Ghosts in the Bathhouse

GHOSTS OF AN EPIDEMIC

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 unremembered 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 and returned to visit only once or twice. At the time the topic of my queerness was still contentious, so I didn’t ask anything further. Years later I became curious about this ghost in my family. I signed up for an account on a genealogy website and began to search for him. I discovered that Gary, a name my family had never spoken to me, died in 2002 at the age of sixty-seven. I found the address of a home he’d owned in California and mortgage documents that listed a male co-owner. I assumed this must have been his partner, so I wrote him a letter. A few months later I received a handwritten reply on a single sheet of notebook paper. There were some details about Gary’s life but no acknowledgment that this person was a partner or lover.

I’d asked if he had been happy. The answer read; “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about those things.” I wanted for him to have found someone to love him—to have created a new chosen family after needing to escape ours. I wanted him to have been happy. His story informs my story. He was a gay man born in 1935. Did he ever find acceptance from my grandma? Did he lose a lover to AIDS? Maybe dozens of friends? I imagine flying out to meet the man he shared a home with. I want to learn more about Gary and maybe something about myself. Perhaps this is an attempt to transform a family ghost into an ancestor.

ECHOES OF AN EPIDEMIC

It’s midsummer 2022, and while many people are no longer allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to inform daily decisions, a new epidemic is creeping its way into the gay community. There are three hundred cases and counting of monkeypox among gay men in Chicago, and reliable information about how it’s spread and how to get vaccinated is hard to come by. I’m sitting with my patient Alex, who is roughly my age and three months into chemotherapy. The risk of COVID is always on my mind with him, but he wants to meet in my office. He begins today by telling me about people he knows who are getting the monkeypox vaccine. “I thought you had to be a sex worker or have had several anonymous sex partners in the last week to get vaccinated,” he said. “Maybe I’m out of touch, but are that many people doing that?”

I’ve been seeing Alex for three years. He’s fastidious, obsessive, desperate for intimacy but so fearful of closeness and contamination. He has a tender vulnerability that takes time to see. The AIDS epidemic is just one of the childhood ghosts that haunts him. He’s also particularly attuned to how I react to him. I tell myself that there’s no reason he needs to know that I just got my vaccine a few days ago. The information wouldn’t be helpful. I lean back in my chair, comfortable in my decision. 

He continues. “I told my friend Jon that I couldn’t see him for dinner this week because he got the vaccine. I’m not supposed to be around anyone who’s had a live vaccine in the last two weeks.”

“Because of the chemotherapy?” I ask. 

“Yes. Apparently, it’s a risk. They told me about it at the hospital.”

My heart sinks. I have to tell him. I’ve put him at risk here in my office. 

“Alex, I need to tell you that I got the vaccine a few days ago.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay.” He waves it off. “We aren’t sitting that close.”    

“And,” I added, “I haven’t traded sex for money in the last two weeks, if you’re wondering.”

I’m not sure why I added that. Remnants of my Southern Baptist superego tell me to make sure he knows I’m not out at the bathhouses. I should have waited and allowed him his reaction. 

He is a few years older than me, but we’re both young enough to have escaped the worst of the AIDS crisis. Our knowledge of HIV and AIDS came from the evening news, from the jokes about gay people at school, and from the made-for-TV Ryan White Story. I was only six years old when it aired. Ryan White, a child with hemophilia, contracted HIV through blood transfusions. An “innocent” victim of an illness considered by many a deserving punishment for gay sex. I vividly remember seeing the movie and connecting it with homosexuality. My six-year-old mind assumed the virus was lying dormant in my body. I feared that it might make me ill at any moment, exposing me for what I was. 

I never spoke with anyone about this secret ghost until well into college. In my senior year I was in a study abroad program in Mexico. During dinner with my host family, some of the other students began to joke about Parque Juarez. The consensus was clear: stay away. Their insinuations told me it wasn’t violence or crime I was supposed to avoid. I was familiar with the unspeakable nature of queerness, and while still unable to speak it, I was ready to act. I’d never been brave enough to visit a gay space, but with much trepidation, I decided to visit one the next evening. In Parque Juarez, I met Martin, walked with him to his apartment, and looked a ghost in the eyes. This part of myself that I’d thought made me broken, for the first time, felt completely natural. The next morning, I felt like the change in me was visible. I was still scared for anyone to know, yet I hoped someone would read it on my face.

 With this newfound buoyancy, the fear that I’d contracted HIV became an unwelcome stowaway in the back of my mind. The messages of my childhood were clear: gay sex leads to AIDS, which equals death. An image from one of my undergraduate courses flashed in my mind—a guest lecturer there to share his experience with HIV. He carried a bag full of pills and injections with him. His image haunted me.

 I think of how he, or several other older gay men, could have been important mentors or friends to me, but I was terrified of them. Through a process of afterwardness (après-coup), my fear of the contaminated and what I othered so as not to locate in myself has, over time, been transformed into an attitude of reverence, respect, and mourning for these men.

I find myself longing for their past. A past when owning one’s queerness was subversive. When camaraderie was found in secret gatherings. I’m ambivalent about the present—queer engagement parties, adoptions, and the sharing of last names. You can view this history through a lens of excitement, belonging, solidarity in fighting for one’s rights, and you can view it through a lens of suppression, danger, trauma, and death. Both are true. I celebrate progress and mourn what has been lost. I’m aware of my tendency to romanticize a past I wouldn’t have wanted to live in and likely wouldn’t have survived.

During this unfolding monkeypox epidemic, I want to be with my gay friends. In an echo of the AIDS epidemic, we’re encouraged to avoid large gatherings of gay men—no bars, bathhouses, or large parties. Instead, we meet up for a day at the lake or a backyard dinner. We compare our reactions to the vaccine. We talk about the strangeness of sitting in a municipal basement with other cis and trans men waiting for a vaccine hoping to protect ourselves from a virus we don’t fully understand. We recognize the obvious parallels to the past. When I mention monkeypox to my straight friends or colleagues, it’s barely on their radar, and I remember what it means to belong to a subculture. A common threat stokes a desire to be with your people. 

As we’ve progressed to an era in which HIV no longer hangs over us as a likely death sentence, perhaps enough time has passed to process the trauma and tell these stories in a way that we can know and touch. We can celebrate and mourn the lives of those who came before—those who fought, loved, and many who died. We can transform the unthinkable, untouchable ghosts in the bars, in the bathhouses, and in our unconscious into flesh-and-blood ancestors with whom we can weep, act, and love.

¹ Walt Odets in Out of the Shadows considers a tripartite division for contemporary gay men. He postulates an older generation who experienced the AIDS crisis prior to the introduction of effective treatments, a middle generation that did not directly experience the early epidemic but were old enough to have been significantly developmentally impacted by it, and a third, younger group, who may have never associated being gay with the trauma and loss of HIV.