Yearning for Love and Cruising for Sex: Returning to Freud to Understand Some Gay Men

As a psychiatry resident, I was once told, “That's what people do in analysis: When they don't have someone, they talk about finding someone, and when they have someone, they talk about how to get along with him or her.”

In my work with gay men in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I found that the difficulties of some gay men's finding and getting along with partners were not openly described in the psychoanalytic literature and seemed to be different in significant ways from the difficulties of other patients. I have never encountered a man who, yearning for true love, spent hours cruising a park in hopes of finding a beautiful woman who would have sex with him right then and there, without so much as exchanging names. Perhaps more men would do this if there were women who would oblige. Among the gay men in my prectice, this “cruising” phenomenon is not so unusual and often is the source of great frustration, confusion, and shame, Is it to be understood as essentially different from the promiscuity in play in a single's bar, or from any other promiscuity for that matter? Can psychoanalysis help gay men who yearn for love, yet end up in a frustrating cycle of cruising for sex, or men who find love in a relationship which then loses the excitement of sex? In other words, can analysis help gay men whose conflicts interfere with their hope of finding and getting along with partners who can be known, respected, and loved, without losing the pleasure of sex?

Freud (1912) referred to the separation of love and sex, as a “Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (p. 179). He wrote about men who could perform sexually with women whom they either didn't know or didn't respect, and about men who were sexually inhibited or impotent with women, particularly their wives, whom they faced in day-to-day social situations and whose respect they needed to maintain. He stated that, other than anxiety, impotence was the primary reason for men to consult a psychoanalyst. Hi