This essay is in celebration of the Supreme Court recognition of LGBT marriage.

DEVIATES

I did not ask for my first psychotherapy client. She was dumped on me over thirty years ago by one of the psychologists who headed the federal grant that paid me as a research assistant. The doc didn’t want to work with Christine. She brought little value to his publishing efforts and did not fit the criteria for a regular research subject. “Just meet with her a few times,” he ordered. “See how it goes.” And say what, I thought. My Master’s Degree in Social Psychology hadn’t taught me anything resembling therapy.

I had become comfortable with my usual duties—taking subjects’ histories, assessing their circumstances, examining their data. The subjects, classified as “Sexual Deviates” in the grant, consisted of rapists and sadists and men with fetishes (stealing panties from clotheslines or sniffing women’s shoes, for example). And, sadly, since this was the late 1970’s, sexual deviates also included transvestites, transsexuals, and gays, hoping against hope that some behavioral intervention would straighten them out, so to speak.

Some of the deviates wore prison garb, legs shackled, hands bound behind them. Others wore jeans or business suits or tight, brightly colored t-shirts, topped by hair dyed too often. All were male or some variation thereof. Some looked at me. Many didn’t. But they all sat at my scratched wooden desk to divulge their sins and their secrets and their darkest desires before I turned them over to the technicians who would collect more data.

“Data” is a euphemistic term for what the technicians measured. They gathered their information with an instrument called a plethesmograph, known in the trade as a “Peter Meter.” The Peter Meter was attached to the subject’s penis, and while he watched movies or looked at pictures related to his sexual deviance of choice, a needlelike pen on a graph in an adjacent room measured “percent erection” as his penis grew or shrank. They also collected data on “length of time to orgasm” and “degree of satisfaction” in the “Masturbatory Lab,” where, plethesmographed penises in hand, deviates pleasured themselves as they watched or listened to tapes of explicit sexual scenes.

Christine no longer had the apparatus required for the Peter Meter. “James” for most of her life, she had recently had sex reassignment surgery, a radical act in the seventies. When I met her, I was struck by her primness. She looked like an old-fashioned librarian, with her calf-length skirt and black pumps with little stacked heels and her neat pageboy, out of place with her receding hairline. Her face was angular and thin, and she wore silver-rimmed glasses over eyes that had a hard time meeting mine. I hoped she couldn’t see my inexperienced insides quaking.

When Christine told me about her surgery, her voice was high but husky. She was disappointed in the results. She wasn’t sure a man would believe she was a woman. She enunciated her words, her large, manicured hands accompanying them with movements that were ultra-feminine. What the hell am I doing? I thought. Get me out of here. I had not yet heard my favorite definition of therapy: Psychotherapy is two people in a room, and one of them is scareder than the other. Between Christine and me, it was a tossup.

Years later, after other research jobs and extensive counseling in residential centers, I went into the private practice of psychotherapy. One of my early clients had come out as lesbian five years prior. The woman told me she attended and left four churches before finding one that would accept her. “They weren’t mean,” she said, “the people in those four congregations. They were kind. But,” she said, “they were convinced I was going to Hell.”

I was reminded of “Bless her heart”, a common phrase in the South. “Well, she just can’t help dressing tacky, bless her heart,” someone might say, or, “He’s still hitting the bottle, bless his heart.” “She’s a sweet, smart woman,” I imagined those church folks saying, “but she’s going to Hell, bless her heart.”

After the session, I thought about that sexual deviate grant in the seventies, and, in addition to my memories of the “deviates,” recalled details of the Staff there. Though two of the docs were sweethearts, a third one, a married man with two young children, was, as reported to me by his secretary, having an affair with a female researcher in another state. The fourth doc was mad as a hatter, with wild Einstein hair and wicked eyes and a meanness about him that stunned me. He was having an affair too, with the wife of a pharmacist in town. Tumultuous relationships were rampant among the interns. I was a personal trainwreck, often missing work after diving into a bottle of vodka and declining to come up for air.

Professional activities were as shaky as personal ones in the department. Journal publication was coveted and data often skewed by someone’s hopeful hypothesis.“Draw your graph.Then plot your points,” researchers say in jest, but with reason. The best thing I can say about the Staff is that we considered ourselves respectful with our subjects. But, inside, we breathed sighs of relief that we were not the deviates, bless their hearts.

I needed help myself in my thirties and forties, and though I met wonderful, caring therapists, I also met less than wonderful ones: the plump psychologist who stared at my breasts between lewd comments, and, according to a student I taught later, masturbated into a handkerchief during their second session while she sat and watched; the counselor who lived in his office after his wife kicked him out for diddling a client; and the social worker who rented space to me and submitted fake dates of service to insurance companies, forging my signature and those of other therapists on the checks when they arrived, then pocketing the money. I don’t like insurance companies myself, but that social worker was going a bit too far (and eventually to jail, bless her heart).

A few months ago, one of my favorite clients—a big, Italian, computer whiz rock and roller— quoted a line to me from a nineties song by the Smashing Pumpkins. “Tonight, tonight,” the singer declares, “We will crucify the insincere tonight.” The line struck me hard—“crucify” such a strong, blood-soaked word and “insincere” a gentler version of “fake.” I pictured the singer, Billy Corgan, fearful but determined as he persuades his woman to show her deepest self to him, struggling with how much of himself to bare. Then I thought of Christine, and how her bespectacled eyes welled with tears when she told me how hard it had been to pretend she was a man when she knew at her core she was a woman. I remembered that she sniffed the air and asked me what perfume I wore. When I answered “Estee Lauder,” she said “Lovely.” I remembered getting upset when she told me about the leechy, vagrant man she took in and had sex with, and that I saw her as a fellow sister and talked to her about self-respect. The doc who gave her to me disagreed. “It’s probably healthy that she’s having sex with a man,” he said, “however undesirable he might be.”

I saw Christine for only six sessions, and I don’t remember our last one, except that she reeked of Estee Lauder. I don’t know if she had more surgery to improve a vagina she said “would not pass muster, really,” or if she settled into a life of quiet desperation. But I remember how she crossed her legs at her ankles and sat up poised and straight. I can see her nail polish, an unflattering, pearlescent pink, emphasizing the size of her hands. I remember her thinning hair and how I wanted to pick out a hat for her to cover the balding spots, and how she teetered on her tiny heels like a little girl playing dressup. I remember that, at 28, I was a terrified novice, and how, at 44, she crucified the insincere, showing me her real self anyway. Bless her heart. Bless all our little, deviate hearts.

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