Ghosts in the Bathhouse

In The Texture of Traumatic Attachment, Jill Salberg suggests that it takes three generations to process a disturbing traumatic event. The work on transgenerational transmission and healing of trauma has been focused on familial ties and attachment experiences. In the case of gay men, the generations are linked through an identity that isn't familial. Thirty years beyond the worst of the AIDS epidemic, gay men who did not directly experience those years are still haunted by the history. In these cases, we aren't able to speculate about transmission through attachment experience, so how do we think about the way this trauma has been transmitted to and worked through by subsequent generations?

Psychoanalysis, positioned at the nexus of science and the humanities, allows for a certain creativity in its theorizing. We can unselfconsciously conjure up ghosts as the best metaphor for a psychological process we don't fully understand. Selma Fraiberg's powerful 1975 paper, Ghosts in the Nursery, begins; “In every nursery there are ghosts. They are visitors from the un-remembered past…” A young gay child can look out at representations of queerness in culture and have a feeling of “that is me”—a kinship without familial ties. The gay child, unable to locate this aspect of “me-ness” in the home, may have sought it out later in life in places that were safe for gay men to gather—such as bars, bathhouses, parks, and underground societies. Locating myself in what Walt Odets1 would call the middle generation of American gay men, I want to consider the ghosts of my gay forefathers—ghosts haunting a subculture and a home.

People both fear ghosts and search for them. We fear ghosts because they represent something unthinkable. We search for them to learn something about our past. Fifteen years ago, my mother told me I had a great-uncle who was gay. All she shared was that he'd left rural Tennessee for San Francisco in the 1970s