The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story by Doug Wythe, Andrew Merling, Roslyn Merling, Sheldon Merling Page B

from high
school had seen him before, and I’d been warned about the way he’d chain-smoke
through sessions and blow the smoke out his nose, like a dragon. The
“presenting problem” or, in layman’s terms, the reason I gave for seeing him,
was that I wanted a girlfriend. With this therapist, I was able to verbalize
the unknowable, the unspeakable, at last. I shared experiences I’d had in camp,
fooling around with other guys. I knew it was the sort of thing a lot of
adolescent guys do, and it didn’t mean they all grew up to be gay. Next, I
confessed to fantasizing about men. He suggested that I could try to change this.
The way he put it was, “If that’s what you’d like to do, I can help you with
that.” I’m not sure if he came from the school that believed being gay was
something to fix , but he was absolutely willing to help me “change”. At
that point in time, homosexuality had already been removed from the third
edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the official reference book for mental health professionals) and was deemed a
normal variation of sexual behavior. But it was also several years before news
spread about the damage that was being done to gays and lesbians in so- called reparative
therapy.
    He asked me to fantasize about women when I
masturbated, with the hope that I would eventually find it arousing. He told me
to practice doing that. It never worked.
    I expressed a lot of shame and guilt to him.
Still, I never said I was gay. It was still a concept I couldn’t grasp, because
it was a notion I didn’t like. I didn’t like my own instinctual drive. It
wasn’t normal . And yet my best friend was gay. How could I care so much
about him, never judge him negatively at all, and still be so deeply in denial?
    After a few months of therapy, feeling
frustrated, defeated, and depressed, I quit. I had started smoking marijuana.
It helped anesthetize the pain, and for a while I could forget the battle that
was being waged inside of me.
    It took me a long time to rebound from the
disappointment of this therapeutic experience. It’s not that he was so bad. To
a great extent, this therapist was just doing what I’d asked of him. I only
wish he’d known how futile it is to change the source of erotic desire, and had
helped guided me to self-acceptance, instead of certain self-defeat.
    Not long after, I discovered the book Being
Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development , by Richard Isay. Reading it was
a breakthrough in my life. I devoured it in a matter of hours, and when I was
done, I said, This is me . The book provided many case studies of
different people, many of whom I could identify with.  Dr. Isay confirmed some
generalities I’d believed by instinct, and shot down others I’d been less sure
of. One key cliché he debunked was the idea of the “distant father”. He
reframed it, and showed that sons aren’t gay because their fathers are distant,
but rather that fathers distance themselves from sons when they sense they
might be gay. The book touched on every aspect of homosexuality and dealt with
it from the position that it’s normal - not a pathology to be treated and
cured.
    Now that I felt differently about homosexuality,
and myself, I sought a new therapist. At the time I worked at the Jewish
General Hospital as a research assistant. I went to the hospital’s outpatient
psychiatry clinic for an evaluation. “Brief therapy” was recommended. That’s
the kind of therapy you might recommend to someone who is struggling with a
stressful life event that might be treated successfully in a brief period.
    I was assigned to begin treatment with the head
of the Brief Therapy program. That sounded good, until my first appointment.
His office was right across the street from where I was working, doing
neuropsychological testing and Alzheimer’s research. When I walked in, I waited
for a bit in his secretary’s office. There were separate doors for