Personal Blogs

A personal view of two books:

Todd, M. (2016) Straight Jacket: How to Be Gay and Happy London, Bantam Press.

Laing, O. (2016) The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone  Edinburgh, Canongate

The Gay Pride march yesterday (25/06/2016) has emphasised how much joy can be had from celebrating difference, just as the vote on the EC had left us feeling that hate and insular homogeneity was the rule of the day.

I read Matthew Todd because his is a necessary voice. When ‘gay pride’ becomes a means of living in false positives and denial of the obvious – that the experience of socialisation in cultures that marginalises (malignly or benignly) difference is psychologically harmful – then it is not ‘pride’ in self but ‘abandonment’ of self.

The gay movement as I experienced it sometimes marginalised any association between being gay and mental and emotional distress as a means of fighting a large beast – the notion that being LGBTQ in itself was a psychiatric condition. Psychiatry has a poor history in its subservience to ‘norms’. To some extent it can’t exist, of course without them: its bible, the DSM, needs its full title, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, – the notion of statistical norms is equivalent there to ‘diagnosis’.

Matthew Todd from his own and others experience quietly but significantly reminds us that hate and neglect and lack of recognition or self-identification have psychological consequences and that sometimes we have a choice, once we recognise that hurt, to combat it by any means we have of recovery. But Todd follows  the Ruby Wax line to ‘self-help’ and his book becomes in its second half a rather interesting  example of a ‘survivor’s’ self-help book.

It is interesting because it deliberately side-lines approaches built entirely on ‘positive gay identity’ (Alderson 2002 Breaking Out, for instance) to return to the Jungian 12-steps approach associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, where we hit ‘rock-bottom’ before we accept that we need help – spiritual help / a ‘higher power’ (however that is glossed) to guide us. There is no doubt evidence that that works for some people, just as there is for CBT or mindfulness.

For me all of these approaches are useful and, if they save one person from unnecessary distress, they are worthy, but they aren’t the whole story, because they trade in the contemporary notion that to ‘be happy’ is the only meaningful goal of existence.

That is why I remembered Olivia Laing, a writer who might be thought to revel in the opposites of ‘happiness’, with books on Virginia Woolf’s suicide and the river that facilitated it, alcoholic gay and straight male writers and this latest and greatest celebration of the complexity of being different (The Lonely City). Laing does not ask us to like the people whose stories she narrates (I can’t imagine anyone liking Henry Darger for instance) but it does demand our respect for the ‘awfully big adventure’ of life and death. And along the way you confront true heroes like David Wojnarowicz.

Life distorted by harm and abuse is still life and still, if you look closely enough, bears meaning and significance and great beauty. There is no doubt that, given a chance, no-one would want anyone to live as Henry Darger did and no-one, I truly feel, can really feel that his paintings of child abuse are to celebrated but you bless Olivia Laing for seeking (and finding) meaning in the most abject states of being and self-denial – whether in celebrated forms (like Andy Warhol) or one you sometimes wonder whose memorials might have been more ‘happily’ left in a New York ‘dumpster’, where Darger’s paintings of ritual child-slaughter were found.

But this passage is worth 10 books of the like of the second half of Matthew Todd’s[1]:

You can’t think about people like Darger … without thinking too about the damage society wreaks upon individuals: the role structures like families and schools and governments play in any single person’s experience of isolation. It’s not only factually incorrect to assume mental illness can entirely explain Darger: it’s also morally wrong, an act of cruelty as well as misreading. (p. 165)

This is writing that lives in a world still defined ethically and by significance not passing mood. A world we see in her beautiful aside about Owen Jones’ experience in a lovely article – read it if you can’t or won’t read her book – in The Guardian Saturday 18 June 2016, p.5. That article contains every point of political and personal importance made by Todd, without the higher power conversion material. Life means – and it means ‘awfully’ (thanks to J.M. Barrie via Beryl Bainbridge).