Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love

Psychoanalyst Isay trains a Freudian lens on the difficulty gay men have sustaining serious, long-term romantic partnerships. Up against society's prejudice against homosexual love, he observes, they've separated sex and love. As adolescents, gay men suffered the rejection of unrequited affection, but most formatively, they sustained emotional damage in childhood from paternal rejection and/or maternal inattentiveness to their feelings or disregard for their need for autonomy. The result is an inability to fall or stay in love, arising from deep-seated anxiety about dependency, lack of self-love and mistrust of another's love. Isay analyzes dozens of case histories of chronically single gay male patients (he has worked with gay men for more than 30 years), tracing their attachment difficulties to childhood experiences with remote, rejecting or smothering parents. Though Isay (Being Homosexual ) weighs in on the same-sex marriage debate with his secondary argument—that the lack of a formally sanctioned structure further undermines gay commitment—readers looking for a complicated, cultural analysis will be frustrated by Isay's one-note psychoanalytic reasoning. He voices important emphasis on the happiness found in long-term, loving relationships, but his account remains too basic for mental health professionals and lacks concrete strategies for real sufferers. (June)