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By Root 818 0

imagine that you are in a room with X. He is completely naked. As you approach him you notice he has sores and scabs all over his body, with some kind of fluid oozing from them. A terrible foul stench comes from his body. The odor is so strong it makes you sick. You can feel food particles coming up your throat. You can’t help yourself and you vomit all over the place, all over the floor, on your hands and clothes. And now that even makes you sicker and you vomit again and again all over everything. You turn away and then you start to feel better. You try to get out of the room, but the door seems to be locked. The smell is still strong, but you try desperately to get out. You kick at the door frantically until it finally opens and you run out into the nice clean air. It smells wonderful. You go home and shower and you feel so clean.

These are only words, not incisions or shocks, so their violence may be harder to see until we plug in our own best-loved bodies for the algebraic “X,” with which the instruction begins. There are ethical reasons to desist from such acts of imagination, but images rise unbidden in my mind. A man’s wrist lifts as he pours water from a pitcher, making it seem as if water, wrist, world, exist so this angle can be. A parallelogram of moonlight reads the bumps on his back as he sleeps in my arms. When I fix on these images, I know that to transform the desire they embody into loathing would be a violence as sure as a knife across a painting.

Much of the poignancy of these accounts lies in how many gays “voluntarily” embraced conversion therapy. In his introduction, Katz reveals he tried it himself: “I entered analysis, voluntarily I thought, with the idea that ‘my’ problem was my homosexuality, and my goal a heterosexual ‘cure,’ although even then I was wise enough to know that I never wanted to be adjusted to a society which was itself desperately in need of radical change.” For much of American history, to be heterosexual was a condition of humanity. Anxious to join the human race, even questioning radicals sought to kill their gay selves.

There are books whose covers we wish to close forever. Yet as I began work on the gay struggle against assimilation, I was driven back to Katz’s book and others like it. I wanted to understand how the gay rights movement had successfully retired the conversion demand. But I also wanted to understand my intuition that this retirement has been less than complete.

In telling that story of change and continuity, I focus on psychoanalytic conversion therapies. As Timothy Murphy observes, “Virtually every sexual orientation therapy ever formulated has typically passed into history along with its originators,” but “psychoanalysis has proved one exception to this rule of obsolescence.” The hardiest weed teaches the history of the garden.

The usual difficulty of knowing where to begin a history was solved here through stipulation. Both proponents and opponents of psychoanalytic conversion therapy agree its history begins with Freud. Their agreement ends abruptly there, as each camp brandishes Freud as its champion. I realized Freud’s stance on conversion was complex, and went back to his Standard Edition to sort it out.

A fundamental question raised by homosexual conversion is whether homosexuality arises from nature or from nurture. Freud’s answer was clear—he believed all human beings were bisexual. This innate bisexuality meant homosexuality (as well as heterosexuality) was culturally rather than biologically determined.

The belief that homosexuality arises from a cultural source has often raised hopes about conversion—as present-day conversion therapists say, “What can be learned can be unlearned.” Freud expressed no such optimism. His famous 1935 letter to an American mother states:

By asking me if I can help [your son], you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs