Gay Life, Straight Work

by Donald West

  One interesting interlude was a short allocation to the VD (i.e. STD) wards of a military hospital. My lasting impression was of the unfeeling approach of some army doctors. I watched a nervous soldier being severely rebuked as he approached the operating theatre because he was innocently wearing boots. He was to have a growth on his temple removed, and in the procedure which followed, carried out under local anaesthesia, the surgeon severed some small arteries. The wound was festooned with artery clips before being sewn up, and was still bleeding when the man was summarily dismissed, clutching padding to his head. Another time I watched a man dripping sweat and howling in agony as a surgeon persistently and unsuccessfully tried to manipulate a swollen foreskin trapped by phimosis.

  In the field of medical ethics things happened that would be unthinkable today. Patients tended to be ‘talked down to’ like children and not always told what was wrong with them. I recall being told that a man with tabes, resulting from untreated syphilis of long ago, must not be told the cause, presumably because it would be too shaming. Mistakes were covered up. An elderly surgeon, instructing us on ethics, told of the occasion when he had to re-open a wound from another surgeon’s work to find a swab had been left behind. He surreptitiously removed it, dropped it on the floor and put his foot on it to prevent any record being made. Afterwards he “had a word” with the surgeon responsible. For training in obstetrics we had to deliver twenty or more babies, usually supervised by nurses. I had to deliver a pair of extremely premature deformed twins that were making feeble efforts to breathe. They could not survive for long and the nurse told me to take them to the sink and turn on the tap, which I did. The mother was told they were still-born. Although probably guilty of secret homicide, this has never troubled my conscience.

  Throughout the years of undergraduate medical education, apart from studying regular text books, stimulated by attempts to obtain information about what I now knew was my confirmed homosexuality, I began to read works on psychology and psychoanalysis. In addition, feeling the religion of my childhood unbelievable and wrongheaded, in searching for a substitute I hit upon books on spiritualism and psychical research. Both these deviations from official studies, namely sex and the psychic, were to prove lasting determinants of the rest of my life.

  Looking for another World

  There was little connection between sex and my developing interest in the paranormal, save that I fell in love with a fellow student who happened to have an interest in it. Richard was a slim, handsome ex-public school type, streets ahead of me in social sophistication. He was one of the small group of students with whom I spent holidays in the Lake District. When we were sharing a bed he was not averse to occasional mutual masturbation. He was, however, basically heterosexual and, at my request, gave me hints on how to make love to a woman.

  Richard had had a religious upbringing, but was turning towards a more humanistic philosophy. He introduced me to some student followers of an unorthodox Methodist minister, Roy Trevivian, a devotee of psychoanalysis, who preached against sexual repression. This was to lead to some interesting experiences later on. Richard’s mother was into spiritualism, so he knew something of the subject and was happy to argue with me about the writings of such believers as the doctor and author Conan Doyle and the eminent physicist Oliver Lodge. We had these interests in common, but on my side there was the bonus of sexually-generated hero worship and yearning for his company.

  Encouraged by this friendship, I became deeply involved in psychical research and started to think that, if true, the claims made about spirit communications through mediums would be of world-shattering importance. I read accounts of amazing details given by spiritualist mediums about their clients’ deceased loved ones, things they could not possibly have discovered by normal means. Though never totally convinced, I felt that the factual evidence for survival after death was strong.

  Not content with reading, I applied for membership of the Society for Psychical Research in London and, with my father’s ever generous help, made numerous journeys to attend some of their meetings and to visit the spiritualist centre in Kensington (now called the College of Psychic Studies) where, for a fee, one can consult the mediums employed there. These attempts to obtain first-hand experience of the wonders I had read about were disappointing. I tried to be a responsible investigator, listening to what the mediums said, but making as little comment as possible. They produced mostly vague statements that might be construed as applicable to many people, and cited common first names which meant nothing to me. Factual statements about my deceased mother, or about anything else, were not forthcoming.

  Attendance at hymn-singing services at a spiritualist church in central Liverpool, where visiting mediums gave messages from spirits to the assembled congregation, proved equally disappointing. I curried favour with some of the members of this church, even shovelling the broken glass and debris left over from a bombing raid the night before a service was due to take place. They rewarded me with an invitation to attend private séances with a ‘voice’ medium. Under cover of darkness, a ‘trumpet’ (actually an open cardboard cone dotted with spots of phosphorescent paint) appeared to float about. As it approached one or other of the believers sitting in a circle round the room it emitted whispering sounds, ostensibly from spirit communicators. We were instructed to sit still and not move. From time to time we were touched by what was said to be a materialised spirit hand. I brought to one of these séances a bottle of red ink which I dribbled onto my palm as the hand approached and its fingers stroked me. When the lights were turned on the medium’s fingers bore a tell-tale red stain. I was swiftly and angrily ejected and ordered to stay away from the spiritualist church.

  Other than the investigation of mediums, psychical researchers at this time were much concerned with the work of Dr J. B. Rhine of Duke University in North Carolina, who presided over a unit known as the Parapsychology Laboratory. Parapsychology was a term introduced to add respectability to the investigation of the paranormal and to emphasise controlled experiments and statistical evaluation rather than ghost-hunting. Belief in the existence of telepathy had hitherto been based largely upon common life experiences, such as someone suddenly ringing up just as one was thinking about them or, more dramatically, having a vision of an absent friend or relative that turned out to have coincided with their unexpected death or injury. Such anecdotes were suggestive, but the long arm of coincidence, to say nothing of inaccuracy or exaggeration in the telling, left many people sceptical. Rhine claimed that the ability to obtain information by extra-sensory perception (ESP) could be demonstrated quite simply by asking people to try to identify hidden targets. He used packs of so-called ESP cards bearing in equal number five different targets – star, cross, circle, square and wavy lines. Packs of twenty-five cards were shuffled and cards picked out one by one while the subject tried to guess what each one was. By chance an average of one in five should be correct. An average score of one in four, continuing consistently, would soon produce astronomical odds against chance coincidence. Rhine discovered a few special subjects who guessed consistently well above chance and a larger number of subjects, or groups of subjects, who produced smaller, but still significant, deviations from chance expectation.

  This seemed a break-through. It gave promise of demonstrations of the reality of ESP repeatable at will. The effect being tangible and measurable, it could rule out coincidence and pave the way to an exploration of the process. For example, it appeared that long distances between target and subject did not stop the phenomenon, that successful guesses could be made before the target was selected (precognition), and that telepathy was not necessarily the explanation, since successful scoring continued without anyone looking at the target when the guess was being made (the clairvoyance condition). The term ‘guess’ was still appropriate because, for the most part, subjects were not aware whether any particular call was a hit or a miss: the ESP process, like digestion, was unconscious.

  In America
the Parapsychology Laboratory reports met with a blaze of criticism. The methods of concealing the targets from the subjects were not always fool proof in the earlier experiments. Shuffling cards was an imperfect way to produce a random sequence of targets and the statistics were criticised, although, even without statistics, many of the results were self-evidently something other than chance. Gradually, the experimental controls were improved to meet all reasonable criticisms and, by 1940, when they published Extra-Sensory Perception after Sixty Years, Rhine and his team had amassed what seemed unassailable evidence for the occurrence of ESP, but how it worked remained a complete mystery.

  A big problem arose as it became clear that when other experimenters tried to duplicate the American results they often failed. In England, C.V.C.Herbert, the SPR’s Research Officer, obtained only chance scores. S.G.Soal, a mathematics lecturer at Queen Mary College, London, who had previously contributed long reports to SPR publications about his remarkable experiences with mediums, began trying to repeat the Rhine work. Despite Herculean efforts over several years he achieved nothing, until, in 1940, he unexpectedly announced, in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, that he had at last discovered a subject, Basil Shackleton, who had produced consistently positive scores. He continued to work with this subject for several years in experiments designed to meet all criticism, including that of the possibility of fraud by the experimenter.

  Such was the situation when I became more and more deeply involved. Fired with the ambition to do something myself, I tried in an amateurish way some Rhine style card guessing with my father as the suffering subject, screened behind a wardrobe door. The target order and the guesses were both recorded by me, unsupervised, so there was no check on recording errors. The scores were erratic, but on average slightly above chance, but even if accurate they were not proof against the sin of ‘optional stopping’, that is terminating arbitrarily when the score happened to be high.

  Later, in a longer and more ambitious effort, un-witnessed and with myself acting subject, I tried to guess the colours of playing cards, red or black. I would shuffle the cards and, with the pack face down, slide off the cards one by one without looking at the faces, laying them down onto a right hand or left hand pile according to colour. When the piles were turned over the guesses proved correct far above chance expectation. To make sure that familiarity with the backs of the cards was not guiding the guessing, unused packs were obtained and still the effect persisted. As a variation, packs were shuffled and guesses of the order of the colours of the whole fifty-two cards were written down before the checking up. This yielded much smaller scores, but still significantly above chance.

  At a time when high scores were appearing regularly, I sought an interview with my university tutor in order to demonstrate the effect before an important witness. To my embarrassment only chance scores emerged and nothing like the previous results were ever obtained by me again. Either I had been deceiving myself, perhaps becoming subliminally aware of the colours through too swift and clumsy handling, or else the ESP effect is tantalisingly elusive. Nevertheless, with the rashness of youth, and still believing that I had found something real, I wrote an account for the (then privately circulated) Journal of the SPR. In view of the sophisticated array of experimental precautions against fraud and self-deception that are expected of ESP experiments today, I can only look back in shame at these first childish attempts and the confident manner in which I dared to report the ‘results’.

  More about Sex

  The relationship with Richard was not the only notable sexual incident during student years. A disastrous experience of acute infatuation occurred at age nineteen. A few weeks after recovery from an unexpected bout of acute pneumonia I had mild, unexplained pyrexia and was admitted to hospital for investigations that revealed nothing. In the same ward was Dennis, a man in his thirties, who incited an irresistible attraction, both sexual and emotional. He was suffering from the same heart problem as had my mother, but with reasonable precautions was able to lead an approximately normal life and was planning marriage. Looking back it now seems unreal, but we struck up an immediate friendship. He treated me like a younger brother and invited me to be best man at his wedding. There was no question of any physical expression of love. Like most working-class men at that time, he was distinctly homophobic. When I said I was homosexual his response was that I must not do anything like that while I was near him. This did not stop me longing to be near him. He and his wife wanted to set up a food shop business in a nearby town. I hit upon the crazy idea of lodging with them and perhaps one day, after qualifying, setting up a medical practice on the premises. I pestered my father until he agreed to lend Dennis money to start up the project.

  Undeterred by having to commute to the university, I went to live with this couple. The wife had appeared to accept the situation quite happily, but problems soon developed. At first, she prepared meals for the three of us together. With my awkwardness in her presence, and having so few interests in common, this arrangement proved uncomfortable and I was soon banished to eat on my own. It must have been irksome for the couple having to live in close proximity to a discontented misfit occupying an adjacent bedroom, where the sounds of their love making were all too audible. The true reason for my having chosen to join them may have become apparent, but no reference to it was ever made. Instead, other reasons for complaint came to the fore. Perhaps the most upsetting concerned their pet Alsatian bitch that I was allowed to take for walks. One day I failed to close the yard gate firmly and the dog, which was in season, escaped and became pregnant from some nondescript breed. Dennis shared a common belief that any such pregnancy would affect subsequent pups from this pure pedigree dog. He insisted on having the vet carry out an abortion. I pleaded that this was unnecessary, but to no avail. The dog died of a haemorrhage during the operation. I was asked to leave and Dennis approached my father about some repayment of the loan. Looking back on this sad affair it seems to me that neither Dennis nor my father would have gone along with the arrangement had they recognised a dangerous homosexual infatuation, but blind ignorance about homosexuality was then the norm.

  Despite by now being all too well aware of the direction of my sexual instincts, I still wanted to see if I could perform with a woman. I made friends with a young nurse and took her, not of course to the parental home, but to a near-slum, much like my birthplace, the home of my widowed paternal grandmother. She was a shy, sweet generous-hearted lady who had always followed her husband’s rules, but now she was free to show her sympathy with my situation and allow me to entertain a young lady while she was out. The occasion proved unrewarding. The nurse was resistive to clumsy attempts to go further than what was then called ‘heavy petting’ and I was pitifully un-aroused.

  I also struck up a relationship with a young lady living near Richard. We went about together for a year or so, and I had visions of being able to marry. Sexually, we got no further than embraces and she must have perceived my lack of ardour. Eventually I told her about my homosexuality. She consulted a friend of mine, a fellow medical student, who advised her to break with me, which she did. Nevertheless, it must have meant something to her. Having had no word of her for some forty years, she telephoned unexpectedly one evening from Scotland, where she was living with her husband, to tell me she still remembered our time together and that she had married a man with striking similarities to me. We have never spoken again.

  I have never regretted being honest with her. The early break was probably wise for all concerned. Experiences as a psychiatrist and in ordinary life have shown me the unhappiness that can follow a marriage in which the woman does not know until too late that her husband is gay. A middle-aged man engaged in medical research, known to me through a mutual friend, took me to lunch and confided that he was in trouble. Although he loved his wife deeply, he had met and fallen desperately in love with a man. He could not bring himself either to desert the wife or to tear himself away from the lover. I c
ould not solve the dilemma for him, and soon after he solved it himself in the worst way. He was found dead, lying hidden in the middle of a cornfield, having injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine. Knowing that he had seen me recently, the wife came along afterwards to quiz me about whether he had given any hint of suicidal intentions. I could truthfully say “No” to that, but it was obvious she was trying to confirm her suspicions about his sexuality. It was no more possible to help her than it had been to help her husband. There is no rule of thumb in such situations.

  The disastrous infatuation with Dennis did not put an end to sexual urges. During later student years, pilgrimages to London to attend talks at SPR headquarters and swift returns to Liverpool to keep up with lectures and clinics, meant overnight train journeys. Trains then were equipped with individual compartments, often crammed with sleeping soldiers. Surreptitious groping under cover of greatcoats and the like were by no means uncommon and excited me greatly. The technique was to stay close to the next man and wait to see if he would edge away or return a slight pressure, in which case a series of small ‘accidental’ touches might follow until reciprocated interest became obvious. One night a soldier next to me, who had been seemingly enthusiastically participating in genital fondling, unexpectedly pulled away and then leant over and whispered angrily in my ear “I’ve killed men for less than that”. One of his companions sensed something wrong and asked him what was the matter. He murmured something before lapsing back into pretended repose. He was probably one of those people who, feeling guilty about their own behaviour, turn upon the person whom they blame for having tempted them. Nothing further happened, but I remained in terror for the rest of the journey.