Dachau for Queers

This story, including the derogatory title, is based on true events.

****

There are James and Mary, all cuddly by his locker, she looking up to him, dotingly subservient. They are everything you would expect in the male/female archetype: he, tri-sport athlete —football, wrestling, track— and lettering in all three; studious; congenial; probably helps his old man till the land. Ruggedly handsome, chiseled features. Strong hands. Mary is, of course, a cheerleader. Her posture is ballet perfect. She is secretary for student government and has birth-giving hips. Mary is domestically beautiful. Mary knows how to bake the perfect Bundt cake. Mary defers to James. Always. James and Mary come from ridiculously functional homes, from parents who are all four still married to each other, who are Better Homes and Gardens perfect. The four “country club” together and have no problem verbing that status. The two families win standing-ovation applause for satisfying, in a timely fashion, every stage of every theorist’s hierarchy of every development type.

James gives Mary a peck on the cheek, pats her tush. “Now you be a good little lamb,” he says to her; then, “What are you ogling at, Tampon?” he asks me as he passes. He slaps the books out of my hands. He does this when no one is around to impress, a sure sign of confidence. James is overtly accepting of himself: no insecurity issues there. And everyone is accepting of James, and Mary, because they are everything Man and Woman are expected to be, in society, as well as in scripture: I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet (1 Timothy 2:12).

I was born into Ampon in 1946, a surname ripe for feminine slur; and Gene is the name they gave me, the prefix for “birth” as though Mother were proud of that inauspicious event, the one-hundred-fifty-first most popular name for my time. With a name like Gene, I was already destined for low-ceilinged prosperity. Shoe salesman, perhaps. My father is Filipino and my mother is Irish, and that only matters because temperaments matter: my father is docile, my mother is angry; and then there’s the misfit, lost amidst the chaos of warring factions. We have no money; my parents hate each other, my parents hate me, which —defensive mechanism here— is fine because I have no rules other than the understood: a child is meant to neither be seen nor heard. So, I am a criminal, a “psychopathic delinquent” in the eyes of the judge, because I am compulsively truant, and because I “violate social norms.”

There are lots of kids at my high school who skip school, regularly even, and who smoke grass and trip on acid and chant No Justice, No Peace! but they, unlike me, have parents who care, check; are not failing, check; are heterosexual, check.

According to the judge, being queer violates social norms.

I am at school today only because my conscience told me I’d been violating social norms by hanging out at the arcade and playing pinball instead of going to school, but here I am again, the plaything for the norm.

“What are you ogling at, Tampon?”

James, the first most popular boy name for our time, is a senior. You’d think he’d have dispensed with such childish monikers by now, that he’d have evolved to what the police call me, reprobate or pervert or degenerate. I shake my head and quietly pick up my books, which are only for show. I’m not certain I’m even taking these classes anymore, possibly books from last year.

Who gives a shit.

I walk out the EXIT and head to the arcade, hoping Carl will be there. Carl is accepting. Carl is queer. Carl knows how to show me a good time.

****

In 1952, when I was six, the American Psychological Association classified homosexuality as a pathology; according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1), the deviant would be diagnosed with “psychopathic personality disorder with pathologic sexuality.” Because of its irrefutable scientific foundation, the Law translated this into their own parlance, and I became a repeat offender in the criminal justice system. For being gay, in a “gay scene.”

Not acting gay. Not parading about in a thong and a multi-colored feathered scarf, stopping traffic or fondling myself or fornicating in alleyways. I was a gay fifteen-year-old playing pinball in the arcade during school hours when they picked me up and carried me off to Atascadero, a maximum-state facility. Permission for its designed focus on sex offenders was granted by the governor of California three weeks after a six-year-old girl was molested, strangled, and stabbed.

Soon after its establishment, Atascadero became known as Dachau for Queers. And this hell is where I was to spend the next two years of my life.

They showed him the commitment papers,

The judge’s name and other gray-men’s names,

Stopping at his father’s name, and then his mother’s.

Two years of his future signed away in his blood.

Handcuffs clicked, cutting into the fifteen-year-old’s wrists…

I had not been genetically predisposed to be gay, despite my name, and I was not raised by an overly strict father or a stiflingly compassionate mother. The only common denominators are my unfortunate name and my absent parents who, like everyone else, view me as abnormal, a sinner. From an existential perspective: I am gay, so quit your psychoanalyzing and drop your deterministic views. I alone am responsible for making my life meaningful, and despite everyone else who fearfully views me as a monster, an aberration, a contagion, I have accepted my gayness, and every day I work towards my own self-actualization. The only thing I need is a modicum of compassion, a hint of nurturing, without the latex gloves or the antimicrobial prophylactics, in case we come in contact.

This is apparently a really big ask.

****

The Atascadero State Hospital for the Mentally Ill has razor wire and corrections officers. A guard tower looms over the premises. Police cruisers flank the front entrance through which I am escorted. Shuffling my manacled feet, I take in my surroundings: Damp. Gray. Dim. Lights flickering like bug zappers. Manic shouts, pained screams. “Keep moving, faggot.” An officer jabs my lower back with his club. Dirty men are everywhere. Some are lying on the hallway floor, straightjacketed; most are shuffling, manacle-free but shuffling in torn socks or sockless, catatonic, zombie-like. A few ogle the fresh fish and meow, licking their cracked lips. Word will spread quickly.

Sly wolf calls roused behind him howling out another hunger…

Murderers, rapists, homosexuals, sado-masochists,

Child molesters, voyeurs, exhibitionists;

Every twist and turn of sex ended here.

A theater of the perverse…

****

Freud. Sigmund Freud, for Christ sakes. Freud, with his lecherous “stages,” his oral and anal and phallic, a brief respite in the latency to spend the rest of our lives in the genital stage. What the fuck is that about? Sigmund Freud had a perverted fixation, but even Sigmund Freud —the Father of Psychoanalysis, the reference point for every subsequent theory— did not feel homosexuality was a mental disorder, was “curable” or that it even needed a cure.

But you don’t read about this, because it doesn’t sell.

****

It is only my second day, and already I’ve been gang raped. Having flashbacks to my first assault at some “home” some time ago, I fought back furiously. I know I landed a few good blows, but of course I became their prey. The guard seemed to want me to consider it an act of kindness that he put me in solitary seclusion, for your own protection. I did not say thank you. Incarceration —and that is what this is, despite the sign out front— will either kill you or make you stronger. (“Speak in I statements, Gene,” I can hear ‘them’ say.) Incarceration will not kill me. I will become stronger by outwitting the beast.

The “assaults” have now become a bartering process: food and cigarettes in return for…favors. This is an extreme low, but you’d be surprised what you are capable of in the human zoo that is prison.

Men are being tortured here to cure them of their sexual perversion: lobotomies, performed with an ice pick; castration, and aversion therapy, very much like what I read in A Clockwork Orange, released just this year. (I find Burgess’s perspectives on sexuality fascinating.) Men are having electrodes attached to their genitals. I see, hear, metal boxes rolling down the corridor. One guard looked at me and winked. “You’re next.”

A new terror shot through his head as the overhead light

Flickered while each jolt burned into some unfortunate brain.

I know I will not be next, though, because I am still a juvenile. Now that the rapes have been converted to “transactions,” the only corrective measures have been session after session of repeated verbal conversion therapy of the “I am not gay” variety. This is tolerable, being so doped up on their phenobarbital, and I start to comply like a good little pouf.

Compulsory therapy groups; the blind leading the blind,

The deaf speaking to the deaf.

Doctors, doctors, doctors slurping at the public trough

Lest they starve in private practice

Taking two years to decide that he was “unamenable to treatment.”

****

“And Roger, that’s my story.”

“It’s quite a story.”

“The parts [in italics] that I finger quoted, those were parts taken from my contribution to Gay Sunshine, four years ago? I think that’s right.”

“Hmmm…wasn’t the Stonewall uprising in ’69, four years earlier? Was this publication in response to that?”

“I was still in Long Beach then. Yes, I suppose, or perhaps it was just,” and Gene finger quotes, “dedicated to all homosexual predators who must daily endure heterosexual justice oppression.” That is from inmate...prisoner...'patient' number 11302. That number was my name. I do know that in the same year as my publication, in ’73, the APA removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

“Did you ever meet Don Kilhefner?”

“Ha, that fag Jungian quack who started the Gay Community Services Center?” Gene snorts. “No, no, of course not, Roger. Mine is not a big name. Not yet, anyhow. It will be, though, after I die of cancer in 2022.”

“That’s awfully prescient of you, Gene Ampon.” Roger Anderson playfully taps Gene's nose.

Gene puts his hand on Roger’s knee. “Our first date was at the…”

“December 2, Hotel Federal on Market Street,” Roger interrupts.

“Yes,” and Gene playfully taps Roger’s nose. “I didn’t want to tell you all this then, afraid I’d run you off. But, it’s almost Christmas, and because I really need to know that you accept me for all my…my, transgressions, especially over the holidays, I needed to get this out. Are you okay with all of it?”

Roger Anderson leans over and gives Gene Ampron a light kiss on his lips. “Gene, no one is without his demons. The very fact that you are so accepting of yourself makes me love you even more.”

----

The bulk of the information for this unfortunate piece of history was interpreted from the following source:

Romney, Lee and Johnson, Jenny. When Gayness Was a Crime and a Mental Illness:

One Man's Journey from Involutary Confinement to Pride. MindSight News, 22

June 2022. https://mindsitenews.org/2022/06/24/when-gayness-was-a-crime

and-a-mental-illness-one-mans-journey-from-involuntary-confinement-to-

pride/