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Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.”-from Psychology Today) The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ for people ‘in conflict with’ their sexual orientation. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it. (“In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. No wonder White lived there for 16 years. No wonder James Baldwin moved to Paris about this time, 1955. The mainstream medical establishment still views homosexuality as an illness, and so it remains a pathology described in the pages of the DSM. He hates his incessant men’s room cruising. He dearly wants the cure his wired shrink has promised him. He is sick shamed by what he is: the crimes he commits, his disease. Sadly he’s in thrall to a speed-freak psychiatrist who promises to cure him. Can you imagine what the climate must have been like in the late 1950s? And this is a narrator who knows what he is by the time he’s out of adolescence. Last I heard, a month ago, there were 77,000 young men still in so-called regression therapy programs run by US churches. We find out later, tellingly, that dad hates men, doesn’t trust them, and is very much a loner, if a successful one. His new step-mother tells of how much the old man has wanted to kill him. The guilt-ridden father naturally hates his son for this and takes it out on him in yard work. The old man’s apoplectic at his ex-wife’s suggestion that his son is gay because of the divorce. During this joyous weather his father (humorless, business-minded) seeks to drive the narrator’s gayness out of him through a superfluity of yard work. Then comes the summer after the narrator’s freshman year at the University of Michigan. The law student William Everett Hunton has to be experienced on the page to be believed he is a cock-crazy maniac, who prefers them short but “beercan thick.” Then there’s Tex the bookseller and Mason his unpaid clerk, and Lou, one of the narrator’s lovers, and Sean, another lover who goes mad so incapable is he of dealing with his “criminal” nature. The nearby filthy metropolis to which they abscond is Detroit. For at the time “The three most heinous crimes known to man were Communism, heroin, and homosexuality.” He meets Maria, an artist, with whom he’d rather fall in love than be gay.
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The two young populations rarely mingle, but our narrator, bored to death, has decided to be different and make the crossing. No, not the real Eton but a fake Eton which is just across the street from an arts academy somewhere in the midwest. The story is set unpromisingly in a 1950s midwest America.
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“Outside, saltimbanques of snow were leaping up and flipping backwards.” ”The sitter was posing as though his profile was about to go on the coin of the realm.” “In the hollow of her neck there was a smudge of red paint, just where a grandmother in a play might have worn a cameo on a black ribbon.” “Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our dreams, unshaved and reproachful.” I love his metaphors: “Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our dreams, unshaved and reproachful.” “In the hollow of her neck there was a smudge of red paint, just where a grandmother in a play might have worn a cameo on a black ribbon.” ”The sitter was posing as though his profile was about to go on the coin of the realm.” “Outside, saltimbanques of snow were leaping up and flipping backwards.” The story is set unpr An astonishing writer.