Gay Life, Straight Work

by Donald West

  (2) Andrew was serving a sentence for “non-capital murder” with additional charges including rape, abduction, and robbery with violence. Born in wartime Germany, Andrew’s infant memories were of terrifying bombs and, while his father was away, missing believed dead, his mother periodically hiding from marauding Russian soldiers. When hostilities were over his mother took him to live with her widowed mother-in-law. The situation was tense because Andrew’s grandmother disapproved of her son marrying a woman of lower social class and resented having to share her home with penniless refugees. Andrew thought she exploited his mother as an unpaid domestic drudge. A young girl cousin lived in the household, who was pampered, well-behaved and kept better dressed. He was continually compared unfavourably with her on account of his waywardness and backwardness.

  His father turned up unexpectedly as an exchanged prisoner-of-war and soon began punishing Andrew and urging him to do better. He recalled his father blurting out “How can you be so dumb? You sure can’t be a son of mine!” Andrew hated his father and grew to resent all authority figures. At school he was teased about a drooping mouth, left over from an attack of polio. This sapped his self-confidence and provoked him to angry fighting responses, but being of relatively small stature he had sometimes to back down, which brought on intense shame and sense of failure.

  Andrew thought he got on normally with his own younger siblings, but his mother said he bullied them. When he was ten, his father migrated to Canada in search of economic betterment, leaving wife and children behind. After that his troublesome behaviour, including thefts from his grandmother, worsened and his school performance deteriorated.

  Andrew had a repressive Catholic upbringing as regards sex and felt guilty and ignorant. Once he disobeyed his mother by taking his younger sister with him mushroom picking. He was sure that fear of some sex between them was the reason for his mother’s extreme anger. At this time he was having hazy fantasies of impressing women sexually, although he had no clear idea what was involved.

  When he was fourteen the family was re-united in Canada. His father’s irritable attempts to control him increased his hostility. In fact his father was developing a malignant brain tumour from which he died the following year. Andrew avoided him when he was very ill and felt no loss when he died. From then on his delinquent exploits, truanting, wandering about stealing and purse snatching began to escalate and to be associated with sexual fantasies of attacking women. His first major sex crime was sneaking through the open window of a neighbour’s house one night, where he knew two women were asleep. He started looking for their purses. They awoke and he threatened them with a knife and tied them up, after first ordering one of them to strip off her nightgown. There was a third woman in the house and, helped by the other two, who had managed to break free, they drove him out. After leaving, he felt “fear and exhilaration”. On emerging next day, wearing the same clothes as the previous night, he was soon recognised and arrested. He was sent to a reformatory where he got into many fights, always in reaction to perceived insults.

  Following his release at age sixteen, he was placed in foster care and appeared to settle down. He liked the fostering couple and got on with the other youngsters in the household. Trouble began after attempts at heterosexual socialising. He attended dances but “felt unable to talk to girls unless I had a few drinks in me”. He recalled getting up courage to approach a girl whom nobody seemed to want and trying unsuccessfully to get her to come into a bedroom with him. Seeing her next morning when sober he was ashamed to see her so unattractive, and was embarrassed when others teased him about her. This was a foretaste of numerous incidents when he failed to secure girls who attracted him and those he went with were unsatisfying and soon rejected. The daughter of the household was a girl his own age to whom he was much attracted, but she told the parents that he was truanting occasionally. That spoiled everything and he began to have angry fantasies of beating, raping and even killing her. It caused him to turn against the foster parents and engineer a return to live with his mother. He had not yet achieved full sexual intercourse and he became frustrated because he could not bring girls home for sex. He did once borrow a car and managed to pick up a girl of fourteen from the street, intending to force her into sex, but a premature ejaculation stopped him. The following year he managed to obtain a loan and buy a car. This enabled him to pick up and date many girls. “Seldom did more than a few days go by without having intercourse.” The relationships were all short-lived. “Their common denominator was my uncaring or surface feeling for any of them”. “I always seemed to be lonely and dissatisfied with myself”. “I began using the technique of telling the girl I had picked up, once we were in some isolated spot, that she had a choice of walking home or having sex. The possibility of rape became nearer”. At this period his life-style in other respects became unstable. His work record was erratic on account of drinking, gambling and building up debts, and he was obliged to move from place to place to avoid debt collectors.

  He was twenty-two when the first desperate incident took place. Lonely and short of money, he bought a rifle and threatened a woman in a neighbouring apartment. He felt the urge to rape, but she was heavily pregnant and he simply tied her up while he looted the place. When another woman arrived he tied her up too. He fled the area, and “I recall feeling exhilarated for the first half hour”. Before long he was picked up by police. Receiving a suspended sentence, he was returned to his long-suffering mother. He was very depressed, could not find work, and resented his mother’s lecturing. He committed another similar crime, breaking into a neighbour and tying up the woman. After fleeing, he took sleeping tablets and was unconscious for three days. Found by police, he was imprisoned for attempted suicide and robbery.

  In prison he began to realise he needed psychiatric help. It was not quickly forthcoming and he made an escape. While on the run he was befriended by a couple who let him come to stay with them. After confessing something of his situation to the husband, a psychology teacher, the couple advised him to find a job and stay out of prison for a time before giving himself up, so that he could show he was capable of making good. He followed this course. When he was eventually released from prison, the same couple allowed him to return. He had not, however, fundamentally changed. He was despondent and finding it hard to live up to their expectations. He hired a car, procured a gun and picked up a girl hitch hiker. Before reaching the destination she wanted, he turned off onto a dirt road, stopped at an isolated place, pulled a knife and raped her. He tied her up, but untied her when she promised not to run away or tell the police. He kept her overnight and had sex again, before letting her go. On returning home, he was full of remorse. He gave his friends a censored version of what had happened, but by now they were becoming less tolerant, telling him to seek psychiatric help and look for other accommodation.

  Taking advantage when the couple were out for the day, he called a girl he had met some time before and asked her to come over. When she arrived he had his belongings already packed and asked her to drive him to a camping place. She was suspicious and refused. After a fierce struggle, he subdued her with a knife and tied her up while he loaded the car. “She asked whether I was going to rape her. I told her she would be all right but she would have to perform fellatio on me. Now I wanted to rape her, in part to get revenge for the cuts on my fingers she had caused me”. He got her into the car and drove into the bush where he raped her twice, once at night and again in the morning. Then he let her go and waited for the police to come. Before these rapes he felt anger and wanting vengeance, afterwards he felt sad and not caring what was to happen to him.

  He was now twenty-six and for this latest rape he was sentenced to four years in the penitentiary. While there, he became paranoid about other prisoners attacking him. He demanded protection and was put into solitary confinement, where he continued to have fantasies of tying up women, raping and “debasing” them. His mother, who had never given up on him, allowed him home
when he was paroled. He was at a loss what to do with himself and was still preoccupied with violent fantasies, even of hitting his mother over the head when she was asleep.

  Two weeks following his release he received $50 cash from a welfare officer, which he used to buy a small automatic rifle. He sawed the gun down with a hacksaw, packed it in his bag and set off hitchhiking. He was picked up by a woman driver in a camper. Another male hitchhiker was positioned on the front seat between him and the driver. “I took an immediate dislike for him because of his loud voice and air of taking over. This was intensified when, after asking me whether my window was closed he did not accept my answer but rudely felt round the window frame, meanwhile sticking his elbow into my face. I said nothing, instead reached for my bag, took out the gun and told him to keep his head between his knees”. He made the man kneel while he searched his pockets. He knew the man was bigger and could beat him in a fight. “Whether I shot him because he suddenly turned around or whether I meant to shoot him anyway I cannot really answer”. He ordered the driver to turn off onto a dirt road and stop, while he thought what to do. The man made gurgling sounds. “It made me angry. Seemed to hurt my ears”. He shot him again. The girl was scared he was going to shoot her. He tried to calm her. It was some time before he raped her. He dragged the man’s body out of the vehicle and into the wood. He drove a further mile or so and washed in a creek. He dozed on a mattress in the back of the truck, with the girl beside him. She kept asking when he would let her go. At one point he became enraged and shook her and tied her hands in a deliberately painful manner. After trying to rape her again he did not get an erection, so he told her to fellate him, but that did not work either. They talked a lot about their problems. Eventually he told her to drive back onto the main road where they were stopped at a road block and he was arrested.

  Back in the penitentiary at age twenty-nine, Andrew was scared of being attacked by other prisoners and fearful that he would lose control and kill someone in retaliation. He was in fact involved in one serious confrontation. He declined visits from his mother because he found them too upsetting. After a suicide attempt, he was assessed and offered a place at the Regional Psychiatric Centre, where his intelligence and aptitude for figures and computing work was soon recognised. Unfortunately, he found the strict requirements of the sex offender programme extremely stressful and, after being threatened with expulsion, he finally chose to return to the penitentiary where he soon committed suicide. He was the only one of the group who dropped out during my visit.

  Andrew’s self-image of masculine inadequacy battling angrily against hostile powers was all too evident. After increasingly frustrating attempts at achieving heterosexual ‘conquests’, his rage turned against innocent women. There was much in his developmental history to explain his internal conflicts which, remaining unresolved, led to his behaviour becoming more and more extreme, irrational and dangerously unrestrained. Correctly identified as a candidate for therapy, it was sad that action had not been taken sooner.

  (3) Philip was serving a long prison sentence for a series of rapes, committed at age twenty four, and further rapes at age twenty-six, while he was out on bail for the earlier offences. He was soft-spoken at interview, with numerous hesitant pauses. He confessed to finding it difficult to remember and talk about his unhappy childhood and his later crimes.

  Persistent bed wetting, for which he got no sympathy, and which lasted until his teens, made his childhood a misery. The family was hard up and sparing of water for baths. He felt awful when a girl once asked him “Why do you always stink?” At home he was the under-dog, blamed for everything. Mother would make his father punish him and would nag if it was not hard enough. This made father lose his temper and punch harder than ever, knocking him across the room and leaving him bruised for days. Mother had the habit of pinching and twisting his arm, which hurt terribly. He blamed her for all his crime trouble and once wrote from prison telling her so.

  When he was fourteen his mother, who had until then been a conscientious housewife, changed her ways, drinking heavily and neglecting the house and the children. She was working outside the home and meeting men for sex. Philip sometimes followed her, reporting back to his father. This fraught situation continued a further two years until the parents divorced and the home broke up.

  At school he was ashamed of his poverty and the clothes he was forced to wear, and remembered being laughed at about a hole in his pants. He got into fights and on one occasion a boy he beat up had to be taken to hospital. For this, the head beat him severely on the hands and he had to return to the class bleeding and crying.

  At age fifteen, when fed up with his mother’s behaviour and the impending break-up of the family, his school performance dropped off and he began truanting. He and a friend beat up another boy who had annoyed them. Afterwards he told the head he wanted to leave the school. The head told him that if he had not wanted to leave of his own accord he would anyway have been strapped and thrown out. He did not tell his mother, but stayed away from home pretending he was going to school. When this was discovered he was sent to stay with relatives and made to find work.

  His sexual development was characterised by excessive shyness alternating with inappropriate or aggressive attempts at sexual adventures. He recalled his two elder sisters getting him to perform cunnilingus when he was only eight or nine. He felt guilty about these secret sex games. For a time he had no interest in girls, but then began wanting to approach them, but lacked the confidence to do so. At fourteen he was creeping into his sister’s bedroom to touch her in her sleep. While still at school he had sexual intercourse for the first time with a girl some years younger. She was a bed wetter from a poor family with drunken parents. In contrast, when he was baby-sitting with a more intimidating older girl who wanted to go further than petting, although he had an exciting erection, he took fright and left. After that he started peeping through windows and stealing female underwear from clothes lines. His mother discovered his collection.

  When he was staying with his father after his parents’ divorce, truanting youngsters would come round and have sex play, but he was still shy. By age seventeen he was still peeping into bedroom windows watching couples. One night he spotted a neighbour, a woman of thirty who lived alone, getting into bed. He returned later and broke in. He told her he wouldn’t hurt her if they could have sex. There was a prolonged struggle and he finally gave up and left, warning her that he had a brother who would kill her if she told the police.

  At age eighteen he acquired his first conviction for a sex offence. He was dating an under-age girl and made her pregnant. When her parents found out, although they had been accepting of the relationship, they reported him to the police and he was fined. Soon after, he met Iris, his future wife. After a brief affair he gave her an engagement ring, but when he found her going out with a friend of his he became furious and broke off with her. A year or two later he resumed the relationship after she had been deserted by her current lover. They married after a year of courtship and he recalls the first year of their marriage as happy, although he was still jealous and distrustful. “I decided that she would never go out with another guy if I had anything to do with it. I would never ever let her out of my sight any longer than I really had to. I had sex with her so much it seemed we were hardly ever out of bed. She complained of her vagina being sore, but I was making damn sure she wasn’t going to screw with other guys. She must have felt guilty, for a long time she wouldn’t say no.”

  Problems began when he lost his job and his wife had to go out to work. He resented this, felt extremely jealous of her having male colleagues, and fell into a depression. The situation worsened when his wife gave birth and became frigid and reluctant to have sex. “I was still striving to have sex with her whenever she would allow it, forcing myself upon her all the time. I felt inadequate and unloved and determined to get some sex outside”. It was then he took to driving around picking up girls. He felt depressed and a c
heapskate about this behaviour, but as the marital problem did not resolve he became ever more desperate, forcing his pick-ups to have sex whether they wanted it or not. “It was then I went out and committed the attacks that first brought me into prison. The offences were all in the space of one month”.

  When he was jailed his wife threatened to leave, but he prevailed upon her to give another try. They got together when he was on bail, but the relationship was tense and unhappy. “I was pretty sure I was going to be jailed for a long time, but we didn’t talk about it.” When he leaned that while he was in prison his wife had been out with a friend of his, she denied it, and he pretended to accept it, but he did not believe her. “That set me off on another depression and raping spree. I was caught and given a much longer sentence”.

  Philip’s life story repeats a familiar theme. Reared in confidence-crushing circumstances, he reacted from an early age with aggressive but ineffectual responses, followed by frustration and depression. Sexual development traced a similar pattern, beginning with timidity and failure to relate to appropriate girlfriends, coupled with attempts at delinquent forms of satisfaction. When he finally married, excessive jealousy and possessiveness ruined the relationship, provoking uncontrolled anger and an obsessive need to try to prove his sexual competence with casual pick-ups. As his marital situation deteriorated, so his reckless pursuit of innocent females escalated into increasingly crazed assaults and inevitable personal disaster.

  To conclude, the picture that emerged from observation and history-taking was not one of a collection of inhuman monsters, but of sad people driven to desperation by emotions they were powerless to control. They had become dangerously violent through unresolved and worsening inner conflicts and were thus suitable candidates for psychiatric exploration. They had been selected from a large body of sex offenders as being potentially treatable. In effect, they were a minority group untypical of the generality of rational, opportunistic and selfishly purposive rapists.