WHAT FOLLOWS is a conversation between Charles Silverstein and Perry Brass that took place at a Barnes & Noble in New York City in early January of this year as part of an event to launch Silverstein’s memoir For the Ferryman.
Charles Silverstein is a psychologist, a gay activist, and the author of eight books on homosexuality. Dr. Silverstein rose to national prominence when he helped to spearhead the actions that would lead the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness. After participating in a “zap” protest at the APA convention in the summer of 1972, he pressed to make a presentation to the committee in charge of the APA’s (in)famous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which he did on February 8, 1973, making the case for the deletion of homosexuality based on research and clinical practice. The year before, a panel at the APA’s general convention featuring “Dr. H. Anonymous” (discussed in this issue by Margaret Rubick) had introduced some of these arguments, and by the end of 1973, the organization had voted to eliminate homosexuality from the next edition of the DSM.
In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Silverstein has founded two gay counseling centers in New York: Identity House is a peer counseling center, and the Institute for Human Identity is a full-scale psychotherapy center for GLBT people. His best-known book is The Joy of Gay Sex, of which he co-authored two editions (with Edmund White and Felice Picano). His latest book, For the Ferryman, is a memoir that weaves his personal story, starting in early childhood, with his professional life and gay activism over four decades.
Perry Brass has published fifteen books, and has been involved in the GLBT movement since November of 1969, when he co-edited Come Out!, the world’s first gay liberation newspaper. In 1972, with two friends he started the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast, still operating as New York’s Callen-Lourde Clinic. Brass’s work often deals with the intersection of sexuality, spirituality, and personal politics. He is currently a coordinator of the Rainbow Book Fair, the oldest and largest GLBT book fair in the U.S.
Perry Brass: I’m very pleased that you asked me to do this. I very much enjoyed For the Ferryman. I felt the book was really four books in one: first, a very engaging account of your childhood in a working class Jewish Brooklyn family, a world that has completely disappeared, and your account reminded me of Woody Allen’s Radio Days; second, an account of the early liberation period of the gay movement, which was centered around the Gay Activist Alliance and your pivotal role in changing American psychiatry’s negative attitude toward homosexuality; third, your amazing twenty-year relationship with William Bory; and fourth, an AIDS narrative about dealing with the trauma of the AIDS crisis, a situation which many people are just now coming to grips with after having lived through the siege.
I’m going to skip ahead and go directly to what I think is one of the most engaging sections of the book and that is the American Psychiatric Association’s change in 1973 that declassified homosexuality as a mental illness. Can you talk to us about the attitude of therapists toward gay and lesbian patients prior to that time?
Charles Silverstein: The attitude was typified as the “cause of cure” school of psychiatry, which was the belief that if only we knew what causes this abnormality, then we could find a proper cure. The problem with that approach is that before you try to cure someone’s abnormal behavior, you need to produce evidence that there is anything abnormal about it—and they skipped that step. They skipped it for many years and tortured people with various kinds of treatment. And, by the way, this is still going on. There is a battle going on right now about the sexual disorders section in the new diagnostic handbook and I question whether there will be any improvements. The committee in charge of that section wants to diagnose everyone as suffering from some kind of sexual disorder, and those of us who are pretty liberal think this is a travesty.
PB: You have a great passage in your book about the road to the APA decision: “The emotional reaction of the psychiatrists to our activities put the power of social change into the hands of gay liberationists.” So what was that emotional reaction?
CS: They were outraged. I remember at some professional cocktail party I attended, none of them would talk to me—which didn’t upset me too much. But they wouldn’t come near me. They not only resented what I was doing, they were frightened that if they were observed talking to me, other colleagues might think they were homosexuals as well, and they didn’t want to be tainted. This even happened at an APA convention. I happened to be talking to a friend, and he walked away and another friend came by and said, “I saw you talking to so-and-so,” and he said, “Is he gay?” I said, “Why would you think he was gay?” And he said, “because he was talking to you.” And I said, “Then Jerry, anyone watching the two of us will think that you are gay.” He just turned around and walked away.
PB: You talk openly about the relationship between certain forms of therapy, especially aversion therapy, and social engineering. This therapy can be used to enforce social norms like heterosexuality, but you also make the case that oppressors often hide under the mantle of being humanitarians or altruists, like the therapists who got paid by self-hating homosexuals to convert them and felt so gratified that they could do the gay community such a favor by changing them. We still see this kind of “altruism” going on with therapists in the ex-gay movement. Do you see a relationship about that period before the APA change and today?
CS: One of my favorite quotes is from Henry David Thoreau: “If I knew for a certainty that a man were coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” The amount of damage that has been done by the psychological and psychiatry professions to help people change—I see it every day at my practice. Patients who were kids in school and called “faggot,” got beaten up, were rejected by their own parents and other members of their family. I think aversion therapy is a form of torture. I think that psychiatrists of that period enjoyed setting up a sado-masochist relationship between them and their patients.
PB: There are some shocking accounts of this in your book, like what the Germans were doing at the time, using therapy that would make you nauseous.
CS: The Germans were using cerebral ablation, going in and cutting out parts of the brain. That was part of aversion therapy. There is a theory connected to it called classical conditioning, but the point is that all of this is just torture.
I was in the audience when there was a press conference, when the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, and I thought how wonderful this is: finally a group of hands got raised at a committee meeting and did something that should have been done fifty years before. And all it took was a raise of hands. And then people objected to the fact that a bunch of guys around a table raised their hands about something, because, that was not the way science progresses. Well, how do you think homosexuality got on the list in the first place? A bunch of guys got around a table and raised their hands.
PB: Let me quote you again, this time about guilt versus shame: “Guilt makes one feel bad, but shame, worthless.” Can you talk about guilt versus shame in your own life?
CS: Very clearly for all my own young life there was the shame of my sexual desire. The important difference between guilt and shame: I feel guilty because I did something, but I can try to make up for it by doing something else; but shame is like a toxin in the body, and no matter what you do, no matter how you behave, it’s always there. So in dealing with patients and their feelings, it is much harder to work with people when they suffer from shame than with people who are feeling guilty.
PB: Can you talk about John Bancroft? He was an English proponent of aversion therapy, who made a big switch when he became the head of the Kinsey Institute and then a friend of gay rights. You were part of that switch, and can you tell us how it came about?
CS: Bancroft is a British psychiatrist who wrote a book on aversion therapy, and he was one of the leading proponents of it. It just so happened that he came out with a new book and the editor of Behavior Therapy journal asked me to review it. It was not a positive review. How should we put it? I nailed his ass to the wall. And he was furious—really, really furious. Later I would learn that Bancroft had become a great friend of the gay community. As a matter of fact, right now he is doing some really great work that I admire. And, by the way, I have never met him. But if I ever do, I think I might stand a few feet away because I think he’s still mad at me for my review.
PB: I want to ask you now about William Bory. You began your discussion about meeting William at the GAA Firehouse with a great quote: “I felt like a shard of metal being uncontrollably drawn to a powerful magnet.” So can you tell us some stuff about this magnet?
CS: Everybody has their types. It sounds so corny, but it was love at first sight. And I loved him more the day he died. The twenty years between the two [events]were a problem. People often fell in love with him. And it wasn’t only a physical thing, because William was a Renaissance man with an extraordinary knowledge of history and culture.
PB: You also said he collaborated on some things with you. He edited work for you, he was a sounding board for you during his more lucid moments.
CS: He had a sense of language that was extraordinary. I don’t mean English. I mean the nature of language and how it was constructed. For instance, he knew we were going to Egypt. We made a number of trips there. He taught himself how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. When we got to the Cairo Museum, he saw this tablet. It was just a tablet to me. But he got all excited and said this is a letter from Ramses the Great.
We were lying in bed one night and I was reading some boring professional paper, and he decided he was going to teach himself modern Greek because he already knew ancient Greek, and so he stole the book from the library, and he sat in bed and opened the book to page one and I would see his finger moving. And in a couple of minutes it was moving faster. And then it’s going faster. And I said, “William, how did you do that?” And it was one of his typical answers, “It’s obvious.” He understood language in that sense. When we went to Italy, he learned Italian. When we went to Portugal, within a week he understood the language and in two weeks he was speaking it. How I admired him. Sometimes he could be pretty angry at me at my inability and insecurity in writing the language.
PB: You talk about that, how he could go into tirades. That leads to the next question. Through this incredible rollercoaster of a relationship, what do you think held you to William through the maelstrom of his many problems—he had drug-related problems, emotional problems, social problems. What was it that held you to him that you didn’t simply walk away from him?
CS: I think there are probably a number of different answers to that, and one of which is, I don’t know. The others are sense of loyalty, the fact that I still loved him, occasionally wanted to kill him. Maybe the fear of being alone. Maybe the kind of discussions we would have when he was not so sick. All of those things.
PB: There was one section when you talked about your feelings about AIDS deniers and AIDS charlatans, which is extremely controversial—
CS: I cannot imagine anything less controversial. I remember what I wrote: I don’t think I used the word bastards—I should have—but these bastards crawled out of the mud and were opportunists and took advantage of people who were going to die, and made money off them.
PB: Looking back on the AIDS period, the worst of times, what lesson do you think that we should keep in our heads from this period? Are there some that are really important not to lose?
CS: I think there are some segments of the gay male community that are rather selfish. The most important decisions of life they make are about fashion—what are the right socks to wear? One of the things that happened during the AIDS period is that we found that there is a different segment of the gay community – people who with love and compassion went out of their way to help other people, who became caregivers. They acted heroically. One thing that happens when you’re caring for someone who is dying—it’s not just cooking and cleaning up—sometimes this body is too frail and has to be picked up, sometimes it has to be put into a bathtub and washed. There forms a new kind of intimacy, and one begins to appreciate more what life is about than whether your blue sweater was bought this year or last. And I think this is a very healthy thing.
