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I want to discuss some large and important topics in psychoanalysis, but I would like to begin with some personal memories. In 1975, newly divorced at 32, I came out as a gay man and moved to New York City from Rutgers, where I had been teaching English. It was a period of great personal freedom and sexual license, full of frivolity and waste, but I have many happy memories of the people I met and the things we did together. AIDS was still six years off. Most of the friends I made then are dead, and my memories, happy as they are, are darkened by grief and regret.
I became involved in the new gay movement. Many of my friends were intellectuals who loved to argue about how their sexual lives fit into the larger project of emancipation for gays, women, people of color, the poor, and — yes — straight men. I also entered therapy, primarily for personal reasons. I had been using Freud and Jung for years in my literature courses, but as I read more seriously and systematically, I decided to become a therapist.
I left for Ann Arbor for training in psychoanalysis at the graduate level, feeling sure I would return to New York as soon as I got my degree. For reasons I do not fully understand, I stayed twenty years. Several things happened while I was exiled in Michigan amid the alien corn. I reconfirmed my commitment to psychoanalysis as a method of treatment and a system for understanding. I could not get certification as an analyst because of my sexual orientation, but I completed a seven-year, four-day-a-week, on-the-couch analysis with a classically trained British analyst. I wrote a book — originally my doctoral dissertation — which was a critical history of the psychoanalytic theory of male homosexuality (Lewes, 1988), and I began to practice. I was one of the few openly gay male analytic therapists in the area, so I got to know a varied group of gay male patients, who remain my touchstones for thinking about psychoanalysis and homosexuality. And I lived with my lover, B