Early Praise for Finally Out
“A must-read. Provides insight into a hidden population of men who have sex with other men but may not wish to identify themselves as gay.” — Abraham Morgentaler, M.D., FACS, Author of Testosterone for Life: Recharge Your Vitality, Sex Drive, Muscle Mass, and Overall Health; Director, Men’s Health Boston; Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
“Finally Out is a much needed book that fills out our picture of how gay men come to terms with the apparent dichotomy between their rational assumptions about the two sexes and their own set of sexual attractions that do not fit that norm. Loren Olson blends the story of his own experience of coming out and an array of scientific information to develop his thesis. An insightful read.” — Amity P. Buxton, PhD, author of The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families; founder of the Straight Spouse Network
“For those who have struggled with coming out, Olson’s expert combination of private struggle and professional reflection will prove invaluable. His down-to-earth, conversational tone makes the work even more accessible, and his story will likely be embraced by anyone facing the same issues or even just intrigued by the topic.” — ForeWord Reviews
“Finally Out resonated for me on many levels as a gay man who married, raised children and came out at fifty-one. Loren Olson's own story of coming out in middle-age touches on universal truths that speak to a generation of gay men who have left the closet later in life or are contemplating that journey." — John Riley Myers, author of Prince of the Pharisees
“Finally Out goes far beyond a coming out story of a married, middle-aged gay man. It represents a carefully reasoned book about all human sexuality. Dr. Olson is so honest and direct that any reader will soon get the impression that he knows what he writes about. Lay readers, both gay and straight, will relate his ideas to their own lives, and professionals in social work, religion, psychology, and sociology will find this book invaluable." — Dr. Bernard J. Brommel, Professor Emeritus, Northeastern Illinois University, and co-author of Family Communication: Cohesion and Change
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Finally Out
Letting Go of Living Straight,
A Psychiatrist’s Own Story
Loren A. Olson, M.D.
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Published by inGroup Press, a division of inGroup Marketing, LLC. Chicago, IL.
FINALLY OUT: LETTING GO OF LIVING STRAIGHT, A PSYCHIATRIST’S OWN STORY. This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to recording, photocopying, file transfer, e-mail, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For more information, address inGroup Press.
Book cover design by Cypress House (http://www.cypresshouse.com).
inGroup Press and the inGroup Press logo are trademarks of inGroup Marketing, LLC. The inGroup Press logo was designed by Shelly Rabuse (http://www.rabusedesign.com).
ISBN-13: 978-1935725046
Visit our website: www.inGroupPress.com
Copyright 2010 Loren A. Olson, M.D.
Smashwords Edition.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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This book is dedicated to the men and women who remain tormented by their same sex attractions, and to those who have lost their lives – or stand at risk of doing so – just because they loved someone of the same sex.
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Jack Drescher, M.D.
Chapter One: I Am Not Gay, but I Might Be a Little Queer
Chapter Two: It’s Just Common Sense
Chapter Three: God Hates Fags: In Bondage to Dogma
Chapter Four: Out from the Shadows: You’re Not the Man You Thought You Were
Chapter Five: Are You Shooting at the Wrong Target? Detox and Rehab for Addiction to Approval
Chapter Six: Ain’t Nobody’s Business: Tricks of the Trade
Chapter Seven: How to Have Sex in a Tree
Chapter Eight: Hook-ups and Not-Quite-Sex
Chapter Nine: In Your Weariness: In the Morning You Start Again
Chapter Ten: Accidental Sex: Never Pass Up a Hard-on
Chapter Eleven: Outed at Eighty: The Infancy of Old Age
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Acknowledgments
One man from East Africa wrote to me and asked, “Do people who condemn us for our same-sex attractions know how we feel?” An attempt to answer this question has been the driving force behind this book. Although Finally Out is about my story, a chronicle of my life would be insignificant except for the fact that it resonates with the histories of so many other men whose stories have never been told.
At the beginning of this three-year project I believed that there were many men like me, who for a variety of reasons had either delayed their coming out or had chosen not to come out at all. The project began with an on-line survey. I wish to thank those who completed it—their responses encouraged me to move forward. Only after seeing these responses did I begin to realize how many men there are who find themselves trapped in a life between gay and straight.
I am exceedingly grateful that so many men from around the world trusted me with the intimate details of their lives, despite taking tremendous risks in doing so. Their stories have enriched my life as well as this book. Many expressed gratitude for having an opportunity for the first time to unburden themselves by speaking with someone who would accept them without judgment. All of them expressed hope that their investment in this book would help others who ask, “Why do I feel something with a man that I don’t feel with a woman? What can I do about it?”
I want to express my gratitude to several people who with a very few words changed the course of my life. First there was Edell Petersen who said to me when I was seventeen, “Loren, I’ve always hoped you’d be a doctor.” Dr. Julie Silver, in her course at Harvard Medical School on writing for physicians, inspired me by saying, “There’s a book inside you.” My agent, Linda Konner, encouraged me by saying, “This just might work if you put your story into it.” I am grateful to Anthony DiFiore at inGroup Press for taking a chance on an unknown author writing about a controversial topic.
I deeply appreciate the helpful comments and support of several people who read the manuscript, or portions of it: Dr. Jack Drescher, Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, Dr. Amity Pierce Buxton, Dr. Bernard J. Brommel, Dr. Carl J. Ratner, Tim Turner, Leslie Wolfe Arista, Judith Gustafson, and John Riley Myers. I am grateful to my attentive editors, Anna Sternoff and Karen Levy, who respected what I wrote while making it better.
I am indebted to the men in the gay fathers’ support group, especially Bruce, who helped me believe that it was possible to be both gay and good. I am grateful for supportive friends and colleagues who have endured three years of my talking about nothing much beyond writing this book. I also want to acknowledge the welcoming community I have found at Plymouth Church.
Writing about my life inevitably exposed others whose lives have intersected with mine; none of them discouraged me from doing so. I have been blessed with a family that has supported me through some difficult life transitions: my daughters, Whitney and Krista, their husbands and my grandchildren, and my siblings and their families. I also wish to thank my former wife, Lynn, whom I still think of as family. I am also grateful to the Mortimer family for welcoming me.
Finally, I want to thank my husband, Doug Mortimer. Never once did he express doubt that I could write this book, nor did he ever complain about the enormous amount of time it took to write it. This book is also his.
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Jack Drescher, M.D.
What does it mean to come out as gay? In the mid-1990s, I wrote a professional book to answer that question. My goal was to explain the psychology of homosexuality and provide an alternative to the rigid dogma that used to inform psychiatric and psychoanalytic discussions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives. In that book, Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man, I offered a range of stories that define some gay men’s identities without offering any singular definition of what it means to be gay. I knew from both personal and professional experiences that gay men of my generation were not like those of previous ones, and that the sensibilities of gay men younger than me differed in other ways. To paraphrase the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, gay identities are not static and vary according to time, place, and culture.
Loren A. Olson’s Finally Out, the story of a psychiatrist and self-described “late-blooming” gay man, is a welcome addition to our understanding of gay identities. Coming out late in life has its own special set of challenges, and Dr. Olson’s book, part memoir and part self-help, poignantly addresses many of them. He speaks to older men who are struggling to come out, to those who already have done so, and to those who know and love such individuals. He recounts his own coming-out process, draws from his own psychiatric experiences with gay men he’s treated, and offers helpful professional advice to individuals and families engaged in similar midlife struggles. All of this practical help is sprinkled with his far-ranging and insightful thoughts about neuroscience, sex research, psychopharmacology, psychiatry, issues of aging, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, gay culture, and human relationships.
As Dr. Olson’s story illustrates, the decision to call oneself gay is not just about one’s sexual orientation. It is also about social identity. It is not just about sex but also about learning to develop intimate relationships with other men. While developing intimate relationships may seem perfectly natural to some heterosexuals, for many gay men it is a process that requires practice. And there are numerous socially sanctioned outlets for heterosexual youngsters that serve the purpose of modeling or role-playing the part of future heterosexual adults. Teenage dating, high school dances, and adult supervision of coed activities help preteens and teens develop interpersonal skills required for later life and relationships. If and when they manage these interactions successfully, an adolescent’s confidence may grow.
Yet those same rituals intended for heterosexual adolescents can generate confusion, shame, and anxiety in kids who grow up to be gay. The closet, which requires that gay people pretend to be straight, imposes a heavy burden. Not only does being in the closet interfere with learning needed social skills, but for many it also may lead to the development of hiding and other coping mechanisms that make it difficult to develop relationships after coming out.
Ironically, younger gay men who come out during their late teens and twenties can appear “adolescent.” They form social cliques characterized by in-groups and out-groups. They place a strong emphasis on style, conformity to standards of dress, a hierarchy of popularity based on looks, and athleticism and affability, and they take advantage of opportunities for experimentation with sex, alcohol, and drugs. For many younger men, this “delayed gay adolescence” is a chance to catch up, in a manner of speaking, with the social skills of heterosexual peers who engaged in similar behaviors years earlier.
The person who comes out later in life faces different challenges. Common points of entry into the open gay community, like gay bars and dance clubs, are usually designed for the pleasure of younger people. Gay men who come out in midlife, having lived in an inauthentic way for a long time and often in need of interpersonal skill-building, may not be welcome in venues mainly catering to younger men. As a result, a pre-existing sensation of alienation from the straight community sometimes can turn into feelings of alienation from the more visible younger gay community, which some mistakenly believe to be the entire gay community.
For these and other reasons, coming out is not always easy for older gay men. Yet the courage to come out is best defined as choosing to do the right thing, not because one has no fear and anxiety but despite having fear and anxiety. In fact, those who come out late do so regardless of the difficulties of making a new gay life for themselves because the painful inauthenticity of the closet is more unbearable. Fortunately, as social acceptance of homosexuality has increased and as more people come out, there is a growing gay infrastructure for older people. These include LGBT community centers and national organizations like SAGE. Of course, not everyone is fortunate to live close enough to a supportive gay infrastructure, but the Internet has eased the isolation of many gay people who rightly or wrongly believe they are the only gay person in a five-hundred-mile radius.
Finally Out is full of helpful advice for gay men coming out late in life and should be counted among the resources for those men who feel they are alone, their families and their counselors. Dr. Olson has written an invaluable survival guide for older gay men with a clarity that is both highly accessible and greatly appreciated.
Jack Drescher, M.D., is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a member of the APA’s DSM-5 Workgroup on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders. He is a past chair of the APA’s Committee on GLB Issues and a past president of the APA’s New York County Branch. He is president-elect of the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry, training and supervising analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, clinical associate professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at New York Medical College, and adjunct clinical assistant professor at New York University's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is author of Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man and has edited more than twenty volumes dealing with gender, sexuality, and the health and mental health of LGBT communities.
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I didn’t intend to write a book. After all, I’m just your average gay, close-to-retirement psychiatrist, living with my husband on a farm in rural Iowa. All I wanted were some answers. A 2007 article by Jane Gross in the New York Times, “Aging, Gay, and Facing Prejudice,” had attached itself to my brain like a barnacle. She wrote that older gay men and women were being forced to go back in the closet because geriatric social service agencies were discriminating against them. Having not come out until I was forty, I was flooded with anxiety. Now in my sixth decade, I imagined that I would need those services before long. I did not want to let go of the feeling of freedom that first surged through me when, in the middle of my life, I recognized and accepted that I am gay.
So I did what any physician would do. I researched the medical literature to see what I could find about mature gay men and women. But my search of both the medical and the lay presses frustrated me; research almost entirely ignored the subject of coming out in midlife, and what little information I found didn’t resonate with my own experience or the experiences of most of the mature gay men I know. The absence of answers led to more questions, which eventually led to this book.
I have chosen to tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is one that I have heard over and over again from tormented men. They feel alone, and they are frightened about sharing their conflict with anyone. As I searched psychiatric literature to find answers for myself, I found that almost everything written addressed issues faced by young men; however, almost nothing was written for and about men who delayed their coming out until midlife. Except for a few high-profile men whose secret life has led to public exposure, these men are mostly hidden from view.
My goal in writing this book is to use my psychiatric training and experience to shed psychological insights into how the brain develops and operates, how self-identity is formed in both functional and dysfunctional ways, and how gay men have the power to change how they feel about their lives. It is my desire to help the younger LGBT community understand mature gay men and help mature gay men see younger gay men as something more than the stereotype. My intent is to offer hope to these men and their families, to tell them they can heal, and to let them know through my own experience that life doesn’t always have to be as painful as it has been.
I am frequently asked—sometimes quite angrily—two questions: “How could you not know you were gay until you were forty years old?” and “Wasn’t your first marriage just a sham designed to protect yourself, and at your wife and children’s expense?” The second question is easier to answer. Although I know that my sexual orientation and my decision to come out deeply hurt my wife and children, I never intended to use them as a shield to protect me. As a psychiatrist, the focus of my life has been to relieve pain, not to cause it. Before I was forty, there was never a time in my life when I was committed to anything more than to being a good husband and a devoted father.
My decision to leave my family came about because I was losing the battle to control the feelings that raged inside me. I worried that my secret life would be exposed. Right or wrong, my judgment was that if I were outed while still married, the potential for humiliating my family and bringing shame on myself loomed larger than the pain I would inflict by leaving. Cheating on my wife, whether with a man or a woman, was wrong, and recognizing I was gay did not absolve me from the guilt I felt about it. Perhaps my reasoning was only twisted rationalization, but I absolutely believed that I faced a choice between only two unacceptable outcomes: either break a deeply held commitment to marriage and family, or inflict shame and embarrassment on the people I love.
The other question, “How could you not know?” is much more difficult to answer. Probing for an answer is ultimately what led to this book. All memories are but reconstructions, but what I can affirm without qualification or reservation is that until I was forty, I had no idea I was gay. Before that, I suffered from a sense that things weren’t right inside me. It seemed that I had to work harder to feel like a man than other men appeared to, but I could never speak of my confused feelings to anyone. I believed that my father’s death when I was three years old had crippled me. It was as if his death created negative space around me, like the optical illusion of Rubin’s vase. Was I really a man or just the illusion of one, defined by that negative space surrounding me?
Jonah Lehrer, in his book How We Decide, captivated my attention as he described how our minds contain two distinct systems of thought: rational thought and feeling thought. Although we prefer to believe that as humans we operate exclusively through rational thought, according to Lehrer, our feeling thought makes up the majority of our thinking and operates continuously and usually unconsciously:
That deep need to repress inner contradictions is a fundamental property of the human mind. Even though the human brain is defined by its functional partitions, by the friction of all these different perspectives, we always feel compelled to assert its unity. As a result, each of us pretends that the mind is in full agreement with itself, even when it isn’t. We trick ourselves into being sure.
That need for harmony in our thinking is why men like me who experience a significant conflict between their rational thought (men should love women) and their feeling thought (I am attracted to men) search for a way to find accord in our thoughts—deceiving ourselves about our sexual attractions. To protect ourselves from unacceptable feelings, we instinctively erect barricades in our brains so that we may hoodwink ourselves into absolute assurance that we are heterosexual. In the process, we unknowingly perpetrate a hoax on our spouses, our children, and everyone we know. If that partition develops even a small crack, it is not a fissure that enlightens our conscious minds; it is a fault line in the darkening lens we’ve constructed that blocks the blinding light of unwanted feelings.
In high school, I was captivated with the idea of becoming a flight attendant, with “flight” being the important word. On domestic airlines in the 1960s, flight attendants were young, beautiful women called stewardesses. Men were only hired as stewards on international flights, and the airlines required fluency in a foreign language. My one year of poorly taught high school Spanish did not qualify me for the job. Looking back, I can see that this, too, was the unconscious operations of my mind, pushing me to break free of the fences created by my traditional upbringing to explore the world that lay beyond Nebraska’s prairies.
Inquisitiveness about how the mind works and why people become who they are, including a curiosity about understanding myself, drew me into psychiatry. As I finished medical school, the unconscious forces in my brain were pushing me to consider continuing my training in New York, Chicago, or New Orleans, but my rational brain told me to get married and remain in Nebraska. A young doctor and a beautiful and educated wife with similar backgrounds and values should have been a perfect match.
During medical school and my psychiatric residency I read—with what I thought was only intellectual curiosity—everything I could find about the “psychopathic deviancy” of homosexuality. Very early in my practice I displayed too much interest in the life of one of my homosexual patients. He came into my office one day and, before I could sit down, stripped off all his clothes. Stunned, I said, “Put your clothes on again, then sit down and we’ll talk about what just happened.” The implications were obvious; unchecked empathy creates what psychiatrists call “counter-transference,” something I should have worked out with a supervisor in training. But, unfortunately, I had been too afraid to discuss any of this with anyone. What led to my earlier study of homosexuality proved to be driven far more by the forces of my unconscious mind than I ever imagined. This incident with my patient served as a wake-up call to me; my interest in homosexuality was much more than just an intellectual curiosity.
Some may read into my story the psychological defense mechanism of “dissociation,” a disruption of consciousness, memory, and identity. A simpler explanation is a child’s belief in Santa Claus. Very young children have no difficulty accepting the fantasy of Santa Claus, no matter how improbable it is. As the child becomes a little older, he or she begins to be suspicious that it isn’t true but wants so badly to believe that the child dismisses all evidence to the contrary. As the child grows even older, the evidence becomes overwhelming and the child must forfeit the belief.
Dr. Jack Drescher, in Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man, provides a thorough discussion of the phenomenon of dissociation, focusing on two principles originated by Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, a gay psychiatrist: “the good me, the bad me, and the not me” and “selective inattention.” Drescher describes one of his patients who referred to his religious beliefs as the “good me,” his sexual feelings as the “bad me,” and the dreaded homosexual feelings as “not me.” Focusing almost exclusively on one experience prohibits awareness of other unacceptable experiences.
Used in this context, dissociation is a ubiquitous defense central to everyone’s growth, and it was certainly a part of my own. The hysteria around sexual abuse during the 1980s and ‘90s, however, has tainted the concept of dissociation. The symptoms of dissociation are easily dramatized, and therapists became obsessed with it. Unskilled therapists pronounced to their patients that if they couldn’t remember aspects of their childhood, they must have been sexually abused, and together they created false memories of horrific abuse that resulted in unwarranted accusations toward “perpetrators,” often unsuspecting family members. Abuse is not a part of my life experience.
I never considered myself pathological, so I did not identify with gay men whom psychiatrists and society as a whole considered sick. I briefly questioned if my intensifying feelings for men meant I might be bisexual, but at a psychiatry conference when one of the speakers proclaimed, “Bisexuality is nothing more than a state of transition,” I immediately dismissed that radical idea as having nothing to do with me. I was not willing to loosen my grasp on heterosexuality if it meant I was going to slip right past bisexuality into being gay. I was heterosexual—with a little quirk.