The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing

by Daniel Bergner

  The metaphors were seductive, each one seeming beyond argument, each one substantiating the others. Couldn’t we indeed learn fluency in second languages? Wasn’t a four-star meal more compelling than a Big Mac? Didn’t orthopedic surgeons sometimes do exactly as Fedoroff said in treating a malformed arm or leg? Fedoroff seemed a visionary. “Some guys spend their time in the lab,” he said over dessert. “They’re the ones who win the Nobel. But—all right, I’m drunk—I want to change the world. I might not succeed. But that’s what I want.”

  He longed to prove that desire could take fundamentally new paths. To succeed with pedophiles would draw everyone’s attention. The prevailing opinion was Cantor’s, that transformation for such men was impossible: talk therapy couldn’t accomplish it, conditioning couldn’t accomplish it. The only hopes were to extinguish eros with drugs or to teach techniques of self-restraint, the way Liddle did, and pray that they were enough.

  You are drunk, I said silently to Fedoroff at dinner, but then thought of a tribe ten thousand miles away in the jungle highlands of Papua New Guinea. An anthropologist, Gilbert Herdt, had lived among them during the 1970s and discovered that the erotic lives of their boys and men passed through stages as transformative as any redirection that Fedoroff envisioned. The Sambia, Herdt had called the tribe in reporting what he’d found, using a pseudonym to protect the people from an onslaught of Western attention.

  Sambian boys, at around the age of seven, began performing fellatio on the teenage males of their clans. The act was considered necessary to fill the young boys with semen. The fluid would then manufacture more of itself inside the boys’ bodies, but to build up a sufficient base in order to create a life’s supply, the boys had to give frequent blow jobs. In this way, both the young, who swallowed, and the teens, who climaxed, were performing a service for the survival of their people. As the teenagers grew into men, they passed beyond homosexuality, took wives, and impregnated their women. But in addition to allowing for reproduction, the homosexual rites offered pleasure, not only for the teenagers but, Herdt observed, for the boys, who had their favorite partners. Sambian males seemed to pass seamlessly from being homosexual givers of oral sex to being homosexual receivers of oral sex to being heterosexual.

  Audibly, loudly, despite the vast distance and the decades that had passed, Herdt’s research argued that the direction of lust could change—easily. It could change according to a culturally constructed system; the learned seemed far more potent than the congenital, the prenatal. And I’d sensed this often as I spent time with the paraphilic.

  One night, on my way to a lecture the Baroness was giving to a society of sadists and masochists, I glanced up through my taxi window at a billboard in Times Square. The model’s face filled me with a wanting so keen I felt bereft. Then I walked down a set of gray metal stairs and entered the fluorescently lit basement room where the Baroness was speaking. The dominatrixes in the audience had bodies ranging from the thick to the obese; their faces were plain. Yet the room was charged with the craving, the devotion, the love of the submissives who surrounded them. Three hours later, as I headed back through Times Square in another taxi, the woman on the billboard was almost unrecognizable. Her looks had little effect on me. I hadn’t adopted the ways of seeing that suffused the basement air, but I had absorbed them. I hadn’t become enamored of the obese and plain, but my way of seeing had shifted. It would shift back. It wouldn’t take long. A rush of conventional culture, beamed through the taxi windows from the rest of the neighborhood’s huge and luminous advertisements, would be enough to carry out the reversion.

  IF Sambian males could change so radically, couldn’t Michael Thayer? With tight blond curls and a way of locking his gaze to the eyes of anyone he spoke to, he attended one of Fedoroff’s groups each week. He had licked and sucked his young daughter’s genitals, and been sentenced to treatment. Fedoroff had put him on a strong dose of Lupron. Before that, merely reading a book with a child character could overwhelm him. He talked about finishing a novel in which a boy was killed. “I was grieving over this child. Responding as though I was in love. And it was like that in my life. For the conversation, for the teaching, for the sexual—the same as you’d fall for an adult, I would fall for a child.”

  The Lupron put him “totally to sleep.” He lost not only all interest in sex but almost all inclination to socialize. He worked as a groundskeeper outside a government complex, weeding flower beds, scouring graffiti. “People were always around me, asking me for directions. This included children,” he recalled in an e-mail he sent me. “I was a little nervous being around the kids, but that is all. Everything was fine with my attractions.” Then, abruptly, though there had been no change in dosage, he “woke up.” It was Canada Day, and the grounds were thronged. “It seemed that every child in the city was there playing and running around. I had to walk through groups of them to get to the various work sites. It was okay for the first couple of hours, but eventually my defenses and nerves broke down. The thoughts were so severe that I had to rush home. I spent the next two days alone in my apartment virtually in tears. The thoughts lasted for two weeks and refused to give up. It was so bad that I almost approached my probation officer to ask her to call the police and take me into custody.”

  But something still more strange came next. By the third week, he said, the torturous longing for children faded, and by the fourth it disappeared, replaced by interest in adult women. The substitution was far more swift than anything Fedoroff had imagined. Michael remembered that when he told Fedoroff what had happened, the psychiatrist reacted with disbelief that his patient was “awake” despite the Lupron (though he wasn’t so awake that he could become hard), and that Michael’s fantasies had switched so suddenly toward adults.

  After six months, Fedoroff decided to cut Michael’s dose of Lupron by half. Wakefulness increased. Erections, though fleeting, became possible. Fantasies stayed focused on adult women. He began to date. Any thoughts of children were like vestiges, easily put behind him. Recently, he told me, he’d played with his young nieces on the floor. “Not once did I have a deviant thought for any of them.”

  He felt he could do without the Lupron altogether. Fedoroff wasn’t yet ready to take this step. But he trusted Michael’s reports, didn’t think they were driven by the wish to get free of the drug, free of Fedoroff’s watch, and to get back to pursuing kids. Fedoroff saw him as a possible test of his theory. He wanted Michael to find an adult partner, to build a stable relationship. The second language should be given time to develop. Then the Lupron could be eliminated, the full force of eros restored to this man who had danced his tongue between his daughter’s legs with the ardor of love.

  IN a statement Faith made to the police, which I discovered late in my time with Roy, I read that some of the touching, through clothes, began when she was in the second grade. Roy continued to insist that there had been nothing even suggestive of desire until she was eleven, until after that day at the shore. Faith’s father, when I asked about the police statement, seemed unsure when to date the beginning of Roy’s crimes. So I asked myself the obvious: Had the taint of recent times distorted Faith’s vision of the past? Had Roy’s propositions and his groping stained what had once been innocent? But I wondered, too, if I could believe anything he told me. Had he been lying from behind a veil of agonized introspection? Weren’t child molesters often the most deft, the most subtle manipulators? Or was I posing the wrong kind of question? Was the sort of touching she described—a hand on her seven-year-old bottom, through pants—ever innocent?

  With extreme reserve, Liddle fought to impose control. After their time in the tall grass and after their introductions, the men, at his direction, lifted loose-leaf binders from the floor beside their chairs. The blue-eyed poet who’d taken his brother and daughter to a motel room, and the white-haired retiree who’d fondled his grandniece—they owned the type of binder whose leatherette cover closes with a zipper. So did most of the others, as tho
ugh this style could make a binder look like a briefcase and elevate their being here.

  The binders were filled with the homework the men had done and the handouts they’d been given, with “Feelings Journals” and instructional sheets on techniques like “Thought Broadcasting”: “If you get a deviant thought, imagine that your thought is being broadcast from your mind over a loudspeaker system.”

  There was, too, “Punishment Scene”: “When you get a deviant thought, put your mind on fast forward to the part where you are held accountable for your actions.”

  And “Aversive Scene”: “When you get a deviant thought, you begin to think about something that you find disgusting, e.g., Brussels sprouts. Or you could think about an experience that you don’t like, e.g., going to the dentist.”

  Back in the 1970s, Liddle’s boss told me, when the field of child-molester treatment was just developing, the prevailing strategy was psychodynamic—profound insight into the disinterred past was supposed to eliminate deviant desire. Mostly, it didn’t, and by the early eighties, therapy shifted toward behavior modification. Offenders were instructed to inhale noxious odors during illicit fantasies. This brought success, but the success didn’t last. Men plunged back into old longings. So cognitive-behavioral approaches, like Liddle’s, took hold.

  His sessions could seem more like classes in coping skills than anything that could be called treatment. The pragmatic and trite had replaced the penetrating and profound: thoughts of Brussels sprouts to quell deep-rooted need. Yet there were studies to suggest that the practical could displace the dark, that the trite was somehow profound, that the method might cut recidivism—which wasn’t as high as people tended to imagine—by more than one-third.

  Liddle asked the group to open their binders to a handout on “dynamic risk factors.” He called on the white-haired man to read aloud, and the retiree, who liked to reminisce about how, when he was a boy, the probation building had been an ice factory, droned through definitions for the nine factors, from “negative social groups” to “distorted attitudes” to “victim access.” These were to be recognized and avoided. “Intimacy deficits” was another factor that required awareness, caution, rectifying. And complexity lay quietly within this category: if loneliness was unsafe, then molesting involved reaching out for love.

  Roy sat with his binder on his lap. His notebook was the thickest of any in the circle. He tried to think of the course as “a normal college class,” to convince himself that diligence would guarantee graduation. Not only did he have the jumbo zippered binder with labeled dividers that he brought to group; he had another that he kept at home. He threw away nothing. He kept every page of evidence that he did everything Liddle asked.

  On those pages were notes about “positive self-talk,” a method to help the men keep themselves from feeling that they had nothing to lose. Roy was lucky in this regard. He had, for one thing, his job. His boss told me how his own wife felt about Roy: their children were grown, but she would have him in their house even if kids happened to be around. “That,” his boss said, “is the confidence he gives you.” Roy had plenty to lose, and still, driving over bridges, he fantasized about swerving through the rails. Thirty-five years of probation. He fantasized about the fall through the air, the descent through the water, the finality of it. Most of the others had the weekly circle of chairs and little else.

  The pages were covered, as well, with notes on “maladaptive coping responses” and “adaptive coping responses.” If the men woke in the middle of the night having had a deviant dream, what they should never do is lie there, touch themselves. They should get out of bed and get themselves a glass of milk. It was as though they were to swallow purity before returning to the danger of sleep.

  Roy was doing well in Liddle’s eyes. When Liddle asked for a definition and example of an “SUD,” a “seemingly unimportant decision,” Roy answered perfectly. It was like that with everything. His “action plans”—his applications to do what his probation restrictions did not permit—were composed at length and neatly typed out. When his sister gave birth, he put in a request to visit her over the state line. He was thorough in anticipating all the potential problems. “What if my brother-in-law’s friends show up with their children?” he wrote. “What if my brother-in-law’s brother came with his two girls and they were running through the house from room to room? I would say my good-byes and leave.” His request was granted.

  He applied for more and more freedoms, and they were given more and more often. He was allowed to take his fiancée bowling, to take her to the movies, to fly kites with her at the town beach. He asked to perform music at a local bar, which filled Liddle with fear. The bar didn’t attract underage girls, but the therapist envisioned admirers and temptation: Roy picking up a strange woman and this leading—by way of eros unleashed—to his unraveling, his reoffending. Liddle refused the request, but intimated that, if Roy continued to show control, he might be performing soon.

  And Roy applied to host a reception after his wedding to the bookkeeper. He applied to honeymoon down South. The problem with the reception was that the catering hall would be holding more than one event, and at the others, girls might be among the guests. “What if we are outside taking pictures and I need to go in and use the men’s room? Since my brother is the best man, I would ask him to come with me so I was not walking through the building or the hallways alone.”

  ROY’S new wife wore white socks on her shoeless feet, blue jeans, a blue sweatshirt. It was a Friday night, and they had just finished their ritual Friday dinner: pizza and eggplant sandwiches. Now they sat close on their new couch, her feet tucked beneath her. Outside, on the windows, the shutters were adorned with quaint carvings. The house, his house, which she’d moved into, was pristine. The wood floors gleamed, the matching end tables were polished and bare. All felt at once irreproachable and ephemeral.

  She was a few years older than Roy, but young-looking and slim, with brown bangs and a smile that held the endearing hint of an overbite. On their first date—three months after his arrest but before his plea, so that probation’s restrictions and Liddle’s rulings on his action plans didn’t yet determine what he could and could not do—they’d flown his purple-and-aqua stunt kite. They laughed, on the couch, remembering the way it had yanked and dragged her down the beach. Besides the kites and the movies and the bowling, they’d gone for long walks, and he’d confided in her about his crime. “I’ve talked to her about everything,” he said, as I sat with them. “I’ve talked to her about my thoughts when I was committing. I told her, ‘If you’re uncomfortable you can tell me. If you don’t want to see me anymore you can tell me. But I have to be honest with you, I have to be.’”

  “In my heart,” she said, “I don’t think he was this monster he was portrayed as in the paper.” She was thinking of the articles in the small newspaper of his suburban town at the time of his arrest. “I didn’t know what to believe. I couldn’t believe the charges.”

  She described the plaque he’d won at work for most valuable employee of the year. “Who is Roy?” she asked, and answered herself, “He’s very responsible. He’s very kind. Very much like a little boy. Very playful. Very sincere.”

  On the night of the Fourth of July, they had gone to the shoreline park not far from his house and set a gargantuan kite aloft: the one he had outfitted with strobes. From high in the darkness it throbbed beams of orange and green and indigo down through the blue-black to color the sand.

  They shifted closer to each other on the couch. She remembered, “One of the nicest things he ever said to me was that when he met me God was giving him a second chance.”

  He recalled her once telling him, “‘When we go out flying, it’s like an entire new day.’”

  Her voice, as they spoke, was tender yet never fully surrendered to emotion. She could sound, at moments, utterly clear-headed and almost managerial, as though she had accounted and planned for every aspect of the past and future. But just
before their wedding, Roy had talked in group about the meeting they’d had with her family priest, who was going to marry them. They told him about Roy’s crime. The priest asked if she was really prepared for a life with a convicted child molester serving thirty-five years probation. “All of a sudden she was crying hysterically.”

  “I think,” she said now on the couch, “I know Roy well enough to be sure he won’t ever do that again. I think things just got out of hand.” She wanted to take a special training course that would allow her to become an ancillary, probation-approved supervisor for her husband. This would give them a bit more freedom. And she felt it would teach her how to be on guard, how to save him. “I want to be able to recognize the signs, to know what to look for,” she said. “People can stumble.”

  Then her voice sharpened severely. “To this day, I can’t understand how he could write crap like that to a little girl. I tell him that all the time.”

  “She does,” he mumbled, his soft face looking as though he’d been struck. “She does.”

  HIS fantasies emerged during a polygraph test. The men usually took the lie detector twice a year. The most incisive part sometimes came not when the machine was running but, beforehand, when anxiety was unbearable and the subject was asked to fill out a long questionnaire. During this section Roy confessed to thinking about Faith.

  He’d said the same to me, more than once. “How do you turn it off? How do you turn off the thoughts that got you in so much trouble? Those conversations she had with her friend, they’re still vivid in my mind. I’d be lying to you to tell you I’m not sexually aroused. Even at this point.” And the thoughts, he felt, were “burned” into him by the group sessions themselves, by his being forced every week to walk the mazelike corridors and enter the windowless room and sit in the circle of chairs.