My Gay Tragedy

I sat in my chair, looking through the window across the wide plain to the towers of Lüneburg. Everyone was silent. The therapist turned to the older woman. “What do you see?”—“The Elbe River.” Then she began to tell: Her father, whom she had never met, had died in Russian captivity when she was a child. The loss had defined her life. She blamed herself for not having been with him in Siberia. All her life she had done nothing but help others, save others, protect others. None of them were her father, but each one had the secret task of replacing him. She couldn’t do it anymore. She cried. The therapist asked her to choose several participants from the group to represent figures from her family story. I was asked to stand for her father.

I was forty-seven years old, recently returned from my first visit with my own father. I was agitated and euphoric. I couldn’t go back to my old life, and I didn’t have a new one yet. I must have been unbearable in those weeks of my new half-birth. Everything would change, an intuition told me. I would fall in love with a woman, start a family, and become a successful writer or local politician. I would pull myself out of the swamp of my erotic confusion by my own hair. Animated by these dreams, I gazed out the window as the handsome student sat down.

Suddenly he was opposite me, with his bright blue eyes, his half-length blond hair, his athletic figure, and a face that betrayed the masculine pride of the Orient, despite his fair complexion. I desired and cursed him. I wished him away. I wished that, if he must be here, at least I could conquer him—which at the same time I did not want at all, because I had resolved to put homosexuality behind me. I could not crumble at the first temptation, especially since this young man was, of course, not interested in men. I was desperate.

A moment later, we were standing in the middle of the room. I was a prisoner of war in Russia, and he was the soldier who guarded me. Would he murder me? Would my comrades and I start a riot in the camp? Would I contract a fatal illness? I knew that I was to die, but I did not know how. A tremendous anger rose in me—at my captivity, at his weapon, at his uniform, at his danger, at his beauty, at his power, at my death. I had to empathize with the person I stood for, but didn’t I also have some choice in the matter? Was I really going to die? It wasn’t my time yet.

I charged him. He was on the ground before he knew what was happening. I lay on top of him and tried to hold him, but he was stronger and freed himself. I wrestled him down again, and he freed himself again. This went on for some time. We struggled all over the room, as the therapist stopped the others from intervening. Eventually, I defeated him. I pushed him to the ground, and he did not budge. Furious, he hissed, “I’m going to kill you!”

I had wounded his pride. And perhaps he suspected what I was really fighting against. I desired his desire and feared my own. I feared his erotic indifference. Couldn’t he desire me despite my resolution to be chaste? Couldn’t I reject him (just as he would reject me if I revealed my desire)? But what game was I playing with myself? Wasn’t my escape from homoerotic attraction turning into the greatest and most absurd travesty imaginable? If I desired his true masculinity, I logically also desired his rejection. But only when it was not he who rejected me, but I who rejected him, would I be satisfied. The only way out was revenge. I knew now that I would die. I attacked him for the second time. This time we fought harder, and I lost. For half an eternity I lay on my back in the middle of the room, unable to die. At some point, when peace had returned, I closed my eyes.

For the daughter of the German POW, this scene was redemptive. Finally she could let her father die. And I could look the young man in the face the next day without being plagued by erotic confusion. The struggle with him had liberated me to some extent, even if it was only the beginning of a longer struggle, one that would last for years.

What would have been, I often wonder, if my first child had not been aborted when I was a student? Perhaps even that would not have saved me from what followed. But I believe it would have disciplined and stabilized me. The dog educates the master, and the child educates the father. Everything else would have depended on the relationship with the mother, with whom I was very much in love. Probably we would not have made each other happy in the long run. But at least the child would not have died. This thought later tormented me (much more than my memories of the unhappy love) when I saw the black-and-white photos of our visit to walled West Berlin: Julia looking skeptically into the distance in the deep winter, sometimes smoking, sometimes with her gloved fingers before her mouth.

And I wonder what would have been, if my inclinations had not been met at the beginning with so much enlightened understanding and political goodwill? Perhaps I would have found it easier to renounce sin. Or perhaps the foreclosure of my desire would have plunged me deeper into despair. It may be that the prevailing liberality and lasciviousness saved me from worse.

How I envied those gay men who seemed to pursue their inclination as a matter of course, without inner conflict! For me this was not possible. I look back on my life then as on the life of another person. I see it as expressing an excessive neediness of soul—the need to find, at least for a few hours, relief from a great mental burden. The desires triggered in me by the bodies and ecstasies of others arose from the painful longing for my own more wholesome youth. For I viewed others as happier versions of myself.

Why was I so confused? Why did I flee what I was seeking and seek what I was fleeing? The homoerotic vitality into which I threw myself was, amidst all the suffering, associated with joy, with illustrious encounters and intense experiences, some of which I am still grateful for. Generous hospitality allowed me to spend vacations in France, Switzerland, Poland. I do not want to cut this life off retrospectively—like my grandfather, who one day destroyed all the family photos that included the ex-husbands of his daughters. In this way, of course, many photos of his children and grandchildren disappeared forever. I need to revise my past and yet protect myself from the revision.

I look at everything beautiful in my past as through a filter that imbues things with a doubtful grayness, as if something had been there that didn’t belong, or as if something decisive had always been missing. I must live with tension over the life I regret having lived and regret having renounced.

Renouncing it was hard, harsh. I broke off intimate friendships to avoid temptation. I feel like a recovering alcoholic who must avoid all alcohol. My reserve towards homosexuality is more than justified after all my experiences, if only because of the dangers of infection, which at one point drove me half mad.

On a weekend with a girlfriend thirty years ago, we suddenly became intimate, which triggered a rare feeling in me, the feeling of being embedded in the world—a feeling of the very greatest self-evidence, naturalness, and normality—the beautiful, oceanic feeling of diving into the infinite stream of life by doing exactly what everyone was doing. With none of the many, the very many men I’ve been with has this feeling ever occurred. There have been other intense feelings, but not this one. The lack was long obscured by my exciting life in the big city. Going out in Berlin’s subculture began each time with palpitations and diarrhea—that’s how excited and anxious I was back then.

With good reason. The fear I felt on my first walk through the Tiergarten, past all the dark figures half hiding in the shadows of bushes and trees, testified to my still healthy instincts. But soon I was plunging into the sex clubs, with their impenetrably tangled groups of men, as into a warm bath. I could hardly wait for this experience once the need seized me. But it was not a matter of the boundless fulfillment of fantasies—for where everything is possible and every one of dozens or hundreds of people is potentially a “sex partner,” the nervous worry grows that one will miss the right one, the best one, the actual, true, and saving encounter. The promise is so disproportionate to the particularities that mental frustration may—must—arise alongside physical satisfaction. Absolute sexuality is gnostic sexuality.

And so, as a rule, I avoided sex parties with hundreds or thousands of men. Yet every day there was something going on somewhere. The permanent temptation was powerful, and when occasionally I gave in to it, feelings of disgust and repulsion arose among all the strange, naked bodies. I wondered to find myself in such a dark, sultry, malodorous, apocalyptic place. A residue of stubborn alienation nourished the fiction of my being above the excesses surrounding me—and this fiction allowed me to take part in them all the more easily again. The feeling of revulsion alongside arousal became customary with me. But one night I saw dripping blood in one of the porn movies that ran above the bar. The image disturbed me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It probably contributed to my later turning from the whole scene.

I could hardly have done without these occasional escapes, and yet I felt relieved every time I managed to exit the underworld and go home. It was a strange adventure playground, whose visitors, during one of my last excursions, suddenly seemed to me like playing children.

I was like them. I, too, sought to strengthen my tenuous masculinity by grasping at the masculinity of others. I was driven by the envious hope that these others had something I didn’t. My desire for them was a desire for my own unattainable self. For a few hours, this affirmation—being desired as a man by other men—distracted me from an insatiable lack. It was only a distraction, not a remedy—though the relaxation after the act sometimes made me believe that now I could end this search, once and for all.

My constant need for this relief condemned me again and again to the same disreputable urban places, to those cellars, saunas, and old industrial complexes where one night I felt as if I were among Dante’s shadowy bodies in the third circle of hell. Fortunately, I only tentatively sought the intoxicating enhancement of pain, with the device of leather straps tied tightly around my chest. From this path, on which some are lost forever, I turned back just in time. I was hardly more than a fleeting guest in the torture chambers called “playrooms,” with their slings, ropes, chains, whips, clamps, masks, and other tools, which many men operate in their apartments, receiving visitors in endless sessions, often several at a time, while on their computer screens news of the next and the next fuckbuddy is already popping up and a new day is dawning outside.

But the most disquieting thing was not this wild promiscuity, which at least was accompanied by human contacts, however dubious and brief. No, most disquieting was an image I encountered in an amateur pornographic film, of a very flexible young man performing fellatio on himself. It was a sad parody of the cycle of life, an image in which on the one hand everyone was present—the father, the mother, and the child—and on the other hand everyone was absent. He expelled the woman by replacing her with his own mouth, then expelled the father as the true giver, and finally the child as the fruit of conception.

This bizarre self-insemination negated the need for a beloved, and with it the prospect of wholeness. I was somehow aroused by this crazy picture, a picture in which not even the young man was really present, though he had made himself, through the internet, the absent cause of arousal in countless people. Today I would interpret this excitement as a sign of my longing for a risk-free intimacy in which no one could ever become dangerous to me, not even another man.

The existential hopelessness of the self-fertilizing narcissist is by no means the problem only of this one young man and his audience. It is the problem of homosexuality in general, and it can never be remedied by any social accommodation.

At all times, a man must inquire whether the path he has chosen is the right one and whether it will still be the right one in twenty or thirty years. This necessity applies not only to homosexuality but even more dramatically to the irreversibility of abortion. It wasn’t until late in life that I experienced what a transformative and joyful experience it is to become a father. Parenthood, I have found, is one of the most precious things life offers.

But warnings usually go unheard, and they bounced off me for a good twenty years. I didn’t want to hear the hint of a school friend that there were therapists who could mitigate homosexual tendencies. Still today I understand why a person might not wish to hear about this. Nor should the therapeutic approach be coercive. Social leeway has almost always existed, and it must continue to exist. The problems posed by homosexuality must never be tidied up, for the effort would entail ideology and violence, the leveling of individual cases, and the only thing it would eliminate is humanity itself. These are areas of life that require great discretion and admit of no complete solutions. Today, however, this principled violence has exactly the opposite of its traditional effect. It now exists as pressure on those who do not want to live out their homosexual inclinations. In the interest of freedom, we must restore options that our brave taboo-breakers have made taboo. The alternative is a diabolical monotony.

What will happen when, one day, all the demands of emancipation have been met and yet the fundamental lack has not disappeared? When the most emancipated homosexual realizes that the desire to be “normal” cannot be fulfilled by a shift in mores, nor can it be suppressed? When no kindness in the world can bridge the chasm between me and others, which I find everywhere, on the street, at work, in the cinema? It is an irresolvable paradox: to be the same as another person, and yet to be different in grave ways. It can drive anyone to despair, or to hopeless activism.

The problem concerns not only minorities who are deluded by fantastic hopes of emancipation. All of us wonder who we are; no one is spared the problems of identity. We are what we are because we are not what we are not. But the non-identical is not only external. As a limited possibility of otherness, the non-identical is a part of oneself, and so our task is to unite both sides within ourselves. Nature provides an ingeniously simple means: offspring. Individually, man and woman are exposed to the painful limit of mortality. Only together can they overcome it.

My child is I and not-I in one person. The child is the most natural solution to the identity problem and testifies to the expansion of a man’s personality that is possible only in the love for a woman. Even when a man and a woman cannot have children for medical reasons, their union is placed in the perspective of procreation, which exists only in view of the polarity of the sexes. Since the woman is so different from the man, alien but also attractive, attractive but also alien, the man who desires a woman admits his imperfection—which is why one can only be surprised that the accusation of chauvinism hits the woman-worshiper rather than the gay man.

How often have I asked myself why I had to fight so hard for something that the vast majority of men are given freely! What I would have given to enjoy this natural and unclouded attraction, which almost all men in this world experience! How have I wished that I could free up all that psychic energy for simple existence. Once I watched a group of men sitting on a lawn in the summer and listening to music. They were relaxed, and presumably not gay—which of course does not mean that gay men do not listen to music. But it seemed to me that men who do not look to men can pursue their pastimes and passions with greater peace of mind.

How often have I envied ordinary men for the naturalness with which their glances wander to an attractive woman, not detained by other men, who are noticed, if at all, only as competitors. My erotic disturbing fire has put an unbearable strain on my relationships with such men, whose freedom from homoerotic inclinations, their resting in themselves, was my own highest goal. In my experience, in which I feel confirmed by Marcel Proust, homoerotic longing is directed toward the heterosexual man—who, however, even if he should once cavort in the gay scene, is unlikely to be won over to a love relationship.

It is a tragic constellation. Why do so many get involved? Why do so few want out? If I were a psychiatrist or a psychologist, I would apply my expertise to these questions. Certainly not all gays are depressed. And certainly there are many homosexuals who live quiet lives as couples, far from the urban underworld. But the scene offers something that is otherwise possible only through hard drugs: to go through extreme excitement curves as often as one wants, a prospect that appeals above all to those who have a particular need for release. Of course, the release can never dissolve the underlying tragedy. The internet has created new possibilities of spontaneous satisfaction, which at the same time are new possibilities of long-term failure to exist.

Marriage gives love a chance to grow over the course of years. “Agape takes revenge on Eros by reconciling him,” says Denis de Rougemont. The caring love must become stronger than the erotic one, must calm it down, take it from the realm of fantasy and reconcile it with a concrete person.

I do not regard my homoerotic tendencies as a disease, and consequently I do not speak of being cured. I feel released and liberated because I finally imposed order on a tormenting confusion: “Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil” (Pope Benedict XVI). I believe that my earlier inclinations were determined by biographical facts that had nothing to do with sexuality in the narrow sense—namely the many obstacles of my youth, including my fatherlessness—so that when I finally understood that I was master in my own house, the possibility of sexual conversion opened up. My need for physical contact with men disappeared. Sometimes, especially in summer, they still catch my eye, and then the old piercing longing comes back. But it is ever weaker and rarer.

Nevertheless, peace brings with it a specific suffering: What I have become, I would like always to have been. It is painful not only to remember happiness in times of unhappiness, but also to remember unhappiness in times of happiness. Many people avoid it by never taking up the fight. I am glad that at the turning point in my life, I took the risk. There remains the sadness that often overcomes me at the sight of young couples with children, living the life I always secretly longed for, living it at the right age and with full vigor. I threw off the leather straps that bound me to my childhood, as the Grimms’ coachman threw off his iron hoops in the fairy tale of the Frog Prince. I feel a sad, lucky man.

It’s amazing how today’s public reacts to a change like mine: with a mixture of disbelief, disappointment, and anger. But why? Why should a writer, to whom I hint at a few problematic aspects of homosexuality and gay rights, accuse me of being vicious and destructive, whereas she favors “life”? She has never seen the inside of a swingers club. What do all those people know who champion homosexuality without being homosexual? What motivates their hypocrisy?

Do they know that in the darkroom almost everyone is alone? Do they know the bleakness of some lesbians’ lives when they realize that there will never be a man to provide anything? Do they know how humiliating it can be to cruise for hours when one is not lucky enough to be one of the desirable figures among the night owls? Do they know that among gays, ugliness is sorted out mercilessly? That jealousy flourishes nowhere more than among same-sex people in a small-town bar? Do they know the permanent fear of ever new STDs? Do these friends of the gays know about loneliness in old age, when there is no one to supplement the faulty memories, when there are no children and no children’s children, when after all the years of excess a feeling of emptiness spreads?

The friends of the gays will reproach me for projecting my frustration onto others. They will explain that most gays and lesbians are happy to the extent that society lets them be. I do not believe this and never have. Many homosexuals are satisfied with their way of life, but not all of them. And sooner or later come questions, fears, worries, disappointments, and problems that are undoubtedly part of life, but without the compensations offered by a family.

Where will the propagandists of emancipation be on the day of disillusionment? Will they catch and comfort the despairing? Accusing others of homophobia is all they know how to do. Marriage between man and woman has been so badly squeezed—by the pill, abortion, childlessness, and divorce—that those sexed-up and overaged societies of the West, bleakly bored amidst their extinction, seek a last flowering of dying passion from homosexuals, as fin de siècle Paris sought it from Proust’s Baron de Charlus.

The similarities are striking. Ostensibly out of humanistic enthusiasm (but actually to distance themselves from the rising bourgeoisie), the nobles of Prussia and France embraced the hitherto excluded Jews. In France, the embrace also included homosexuals. Prized for their exoticism, homosexuals were considered far from “equal.” Everything that was foreign and different helped the nobility to escape their own isolation, counter their fear of the oppressive bourgeoisie, and adorn themselves with a prestige they could no longer muster on their own.

Emancipation is always precarious and temporary. This is shown both by the demarcation of assimilated German Jewry from their Orthodox co-religionists in Eastern Europe before World War II, and by the reserved acceptance of French Jews into the already declining world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain one hundred years ago. Today it is no different: We adopt a pseudo-compatibility with everything and everyone, in order to deny our own decline. “Sexual diversity” is the last mirage in the desert.

Its theoretical underpinning is gender theory, which I find has more than a grain of truth in it, and which ironically helped me to do exactly what its political exponents would have nobody do. Gender theory posits the plasticity of “sexual identity,” and thus also the changeability of orientation. In its political application, this thesis is anti-normative, ennobling only deviation, never the norm. Its advocates would no doubt have tried to deny me the means of changeability, due to the sublime inviolability of homosexuality, which is to be protected from any “discrimination.” Yet the basic logic of the variability of sexual orientation spoke to my situation and ultimately helped me.

Politicized gender theory merely imposes on homosexuals another form of speechlessness. It requires denying the emotional state of homosexuals who, despite the culture of affirmation, experience their orientation as a misfortune. The fact that many homosexuals do not experience it this way is no reason to patronize or oppress those who do. They have a right to be heard and to receive support and therapy if they desire. Do the vociferous gay and lesbian associations, which react with hatred to the mere offer of therapies, believe that they can eliminate also the demand underlying it?

It gets crazier when hatred of religion is added to the mix. Nothing gets the functionaries of gay liberation so upset as reservations about homosexuality in connection with a Christian confession, even—or especially—when it is the homosexual himself who expresses the reservation and makes the confession. These people are accorded neither space nor voice in the secular society that prides itself on its liberality and cosmopolitanism. When at the March for Life the counter-demonstrators belatedly recommend abortion to Mary, the Mother of God, we see what the “respect” they demand entails. It is not the rejection but the emancipation of gays that locks them in a mental and emotional prison, in which, in the end, even the consolation of the Christian faith will be denied them.

Persecution of homosexuals has not existed in the West for a long time. I was uncomfortable when the doctor I saw twice in quick succession for gonorrhea gave me a punishing look and a stern remark. It’s not pleasant to find yourself at odds with the world, but it never occurred to me to demand “recognition” or “respect” for my intimate life. The ability to practice homosexuality without social or legal penalty is not at issue. I would even support demands of this kind, but they are redundant. The typical non-gay is now quite relaxed about asking his gay neighbor about his “relationship status,” which the latter also casually publishes on the internet. By contrast, the renegade homosexual runs into a wall of incomprehension. According to the world he ought to be happy, to the extent—and it is great—that he is free to act on his inclinations. Indeed, it is not even necessary for him to be happy, since everyone else is happy for him, and that is really the point.

According to the heterosexual champions of homosexuality, it is such a credit to them that homosexuality is no longer a problem (for them), that the happiness or unhappiness of actual homosexuals need not concern them. Hillary Clinton once publicly reassured a young boy, who allegedly already knew that he was homosexual and was afraid of his future, by saying that his future would be “great” because so many people would love him and believe in him. She wrote thus without inquiring what exactly he might be afraid of and why. And, of course, without knowing what his future would be.

The benevolent condemnation to fixed inclinations is blind to the complexity and unpredictability of individual life. The truth does not lie entirely in either free will or determinism. The most adequate account, in my view, is that of the Christian faith, which alone comprehends the full range between original sin and the possibility of graceful conversion, because it sees people neither merely as driven nor merely as saints, but rather, thanks to the forgiveness obtainable at any time, it places hope in each person and does not reject him when he fails.

Is it true that external influence on sexual orientation does not exist, or if it does, exists only as “compulsory heterosexuality”? Is only homoerotic sensation authentic, inescapable, and unquestionable—unlike all other naturally fluctuating feelings? Are here alone no coercions, no transferences, no displacements, no misunderstandings, no substitutes, no errors, no seductions, no rapes?

The old relegation to privacy and subculture, the “life in secret,” may have accorded homosexuals more dignity than does their nihilistic dismissal to a lack of demands and expectations. The darkroom precisely does not make the gay movement’s promise of happy emancipation. As in the bathhouses of the Middle Ages or Islamic culture, in the darkroom, for all its dreariness, the drive is not a matter of public identity. I think this is the more humane approach to homosexuality.

The West, of course, has gone a different way. The fact of its seeking a historically new solution suggests an awareness of the very problem that is being swept under the rug, namely the tragedy of homosexuality, which like every other human phenomenon is subject to the laws of this life and this world. The tragic is not a privilege of homosexuality. It is a universal experience from which, as the ancient Greeks taught, no one is safe.

Behind the denunciations of heterosexuality as a coercive system, behind the revaluation of all values, lies a prudery directed against the fulfilling life. Sexual pluralism requires a new form of libidinal control, a dominance of narcissistic sexuality, a sexuality without love or encounter, a sexuality of pure arousal, which can render the people in its bondage dependent on public control to an extent no tyrant in history ever dreamed of.

The sexual revolution has instrumentalized homosexuals as a vanguard, and now it directs all its energy against the ontological hierarchy of life and procreation. It fights so vigorously against common sense and, of course, the Catholic Church, that it can only embarrass any reasonable person, even one with homoerotic feelings, to be counted among such fanatics. The celebrated “outing” serves only to send gays to the front, where the war against the future is raging. False paradises turn into true hells. Our task is to recognize this before it is too late to turn back.

Karl Johann Petersen is the pen name of a freelance writer living in Germany.

Image by Anselm Feuerbach, public domain.