When Gay was NOT Okay: Anthony Perkins' Dilemma

 

The brilliant actor Anthony Perkins died of AIDS in 1990, after a long battle with his true nature. Back in the 1970s, unhappy in his career (mainly with being typecast as Norman Bates in Psycho) and feeling lonely and frustrated in his relationships, he took the advice of all his celebrity friends and began to see the avant-garde therapist of the day in hopes of curing his malaise.

According to Tony’s therapist Mildred Newman and her husband Bernard Berkowitz (authors of the wildly popular self-help bestseller How to Be your Own Best Friend),‘Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.’

Their incredibly insightful advice on how to find the road to happiness and self-acceptance:

‘When you do something that makes you feel bad inside, ask yourself if that’s the way you  want to feel. If not, stop doing what makes you feel that way. Instead, do the things that make you feel good about yourself. Love is an affirmation of the living, growing being in all of us.’ These sappy fridge-magnet platitudes damaged innumerable people who were looking for a way out of conflict with their sexual orientation.

Perkin’s friend Dodson Rader (also an unhappy client of Newman's for years) remembered a farcical occasion when Newman and her husband gave a party in their large duplex Manhattan apartment for all the gay men they believed to have cured.

‘The place was filled with about thirty couples, some of them very famous. Every one of them had a wife or girlfriend and they were all trying to prove to their shrink how happy they were in their new straight roles. About an hour and a half into the party, in walked the handsome young actor Barry Bostwick, who was starring in Grease, which had just opened on Broadway. Everybody stopped talking and stared at the door. It was astonishing. As the kid walked around the apartment, I noticed one guy after another would go over to him and slip him their phone numbers. Their sense of self-delusion was laughable’.

The programming (or de-programming) must have worked, for Perkins married socialite Berry Berenson in the late '70s and fathered two sons. But his secret double life never ended - it just went underground. When he tested positive for HIV/AIDS in the late1980s, his wife claimed she had no idea how he had contracted it. The disconnect in his life was profound, and it contributed to his early death. 

I'm sad to say that such forceful attempts to wrench around someone’s natural orientation haven’t ended. The religious right still persecutes anyone who does not match the one-man-one-woman-exclusively-forever ideal. They use Bible verses as projectile weapons to puncture any hope a gay person may have of attaining true self-acceptance. Conservative Christians still see repentance as the only cure, but isn’t the whole thing rather complicated, just like human beings themselves?

BUT NO, Mildred Newman says we can CHOOSE how we feel about everything! Feel bad about drinking alcohol? Don’t drink alcohol, drink Kool-Aid instead! (Or Flavor Ade, which worked well for Jim Jones and the People’s Temple.) The choice is yours. In any case, who needs detox or rehab? Doing something that makes you feel guilty or “bad” about yourself? Just stop doing it, and do something “nice” instead. So if you’re gay, just act straight for the rest of your life and you’ll be happy forever.

But in a significant way, Perkins won. After his death (and his funeral was attended by literally hundreds of his friends and supporters), he issued this statement to clarify the circumstances of his death: 

"I chose not to go public because, to misquote Casablanca, 'I'm not much at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of one old actor don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' There are so many who believe that this disease is God's vengeance, but I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness, and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life."

It's a bit of a trite statement to say "love wins", but sometimes, against the odds, and in the most unlikely of circumstances, it triumphs in the end.