The first thing I noticed about this well-written book was its title, Becoming Gay. The title disturbed me because of a firm belief system I have toward lesbians, straights, and gays. A man does not become gay; he passes through the birth canal and into this world as a gay male baby.
But as I read the book, I realized what Dr. Isay’s title meant. He was referring to the haunting epic journey he had taken from youth until the full realization when he developed an identity as a homosexual man.
Dr. Isay was the more aesthetic middle child between an older handsome athletic brother and a younger parent pleasing sister. Yet neither parent was openly affectionate. His father was chronically depressed. Discipline and child rearing was his mother’s job and she was quick to anger and punish.
Like so many homosexual young boys, Dr. Isay went to summer camps to please his mom and dad, and although he despised the tedium of interactive sports, he knew that watching naked boys in the showers or changing room fascinated him.
As he matured, Isay began to solidify his desire to work as a therapist. As part of his professional training program, first, he had to undergo deep personal analysis in order to fulfill degree requirements. Isay’s psychoanalyst led him to believe he was not a homosexual. His erotic attraction to males masked his true heterosexuality.
According to this analyst, the cause of this gender-switched attraction was the result of Isay’s poor self-esteem and lack of real self-worth as a man. Following accepted theory for the cause of homosexuality, his analyst led Isay to blame his overbearing mother and now permanently absent father; Isay’s father died at age forty-five.
By the time Isay had completed ten years of analysis, he had married and begot two children “all of whom I loved.” Still deeply troubled by his sexual attraction to men, he became convinced that years of suffering through psychoanalysis did him great harm. Believing his analyst blatantly wrong, as a result, he began to form his own theory for homosexuality as he worked intensely with gay clients.
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