The US has become ground zero for gaylib, its rise following WWI, turbo-charged by WWII … and its slow decline following the dramatic AIDS crisis, which swept the world in the 1980-90s and lingers on today, proof positive that the 'gay lifestyle' is toxic, pathological. Three memoirs provide snapshots of the life and death of gaylib:

Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A subjective approach, 1951, 1957.

Jack Nichols, The tomcat chronicles: erotic adventures of a gay liberation pioneer, 2004.

Darrell Rist, Heartlands: A gay man's odyssey across America, 1992.

The tide is on its way out. Trump started the countdown with his ban on transⁱ in the military during Trump 1, didn't mention it in his campaign for Trump II. He make short order of it by announcing in his first day of Trump II that 'there are only two sexes, male and female' and then purging anything with the whiff of it from US policy, foreign and domestic. Hardly a peep from the woke crowd. Corporate America followed suit by pulling funding from gay marches (which never got beyond Europe, Brazil and Mexico).

Trans became the sacrificial goat of the movement, and Trump's cold water was like waking people from their woke dream/ nightmare fad of officially-approved self-mutilation-in-the-name-of-inner-peace. Trans really is the Stalingrad moment, Custard's Last Stand: either push back towards the previous era of relative sanity where same sex attracted (ssa) live unhappily at the margin with prostitutes and drug addicts, or welcome a new, gleaming 'reality' of equal rights which encourages people to self-destruct, to defy reality reality, with 'science' to back them up.

Memoirs provide lots of snippets, albeit filtered through partisan eyes. But then we postmodernists know that there is no neutral observer, especially regarding sex. Freud led the way with his own self-analysis, using his dreams and enivronment to forge his theories. All three authors are upfront about their agendas.

Good (as in 'heal thyself')

Cory (pseudonym for Edward Sagarin 1913-1986) wrote in the first flush of gaylib, just after Kinsey's dubious revelatory Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). Sagarin was no activist, calling merely for ending the criminal label for homosexuality, considering it a disease/ perversion (or maybe not). He opposed his homophile friends who rejected the sickness theory of homosexuality. His belief was that homosexuality was 'a disturbance' that probably arose as a result of a pathological family situation.

His 1957 second edition backtracked on the 'maybe not' and he assured readers he was able to overcome his own antisocial longings and was happily married, even as the militant march of homophilia was in full swing by the late 1950s. The beatnik generation of writers championed it (whether they indulged or not). Suddenly the 'love that dare not speak its name' was cool. He was aghast and warned against the love 'that can't keep its mouth shut.' He argued it was wrong to equate homo with hetero. 'Distress, loneliness, promiscuity, depression, superficial gaiety can't be overcome by tolerance. Exclusive homosexuality is mental illness and needs compassion, help, not just tolerance, acceptance.' A symptom of underlying neurosis.

Desires and behaviour are malliable and can be healed, like alcoholism, drug addiction and prostitution. He.also cast doubt on latching it on to minority rights, as there is no uniform understanding of this sexual perversion, which went mostly unnoticed. Understandably, his ambivalent survey of the 'scene' and his conviction that the newly coined 'gay' lifestyle was destructive, a perversion, consigned his thoughtful personal critique to oblivion, though he is still considered the 'father of the homophile movement'. In the 1957 edition he had firmly rejected his initial call for extra civil rights protection for homosexuals but no one bothered to read the 1957 preface. It's omitted from the Internet Archive free version. He would have approved of Trump's cold shower.

Bad (as in 'anything goes')

Nichols and true love Lige Clarke

Nichols (1938-2005 Lige Clarke) was the next generation He met and admired Sagarin but became an activist for the new love that wouldn't shut up, editor of an early weekly GAY, co-founder of the Mattachine Societies of Washington, DC, and Florida, happily living out a promiscuous lfe, finding a soulmate later in life, who promptly got himself murdered in Mexico (all gay love seems to be either tragic or boring). His Odyssey was a low-life nihilistic romp, often penniless, but with a well-behaved magic wand that convinced other lonely marginals to feed and clothe him till the next adventure.

He remained a gaylib believer to the end and his shallow frolic, celebration, has made him a 'gay icon'. For all his militancy, I can't remember any altercation with the law. It seems his best sex was with someone his friends explained was a psychopath. He went for him anyway (who says homosexuality isn't perverse?) and the ex-marine remains his most vivid escapade. His memoirs are more proof of Sagarin's old fashion 'Gay is bad/ sick. Heal.'

Ugly (as in 'unvarnished truth')

Rist (1948-1993) is the most interesting odyssey, experienced and written during the height of the AIDS epidemic – from which Rist died the year after publishing his Odyssey – but not a gloomy read at all. I would consider it a classic of American travel writing, enjoyable by straight or gay, wildly different characters in mostly small towns, backwaters, even the Acadian bayous of Mississippi. Accessible and interesting to normal readers, as most of the characters Rist encounters are not really 'gay' at all. It turns it most men who indulge in ssa (same sex attraction) are married to women with kids, mostly happily so, and fly under the radar.

Rist wrote in the late '80s when sodomy laws were still in place in 25 states, the military was officially homophobic, and gay marriage was just a dream. His drama-queen New York activist crowd feared a new Nazism, but instead, as he lay dying in 1993, the wall of tradition came crashing down. The sodomy laws were never seriously enforced anyway, mostly used to try to prevent gays from acting out at public toilets, and this continues apace today without them (as well it should). Holland legalized gay marriarge in 2001, California in 2008. Gay lib morphed into LGBTQIA... the alphabet brigade. What's called the homosexualization of America, a new gay lifestyle that supposedly is cool for straights as well – promiscuity, casual divorce, no kids, drugs/ sex/ rock'n roll. Secular, capitalist heaven.

Rist did not live to see this heppi end, but he was already disillusioned with the rosy, pink gaylib America. His quest was for a gay brotherhood of likeminded radicals, rejecting traditions of ma, pa and kids, founding a new nation of healthy homos, freed from prejudice to live healthy lives, proud. By the end, though he met lots of great guys (and gals), mostly not gay at all, mostly happily 'in the closet', just having an adventure or forced into ssa at work camps or jail. Family values seemed to be alive and well outside of big cities, even among most ssa.

For something as elusive, changeable as sexual desire, there are no real stats. Forget Kinsey, who was a biologist, a data-collecting nerd with an agenda to 'prove' all men can be catalogued on a 6-point scale of hetero-homo. His sample was downtown New Yorkers and transients, word-of-mouth. Guess who showed up in spades? And his definition of homosexual sex included pre-teen boys fooling around, which is not sex at all. It seems the (happily married) Sagarins are the majority, with or without healing.

The hardcore gays are a tiny group 2-3% of grown men (maybe 30% of ssa), who are indeed sick, hating/ fearing women, stuck in their pre-Oedipal mother fixation. Neurosis by definition is doing something that you believe is healthy, whereas your sex is only a defensive mechanism, a symptom of an underlying disorder. These are the activists, who must prove that their refusal of normal sexual relations is valid, healthy.

The gaylib agenda of homosexuality being just as 'good' as hetero is nonsense, but it is now the pillar of woke ideology and is pushed on all public school children, right down to kindergarten, with gay pride month, drag queens cuddling children in libraries, where gay teen novels and lots of gay studies have pride of place, and teachers who resist are simply fired as bigots, not even defended by their (woke) trade union. The 'lavender scare' of the 1950s turned on its head, this time targeting law-abiding Christians, as opposed to secular misfits.

More ssa men are married to women than to men (about 10%), which has always been the case. The men who don't manage this are clearly neurotic, frightened of/ hating women, which can only be a neurosis, identified by such psychoanalysts as Edmund Bergler (1898-1961), whose Basic Neurosis (1957) identified the fundamental neurosis for humans as psychic masochism, which we all suffer from to some extent as a result of early childhood development, the trauma of weaning (the baby-mother fusion must be successfully broken leading to the maturation process). The homosexual boy doesn't pass this hurdle and move on to the Oedipal identification with the father. He confuses breast/ penis. All women are the Bad Mother who withheld my milk/ sperm.

Life becomes a repetition compulsion, homosex a secondary defense against being devoured by Bad Mother. Bergler interviewed thousands of ssa (his One thousand homosexuals 1957 and other books available free on Internet Archive), analysed hundreds successfully, many prominent actors, writers, businessmen. No names, as that's the point: you have unwanted antisocial behavior and you want to get on with life, so heal and then blend in, no testimonials, no soapboxes.

Bergler saw the writing on the wall – his sharp critique of Kinsey was simply ignored as unwanted bitter medicine – Kinsey became the Bible of gaylib, and Bergler's tough-love healing was suppressed, ridiculed. After all, homosexuality is normal, right? Now it is illegal to want to get rid of unwanted ssa. Mainstream Protestantism, already collapsing as a social force, embraced gaylib as it continued its own slide into irrelevancy, now abandoning the mother-father family as a key part of its social message. Marriage long ago lost its backbone, with easy divorce, so the homosexualization of secular America makes sense, though it is a bleak sense.

I wasn't expecting much from Rist, so was pleasantly surprised when his gritty realism confirmed my own critique, both of us having lived through the gaylib rollercoaster ride, me coming within a hair's breadth of Rist's fate. He travelled all over the US, even Alaska, mostly relying on referrals along the way, trying to avoid the fledgling gay activist groups, reckoning, rightly, that most ssa is under the radar, as has been the case since time immemorial. He seems to have had some sex along the way, though that was not his purpose. He travelled as an activist documenting ssa far more than gay lives. Few of his acquaintances were interested in the politics, most resented the loud circus of gay marches and nelly behavior flaunted in public.

His intent from the start was to frame the narrative culminating in the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987 (the first was in 1979, modeled on the historic 1964 civil rights march with MLK's 'I've got a dream'), 'advancing into the liberty of a sexual Canaan,' he writes, already tongue-in-cheek. He starts as the militant activist, in search of a gay brotherhood: Rist grew up intellectual, sissy, always thought of straight-acting men as fooling themselves. Jocks were his mortal enemies. I posited an exclusively gay world in which I would be the consummate insider. So despotic can the social vision be of a man who feels he's always been slighted. This is the myth-making impulse that drives the gay movement and fuels a monolithic vision of gay brotherhood.

He ends in disilluionment, realizing that ssa is not comparable to racism, that his own exclusively ssa is sick, fringe behavior. He reenacted Sagarin's own journey of dissillusion. Most of his 'gay' characters (as opposed to bisexual men) grew up in dysfunctional families ('father unemployed, my mother was a prostitute most of my childhood, killed by one of her tricks.'). For most ssa, homosex is more a stopgap, a way to make easy money, or just a phase on the way to manhood, not an end in itself. A gay lifestyle is limited to anonymous big cities. For the first time since 'coming out', I felt I no longer belonged to all this. The great wave of gay sentiment rolled over me and left me dry. My journey had turned inward.

By the time Heartlands was published, Rist had died of AIDS, and the bloom was off the rose, though it has had an afterlife, coasting on decades of tired militancy. In a nice metaphor for 'The End', he and friends attempted (unsuccessfully) to help a terminal AIDS friend die at home with sleeping pills.

However, the inertia of gaylib kept pushing for more rights, more public profile, culminating in the trans mania. Rist met the new Republican gays who proved to be refashioning the gay movement as integral to US government policy, dubbed the Gay International by cynics. Democrats made it central to political correctness, now dubbed the woke movement. 'Coming out' became the new mantra, something which Rist realized was anathema to most ssa. The US flies the rainbow flag at its embassies abroad, especially in countries where homosexuality is illegal or restricted (Africa, China, Russia, Hungary). Rist saw this coming and was disgusted by the commercialization, commodification of his cherished civil rights dream.

One of his last stops was an interview with Rob Rozencranz, two years into a life sentence for machine gunningⁱⁱ a school friend Steve who crashed a gay party he was hosting, beat him up and outed him to his parents.

'My dad was someone I really looked up to. The whole thing with me and Steve was a huge trauma for them, and this [Rob's being gay] has become a lesser thing. Lesser than the fact that at the time I was sitting in the LA country jail facing the possibility of the death sentence, and now I'm here serving life.ⁱⁱⁱ If it hadn't been Steve, it would have been me. My own suicide was an inevitability with me during those years, around the time when I matured. If I get exposed I'll kill myself. Steve's violence got downplayed a lot because everyone wanted to stress the closet issue. Steve came at me with weapons.' [Broke his nose. Forgive?] 'Well, we all contributed—Steve contributed, Joey [his brother] contributed and I contributed. We were all immature. Suicide is a big thing here [prison]. Half this facility is a medical facility, just people who're constantly medicated so they can deal with this environment. There's transvestites in here that walk around in the best drag they can put on, given the limitations of dress codes. They're always with their man—a big, strong daddy type—and they're a couple. Guys that fuck because no women. Not gay. 'Safe sex' is about eluding the guards. The only safe sex is a cell together. In a way it's a healthier environment here than on the outside. Straight with effeminate cell mate. These relationships so common that it's just not an issue.'

Murder for the unhappy 'gay' here was a secondary defense to cover the worse crime -- homosexuality. This encounter impressed upon Rist the vagueness of the male world. As if to achieve some clarity, he then went to Seattle to visit Steve Maidhoff, the notorious S/M activist. It's been my experience that only man-boy sex can arouse such gay disgust as is directed toward S/M. Gays bombarded the gay paper with hate mail after the last NLA leather convention. All sex is S/M. Leather just adds theater to it. Yes! The essence of gay is neurosis. You as sadist are basically fucking yourself as a masochist, reenacting the masochistic pre-Oedipal relation with the withholding Bad Mother. S/M reenacts separation, this oral-based anxiety.^iv Too close to home for activist, proud gays who are in fact the most repressed, the most neurotic. Their activism is a secondary defense, justifying their neurosis as healthy. Gay Pride. S/M lays bare the neurotic origins. Crosses for crucifxion. Paranoia pervades it.

Rist's very last visit, and most elusive, was with an older black activist Leroy, an official in the Curduroy Club, the largest black ssa organization. Apart from drag queens, black are very much in the closet. Confirming, apart from casual sex, unofficial ssa apartheid. He realized racism was far more important in their lives, along with family. Homosex was a luxury and a secret. Gay pride marches are almost exclusively the (white) 'collective West'. So much for 'gay' as an oppressed minority. Calling it that is an insult to blacks, Muslims and other genuine oppressed minorities. At bottom it is a sickness, a pre-Oedipal fixation, at best a stopgap for normal males deprived of women. Not 'good'. Nothing to celebrate. The gaylib bacchanalia is over.

Of the memoirs, the least satisfying is the gaylib Nichols, happy with his thousands of conquests/ adventures. The most sober, pushing you to try to heal from your neurosis is Sagarin. The most touching, pess-optimistic, is Rist, with his failed struggle to find a gay brotherhood, but his discovery of the many satisfying ways to survive with this disability, for it at the very minimum is that, warping your thinking, isolating you from the real male brotherhood, with its uncompromising quest for union of male and female in its healthy, god-given form. Homosexuality is always secondary defense, where male-female cathexis is impossible for external or internal reasons. If you can't have male-female bonding, you can never be a real man, but you can still love, however flawed that love may be.

Sagarin and Bergler (maybe Sagarin was his patient?) prove that where there's a will (and good psychiatry), there's a way. The 2-3% of men who abhor/ fear women, and never know the beauty of genuine male-female parntership, not secondary defense male-male cathexis, are missing a lot. It's never too late to confront this neurosis, to stop hating/ fearing women. The Kirkus review of Heartlands compared it to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Yes. No pictures but gritty vivid, poignant word portraits of mostly lovable people from most walks of life across 50 states. I was sad to leave Darrell and his hundreds of friends behind. The beauty of a world seen on its own terms through many Others' lives. 

Reparative therapy is illegal in much of the white 'collective West' but genuine Christians and those ssa not in thrall to gaylib still quietly pursue it. Rist's encounters with evangelicals were fascinating, impressing on my the strength of this unique good/bad American cultural phenomenon. The key is really, really wanting to change, and strong religious faith is a big advantage. James Franco bucked his gaylib fans with I am Michael (2008), about a gay activist like Rist, Michael Glatze, who gave up his lover, activism to be a small town preacher with wife and child. He's not the happiest looking person, but it's better than living a phony life based on unresolved childhood trauma masquerading as 'normal'. When pestered about his own sex life, Franco politely said, “Gay in my art, straight in my life.'

---

See also Essays on Gaylib and Feminism ebook by Eric Walberg