For the Ferryman: A Personal History
by Charles Silverstein
Chelsea Station Editions
340 pages, $20
AN ACTIVIST since the early 1970’s, Charles Silverstein was one of the key petitioners at the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 “Nomenclature Committee.” He argued successfully for the removal of homosexuality as a category of mental illness in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—a critical development which, as Silverstein argues in his new memoir, has had profound social, cultural, and political consequences on an international scale. Like many gay men of his generation, he oscillated between closeted self-denial and the self-destructive pursuit of a succession of best friends who each turned out straight: Steve, Pete, Mark, all documented in For the Ferryman. He spent seven years trying to turn heterosexual, undergoing a range of psychiatric treatments that he now characterizes as “futile, guilt-producing and expensive exercises in sexual repression.” Only at 35 did he resign himself to his sexual character, still having “no idea what homosexuals were like as people.”
Professionally, Silverstein made up for lost time and proved both ambitious and energetic, opening two of the first counseling centers for gay people anywhere. He was also founding editor of the Journal of Homosexuality, a key catalyst in promoting the notion of GLBT studies before such a thing existed. Most of Silverstein’s subsequent publications have concerned counseling and psychotherapy, but he is best known among lay readers for the more accessible The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with novelist Edmund White in 1977.
It is perhaps too easy today to overlook just how trailblazing this combination of sex manual and gay lifestyle guide was. White himself was scarcely a household name, having only published the cult novel Forgetting Elena (which had only a covert gay theme). Neither he nor Silverstein had anything to gain professionally by coming out so forcibly. But American readers in the tens of thousands gained immensely, discovering forms of lovemaking that they may never have heard about except as a comical or contemptuous allusion. The book achieved something more complex and contradictory: it mapped out the myriad ways of being gay socially, without proselytizing for any single route. In this sense, its companion volume was White’s equally individualistic volume of travel pieces, States of Desire (1980), which documented gay lives in many American cities.
Both books read very differently today in light of the health crisis that erupted soon after their publication, changing everything for those gay men who would survive the epidemic. Two revised editions of the manual (1992, 2003)—collaborations between Silverstein and Felice Picano—took into account the vicissitudes of AIDS, the first in a pre-treatment context and the second in relation to the world of ARV therapies and beyond. It is understandable that Edmund White—who left New York in the early 80’s to gain distance from the decimation of his peers, only to become one of the first to test HIV-positive himself—would feel unable to undertake these revisions. Temperamentally, Picano—himself HIV-negative but generationally and personally close to many of the early victims of AIDS—was a smart choice; he sustained the no-nonsense approach to Eros and much else at a time when more influential mouthpieces in the U.S. press and broadcasting media either promoted or failed to counter rampant distortion, conjecture, or plain misinformation.
Comparing the volumes now is instructive. Unsurprisingly, while White and Silverstein addressed both aging and inter-generational relations in the first volume, later editions included (among many health-related issues) strategies for coming to terms with grief and death. Indeed, an awareness of mortality had become one of the cornerstones of latter-day gay existence. Silverstein, meanwhile, continued his pro- fessional work, writing extensively on the practice of psychotherapy with gay men.
His interests were prescient in another sense. The 1977 book A Family Matter: A Parents’ Guide to Homosexuality addressed the common dysfunctionality of parent-child relations in a way which was informed by a personal grounding in gay liberationist thinking. Hundreds of memoirs, self-help books, and treatises have given space to feelings of disappointment, inadequacy, or betrayal experienced by parents who had struggled to accept their child’s homosexuality. Silverstein took it as axiomatic that there was nothing inherently wrong with being gay, while, by the same token, there was no point in obfuscation, denial, or attempts at change. The book simply told parents two valuable things: how to deal with the stigma around their son or daughter’s sexual identity, and why they must do so.
A recent recipient of a Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Practice of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation, Silverstein has now found time to look back on his achievements and struggles as an activist. At its core, however, For the Ferryman is a reflection on his personal life, something initially characterized by more modest aspirations than the professional one to which it deferred. His dreams of a passionate relationship were more than answered by the arrival of a mercurial, 23-year-old self-styled and self-taught faun, William Bory. Bory was a (largely) frustrated younger poet whose sole collection, Orpheus in his Underwear, appeared in 1993, months before his AIDS-related death. Paradoxically, it is for the warts- and-all portrait of the underachieving Bory—by turns manipulative, deceitful, drug-addicted, and criminal—that For the Ferryman deserves to be read and remembered. Theirs comes across in many ways as a maddening, mutually delusional bond. Silverstein is only too aware of the many occasions on which his intellectual grounding failed to translate into constructive ways of behaving. Responding to Bory’s often intentional provocation must have tested every aspect of Silverstein’s view of humanity. Here he was, advancing a humanist psychology of mutual gay support, while paired with a partner who craved censorship, correction, and even abuse.
Silverstein’s own temperament might be described in various ways, but narcissistic is not one of them. His portrait of Bory—enriched rather than compromised by its determined, stoical truthfulness—constitutes a moving, devotional act, even as, in their actual lives, Silverstein and Bory increasingly struggled to connect. Silverstein’s awareness of the random, self-contradictory estimates of both psychiatry and therapy with respect to human sexuality is, to his credit, repeatedly confirmed. He admits to having been an unorthodox, if not transgressive, psychoanalytical patient himself. When Bory’s drug habits start to wreck their relationship, the author acts on his own perceived need for counseling—but informs his new therapist bluntly: “You won’t have anything to do except listen to me for a few weeks. That’s all I want right now. Please don’t interrupt.”
An unarticulated argument ran between Silverstein (whose ongoing professional development is founded on a broad acceptance of the principles of instruction and tutelage) and Bory, an exemplary autodidact who was born on the decidedly wrong side of the tracks. Bory was apparently someone whose mind could endlessly and indiscriminately absorb whatever came its way. He so lacked any capacity for modesty or subservience, however, that he would fail exams that he should have aced, simply because some questions on the paper offended him on principle. He would refuse to reply.
This opposition between the two personalities—between a love of learning and a refusal to be educated—is characterized by Silverstein as a kind of complementarity. It may initially have brought benevolent heat and light to the relation- ship. However, Silverstein eventually concedes that he now feels he largely failed to provide what Bory needed most: a paternal figure capable of insisting upon boundaries, someone who established and maintained clear, inflexible rules. Their age gap was fifteen years, but in terms of achievements the gap grew larger as time went on. Still, on occasion, Bory’s inclination to fantasize could brilliantly counter Silverstein’s more prosaic pursuit of veracity. Bory must have been an exhilarating (not to say terrifying) dinner party guest. But as fear enveloped him—first of literary failure, next of imminent debilitation, once diagnosed as HIV-positive—his inventiveness took on less benign forms. He moved from “soft” to “hard” drugs, going as far as a heroin habit, though crack cocaine damaged him the most.
Many sketches in For the Ferryman point to Silverstein’s interest in diverse characters, from the “abrasive” Charles Socarides, an “ideal opponent” in the argument concerning homosexuality amongst psychiatrists, to White, Picano, S/M author John Preston (whose biggest kink was choosing to inhabit Portland, Maine, in his later years) and Keith McDermott, who acted in Equus on Broadway and more recently wrote Acqua Calda (2006).
Anyone brave enough to launch a gay press today deserves credit (if not therapy, given market conditions). The Chelsea Station imprint is to be applauded for picking up For the Ferryman after others passed. Still, as Silverstein admits, his expression is not always accurate or stylistic. While other hands have played a role in constructing his narrative, it is nevertheless littered with distracting typos and errors, cumulatively selling it short. In a single page, for example, we read of “food that he could ate,” of “Carlo Levy” (for Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli), and of the Italian “passengiata” (i.e., the Passaggiata or evening stroll). Jessie Helms, who died in 2008, is referred to in the present tense. A wise editor might have argued for a shorter, tighter manuscript; the art of writing so often revolves around determining what can be left out. When Silverstein describes how when traveling abroad he and a friend disagreed about how closely traffic regulations should be observed, I confess my interest flagged.
References to the author’s relationship with Bory indulge the latter’s love of ancient legend but can also risk hubris: “We were like Achilles and Patroclus, for two decades, political soul mates side by side battling against homophobic institutions.” This isn’t, strictly speaking, what happens in The Iliad. Incidentally, if Bory’s output was slight, it was also marked by wit and pithiness. Briefly employed to review gay porn movies, he responded to one called Sodom and Gomorrah succinctly: “The book was better.”
Despite the longueurs, Silverstein’s story is well worth persevering with. He offers among the most moving accounts of the individual and generational loss wrought by AIDS, as well as something still rarer: a sharp, non-idealized account of the period preceding the epidemic. This was, the reader deduces, not just the oft-touted “golden age of promiscuity” but a time in which gay men struggled to define and accept their sexual selves. Shame haunted many, while the overturning of shame itself sometimes led to questionable conduct. Silverstein reminds us of our ongoing, shared responsibility to be open to self-criticism: “I lacked the courage to end the relationship”; “My only desire was to hurt him. I wanted my words to kill.” Finally, he has Bory visit in a dream. The imaginary lover describes the erstwhile pair as “Gilgamesh and Enkidu” (which seems rather more like it), but also instructs Silverstein to “find another man to love”—something the author tells us he has not done. Instead, to our advantage, Silverstein did what he could almost never persuade Bory to do: put pen to paper and commit words to the page.
Richard Canning teaches in the English Department at the University of Sheffield, England. His edition of Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory
