practice;

  •prescribing medication in inappropriate dosages;

  •double-prescribing medication for his own personal use;

  •failure to explain or warn me of the side effects of prescribed medication;

  •treating homosexuality as an illness or disease;

  •allowing me to witness his own therapy;

  •directing me to care for his pets, provide editorial services for his book, domestic services for himself and his other patients, and landscaping services and household
renovations to his personal property, all without remuneration;

  •intentionally inflicting mental suffering upon me contrary to his duty not to harm me and for no medically accepted purpose; and

  •committing battery by injecting me with the drug Ketamine without my knowledge or informed consent.

  In his defense statement, which Mackenzie received on my behalf two months later, Alfonzo denied every allegation contained in my claim. Defense submitted that the action should be dismissed with costs.

  In February 2000, defense filed thirty-eight authorizations for release of information on my personal history, directed to twenty-three medical practitioners and fifteen past employers. Then Mackenzie received defense’s list of more than 100 interrogatories—questions that I needed to answer about every doctor I’d visited over the previous twenty years: appointments with general practitioners, medical exams, X-rays, dental checkups, and therapists I’d consulted post-Alfonzo.

  In March, Mackenzie wrote to confirm that we’d agreed with defense’s recommendation for an eight-day trial.

  Civil lawsuits such as mine, for more than $25,000, were heard by a judge only within the Supreme Court of British Columbia, one of two superior courts in the province, the other being the Court of Appeal. With the court’s ongoing backlog, it was not uncommon for trials to be scheduled up to two years in advance. Lengths of trials also could be altered as the date approached.

  I waited four more months for further information. Finally, Mackenzie’s secretary called to tell me that the Supreme Court Trial Division had rejected a proposed trial date of December 2001. I didn’t hear from her again until October 2000, when my eight-day trial was officially rescheduled for to March 18, 2002, seventeen months away. Unfortunately, we would not know if a judge had been freed up for trial until two days prior to its commencement. If one hadn’t, we would have to postpone the trial to some indeterminate date in the future.

  I didn’t hear from Mackenzie again for another six months, until April 2001, when he called to confirm that my examination for discovery was set to begin December 17, 2001. “By the way, I looked at your journals,” he said on the phone.

  “Okay. And?”

  “We won’t be releasing them as evidence. You were right—you do come across as pretty unbalanced in those pages. They wouldn’t help us win your case.”

  |||||||||||

  Pisti, my next eldest brother, was still single, self-employed as a gardener, and living on his own when I visited him in his two-bedroom apartment over a weekend. If I was not quite ready to step fully back into the family circle, Pisti had at least remained a point of contact. He also had gained more than forty pounds in the years since I’d last seen him. Beneath the extra weight, however, like a body suit that protected him from his pain, I could see the same frightened boy that Dad chased through the house with a fakanál.

  My face was buried in a newspaper when he snuck up behind me in his living room with a copy of Playboy draped open to its centerfold. “Look at those tits,” he said, turning Ms. May in all her glory to face me. “I’d do her.”

  “What movie would you like to see?” I said, deflecting his comment, and the magazine.

  Pisti sprawled the opened magazine on the sofa next to me and looked over my shoulder at the movie listings. “How ’bout that one?” he said, pointing to the latest action flick staring one of Hollywood’s hottest hunks.

  “He’s gay,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The actor.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  “But he’s married.”

  I glanced back to see his expression, wondering whether he was feigning ignorance or if he still believed that all men who married women didn’t sometimes still have sex with other men.

  “Have you talked to Mom or Dad lately?” he asked.

  “Not lately.”

  “You should visit them more often.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you miss them?”

  I dropped the newspaper over Ms. November and looked at him. “How often do you see them?”

  “Every week. We still go to Mass together every Sunday.”

  I picked the paper back up. “So you’re still the good Catholic son they’d always hoped and prayed for.”

  “Why don’t you talk to them?”

  “We don’t get along.”

  “Why do you have to advertise it? I don’t tell them what I know they don’t want to hear.”

  “I can’t do what you do. Besides, my not talking to them isn’t just about my sexuality…”

  “What’s it about then?”

  “Don’t you remember Dad beating me?”

  “You didn’t get it half as bad as I did. Or Kriska. I still remember the day Dad told me to break a branch off the tree in the backyard and leave it in the basement so he could beat her with it.”

  “He beat her with a tree branch?”

  “You have to train a child. You have to discipline them.”

  “You do not ‘train’ a child. Not by beating them. We should never have been hit.”

  “You don’t think I know they made a few mistakes? You get to a certain point in your life where you either accept what’s happened to you or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re never at peace.”

  “You’ve accepted what’s happened to you?” I glanced down at his immense midsection. “You’re at peace?”

  He rubbed his belly, as if inside him lived a baby. “So I like food, so what? It keeps me company. At least I don’t go around blaming someone else my whole life.”

  “I’m not blaming them, I’m holding them responsible. There is a difference. Actions do have consequences.”

  “Do you still blame me for what I did when we were kids?”

  “Which part?”

  “Father Raphael.”

  “Honestly?”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”

  “Threatening to tell Mom and Dad that I was having sex with men unless I confess my ‘sin’ to a priest was definitely not the right thing to do at the time. What did you think he was going to do, perform a miracle?”

  “You don’t think it’s a little twisted that you were having sex with men twice your age, in parking lots, when you were sixteen years old?”

  “You were having sex with girls when you were sixteen. And I never had sex in parking lots. We were always at the bottom of the stairwell, below the parking lot.”

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “It was just sex.”

  “‘Just sex’? You don’t feel the least bit ashamed of yourself?”

  “Of course not. Do you? Of the sex you have?”

  “Sometimes. Most of the time. Always.”

  “You feel shame about having sex?”

  “I’ve never not felt shame after having sex.”

  I looked at my brother, as if through the bars of his cell, a prison of the worst kind: one in which he’d normalized and so no longer even noticed.

  “Homosexuality is unnatural,” he said.

  “Maybe to you, because you’re not attracted to men. My homosexuality is the most natural thing in the world to me.”

  “Cancers are also natural. Lots of things that are bad for us are ‘natural.’ The Bible explicitly states that no man shall lie with another man…”

  “Oh, I am so tired of you people using—”

  “Us people?”

  “Using the words of ignorant men to support your own ignorance. Who wrote the Bible?”

  “The Bible is the inspired word of God.”

  “Written two thousand years ago. By men filled with prejudice and ignorance and absolutely no scientific data.”

  “You really think that genetics is the wisest position to take?”

  “What do you—?”

  “If homosexuality has a genetic cause, don’t you think it’s inevitable that science, or society, would take steps to root it out
? Haven’t you heard of eugenics?”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Homosexuals spit in the face of traditional family values.”

  “That’s ironic, considering the home life we came from.”

  “Your lifestyle will never be accepted by society. Never. Men and women are anatomically constructed to procreate. There’s no debating that. We fit together.”

  “Do you ever have anal sex with women?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Sorry, I forgot: heterosexuals never have anal sex.”

  “Didn’t that doctor help you at all?”

  “With what?”

  “Kick the habit.”

  I’d had enough. I stood and moved back down his hallway, preparing to leave.

  “Oh come on,” he said, trying to pull me back into his world.

  “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have ended up that doctor.”

  “What?”

  “If it weren’t for you and this family of mine, I would’ve spent my twenties learning how to love instead of how to hate myself.”

  “What is going on with you?”

  I turned to face him at the door. “Teen gays commit suicide because of people like you.”

  “Oh come on.”

  “People die of AIDS because of people like you.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone.”

  “It’s people like you that are killing me.”

  “What?”

  “What do you even think of when you say the word ‘homosexual’?” He looked at me like a stunned animal. “Because I’ll tell you one thing, whatever it is, it’s not what a homosexual is. Most of the men I’ve had sex with watch football, drink beer, and hang out with guys that look just like you.” I glanced down at his protruding stomach. “Well, maybe not like you. You wouldn’t believe the number of fathers who’ve picked me up with their little toddler carriages in the backseats of their station wagons.”