Unknown filmmaker | Psychiatric Teaching Interview with Gay Teenager / 1969

the little gray men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown filmmaker Psychiatric Teaching Interview with Gay Teenager / 1969

 

This interview with a truly troubled young New Orleans teenager is one of the most painful documents of the era I have encountered. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen more brutal attacks on young gay men or that I haven’t seen more troubling documented statements of tormented LGBTQ youths. The issue here is that the entire US psychiatric establishment has worked to make this young man feel that he is truly insignificant.

   His dreams are in gray, with men telling him what he should do. I presume his little gray men are the authorities themselves demanding that he join them. “They’d tell me to keep believing in them, that their way of doing things, that escaping through this was right.” But, as he admits, he has not at all been helped through their interventions with his sexual assimilation. In fact, these terrifying fantasy creatures have basically disappeared from his dreams.

      He seems to identify as a bisexual whose childhood encounter with a peer led to that young boy’s feeling he that he had been brought into sexual contact without permission: “One time on of the boys I had relations with decided that he hadn’t done so much on his part to provoke the incident.” Authorities were told, and the young teen, realizing that he is trapped into an impossible sexual scandal, raises enough money to leave town.

     His description of the situation, even though he sounds like he has been “calmed” by a heavy dose of drugs, sounds somewhat like the desperate elderly escapee Carrie Watts of Horton Foote’s A Trip to Bountiful, although his voyage is not into an imaginary world of the past, but a uncertain world of some future. Nonetheless, as in the Foote play his family, having heard from a close female friend of his intent to escape, he is “saved” by his mother and father, who apparently, like so many well-meaning heterosexually normative, and implicitly conservative parents seek out psychiatric treatment which today might be described as something close to sexual reorientation, in this case not occasioned by some fringe element but the approval of The American Psychiatric Association's perception of gay behavior as a medical abnormality that would not be altered until five years after this short tape.

      This young man seems to honestly admit that despite all the help he as received from “coming up here” to the hospital, his sexual desires have not altered, and he is still committed to his then unthinkable bisexual urges.  

      As several commentators to the YouTube reacted, they would like to know what happened to this calmly speaking, Southern-born US boy. But we now know it is the story of not one young man, but thousands like him.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).