Against My Better Judgement: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist.

Against My Better Judgement: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist. By Roger Brown, New York: Harrington Park Press, 1996, 253 pages. Paper, $17.95. Cloth, $29.95.

Reviewed by Michael R. Stevenson, Ph.D., Department of Psychological Science, Ball State University, Muncie IN 46306; e-mail [e-mail]; and Kathryn N. Black, Ph.D., Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1264; e-mail [e-mail].

We did not begin reading these memoirs, each written by a gay male who has survived the death of a partner, with the intention of writing a review. Based on the recommendations of dear friends, we read them for pleasure, for insight, and perhaps to pass the time on long trips. In the case of this review's first author who has lost a partner to AIDS, these books also provided comfort. We were also in search of books to recommend to undergraduate students in a variety of contexts. However, having savored them over the course of several months, we recommend these memoirs to those interested in the scientific study of sexuality, including teachers, therapists, and even empirical researchers. Each book provides insight into aspects of gay men's lives that have rarely been considered by empiricists. They have tremendous heuristic and instructional value, and are well worth the time investment of sexuality scholars, students in sexuality courses, or gay clients dealing with issues of love and loss. This is so even though only Brown's book was intentionally written to fill "gaps in gay literature" (1996, p.1).

These books could be included in the category methodologists refer to as case studies. However, for a potential reader to confuse them with the usual output of researchers claiming to be scientifically objective would be misleading. They are better understood as descriptions of the authors' felt experience, an approach to scholarship encouraged by some feminists. Brown is an eminent social psychologist who has recently retired from Harvard University. Both Doty and Johnson are accomplished and recognized literary figures. All three appear to use the mechanism of writing about their lives therapeutically to help them comprehend and come to terms with what happened. Perhaps because they all have written professionally for most of their lives, they succeed in making it possible for others to understand, at an unusual depth, their experiences.

In Heaven's Coast, Mark Doty chronicles his experience of his partner's HIV diagnosis, deterioration, and eventual death. Although on the surface this book tells the story of a gay couple learning to cope with the ravages of HIV, it is not the usual AIDS story. It is a kind of journal, memoir, and remembrance woven into autobiographical narrative about his life with his partner, Wally, who died of AIDS several years ago. It describes a kind of connection--a love that has yet to be named, measured, or studied. In the rich style of an award-winning poet, Doty allows us to experience how his love for Wally helped him pass through the grief of letting his lover go while keeping him alive in his heart. It also leads us to ask why is it, as we push toward the close of the second decade of the AIDS epidemic, that researchers have spent too little time looking into the hearts of those who are left behind? Can we not learn something about the human condition, the importance of a primary other, by listening to the stories of those whose life partners have died?

Fenton Johnson tells quite a different story about love. The book jacket description begins: "This is a book about the transformative power of love--how love makes us into the brave and best people we are capable of being." The narrative describes how Johnson meets, resists, and eventually chooses to love and to share his life with Larry Rose, a man he knows to be HIV-positive. It is filled with lessons of the geography of the heart: "how love chooses us, if we let it, rather than the other way around" (p. 31). "What is the cost of cutting love from the heart?" (p. 76). Johnson also muses on the definitions of love:

One measure of love is the ability to speak aloud the unspeakable,

secure in the knowledge of the bedrock on which you rest. To

speak with such frankness of the terrors of the heart--to talk so openly

of the demons within, with no fear on either side of rejection--honesty

of this completeness is the privilege of true lovers

(p. 92) ... one definition of love is its power to bring us out of

ourselves, to force us to venture beyond what we've accepted as

our limitations. (p. 151)

Having chosen to accept this love, they had only months of joy. Johnson has grief, but not regrets, about his choice.

Roger Brown has a quite different agenda. Although this book is perhaps the least well written of the three, the questions that he raises are more disturbing, making the book engrossing. The book focuses on Brown's experiences over a five-year period beginning when he was age 65. Brown begins by describing in detail his emotionally unfulfilling relationship with his partner of 40 years and a life, unknown to many gay youths today, of learning to cruise tearooms for anonymous sex.

After Albert's death, Brown attempted to find love through escort agencies and plastic surgery. His experiences portray an approach to love and relationships that might be described as desperate love or, more aptly, desperate dependency. The book is an account of how a man in his late sixties tries to buy love from beautiful men in their twenties. Why would a psychologist with Brown's stature wish to make these experiences quite so public? Although early on he indicates that he wrote the book because "It is a contribution to the anthropologic record" ("About the Author," page not numbered), he later admits that he did so to provide new information.

Most generally about the idea (attacked in my 1986 Social

Psychology) of evaluative consistency in personality, the idea that

people who look good and act good are likely in all respects to be

good and vice versa, not good. In my book I proposed instead that

"Anything Goes" by which I meant that just about any trait,

action, or appearance can be combined with any other in the same

personality. My own recent life seemed to me to be a good example

of the truth that "Anything Goes." Surely people who knew me

only from reading me or being taught by me or working with me

as a colleague would not guess the fact of Career Crisis, Face-Lift,

and Dream Boys. In short, I was taken with the unexpectedness,

the shock value of my personal life and wanted to disclose it as a

contribution to psychology. (p. 233)

After his partner died of lung cancer, he was finally faced with his need for a primary other:

I expected the devastation that followed. What I did not expect

came after the eventual abatement of pain--after about eighteen

months--a regression to adolescence when the exigent need had

been to find someone to love, a Primary Other, to glue me to life.

So exigent that, at the hopeless age of sixty-six and after a prostate

operation that left me usually impotent, I found I must work at fulfilling

this need and found ways of doing so, ways that were humiliating 

sometimes and romantically thrilling at other times. Why the

need for a Primary Other should be so urgent is too deep a question

for me, but there is no doubt that it is for almost everyone. (p. 7)

This story is therefore about the power dynamics between men who differ in age, status, and wealth--as Brown puts it "the love lives of old professors in interaction with young male hustlers" (p. 233). It is also social commentary not only about love and sex but about ageism, the meaning of success, and the separation of public and private identities. It is a shame that the insights of this book came to Brown after his retirement. We can only hope that by writing it, Brown is offering his experience to others who might use it to inform their own research on love, sex, and relationships. His message should not be construed too narrowly: It is relevant not only to older gay men whose romantic ideals come to life in the bodies of much younger men, but it also raises questions about the extent to which age, status, and wealth influence the sexual choices of other groups regardless of sexual orientation.

Conversations and classroom discussions with students have led us to conclude that many assume that gay men's lives are consumed by thoughts about sex. Much of the empirical literature still reduces what it means to be sexual, let alone what it means to be gay, to the number and gender of partners with whom one engages in a narrow category of specific, explicit behaviors. We want therapists and researchers to read these books because the experience might lead them to ask more informed questions of the people whose life experiences they attempt to understand or quantify. We want students to read these books because doing so will help them understand intellectually that same-sex sexual relationships are no more about fucking or getting fucked than are other-sex sexual relationships. These books will also help readers to feel the love and loss that occur in major life relationships, no matter what the age, sex, or sexual orientation of the partners involved.