G. Yeah. Do you know what I used to do with the money?
S. It always has to be in your hand [I guess]. What did you do with that money when I handed it to you the other day?
G. I held it until I spent it.
S. But you didn’t... I didn’t even know how to describe it when it happened—you didn’t take it like a bill and put it in a pocket or fold it up or anything else; you took it and you crumpled it up instantly so that it became a part of your fist.
G. When I gave it to the lady at the store, it was wet.
S. Yeah. So now I understand. When you go into a house and pick something up, you hold it in your hand and you don’t let go of it until—when? ... After the ice cream? You can’t go into the ice-cream place and eat ice cream and hold it. . . the object in your hand.
G. Do you want to bet?
S. Is that right? No, you don’t hold it. You put it down and you look at it while you’re eating.
G. I hold it in my hand.
S. Throughout the whole ice cream?
G. Right, like this [big fist].
S. We’re getting more of the ritual; none of it is casual.
G. Right.
S. So then you get up and you pay for your ice cream and you go out and you get fucked. What happens to the object?
G. I put it down.
S. W'hen you’re getting fucked, you can’t hold on to it.
G. I could.
S. At which point do you put it down?
G. After I go to get fucked. When I’m in the car, I put it down. I put it on the back seat; I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want any part of it.
S. When you’re in the bar, let’s say with the man [picking up the phallic stranger], you’re sitting there with a drink in one hand and the object in the other. What have you done with it?
G. When I go to the bar . . .
S. Oh, I see. When the man part of it starts [on the way to finding a man], then you throw it on the back seat. Is that the end of it? That quickly? The same night it’s already done except in rare instances you’ve kept them a little longer. The rare instances must have been something really mother-and-childish. How long did you keep the drawing [of mother and child]?
G. Quite awhile.
S. How long?
G. Three weeks.
S. What’s the longest you’ve ever kept anything?
G. Three weeks.
S. What’s the next longest?
G. I don’t know.
S. The music box?
G. A couple of weeks. Why don’t you join the police department?
S. It’s similar. Tell me more about stealing money from your mother.
G. I’m wondering what the hell you’re talking about. I would take the money and go out and spend it—not on me, on my friends. I didn’t give a shit about the money. Money didn’t mean anything to me. She was just out of her mind trying to figure out places to put that money where I couldn’t get it [laughs].
S. Isn’t that sort of the feeling you have when you’re in the houses . . . that you’ll find what you want no matter where they put it?
G. Right. It used to be a whole ritual about her hiding the money and me finding it. And I didn’t always take it all. I didn’t take it all. If there were fifteen dollars there, I took ten dollars.
S. To indicate that she had been ripped off.
G. Oh, it was a good indication because I took three-quarters of it. I stole it to rip off my mother and get her right where she lived and she lived in that fifteen dollars or whatever it was. “What are we going to do? I’m so tired and I work so hard. What are we going to do with no money?” She was talking to everybody in general. She never discussed it with me.
S. I think you’ll be relieved if you can remember that the most terrible thing there is for you is your mother ripping you off, cheating you—as a baby . .. and ever since.
G. I don’t know; I don’t know about her cheating me as a baby. I know some of it. I know that my mother rips me off every opportunity she gets. She does it so quietly. Just a word or a look. I think it’s something a little different, though like that. And what it is is that I have to steal when somebody makes me feel like I’m not a woman. Prior to my stealing, somebody will make some remark or some comment or look at me or do something to indicate they might be confused about whether ... at least it confuses me: am I masculine or feminine, am I a male or a female? Calling somebody on a phone and them mistaking me for a man. Some remarks that my mother might make. But if somebody did that every day, I wouldn’t have to steal every day. It seems like it builds.
The impulse to steal disappeared at this point and is still not there, several years later. Although the sense of being deprived recurs, she finally is conscious of what the deprivation is, and with the ritual of stealing exposed for her own inspection, she can look for more direct— and less dangerous and hostile—gratifications. These days, she turns to people and draws from them emotions of love her mother could not give her in the past. And other things are in place, too: Mrs. G. knows now that she is a person, not a penis, and that one need not perform one’s sexual acts in the tight-fitting windows of suburban homes but with the living bodies of lovers. How unfortunate for people when the obvious must be disguised and the bearable truth registered as unbearable.
Because I have shown elsewhere (146) how Mrs. G. created her penis, masculinity, and homosexuality, perhaps a few words will suffice here. As seems true with other women who have strong yearnings to be male—the mothers of male transsexuals (chap. 8) and female transsexuals (147)—a dreadful disruption occurs in childhood that separates the girl from her mother, who becomes unreachable. Their mothers teach the girls— Mrs. G. and these others—that femaleness is worthless, and then, as for instance when brothers are favored, unbearable envy of males is created. These girls become adults: the mothers of transsexuals satisfy this penis envy when they grow their own beautiful phallus, the transsexual-to-be; the female transsexuals do so by the hormonal and surgical “sex change,” which includes a phallus being literally sewn to their bodies. Mrs. G. both grew a penis (via hallucination) and made her whole body into one.
It was her good fortune to lose her need to have and to be a penis; in doing so, she also lost the craving that manifested itself in stealing.
Part III
Social Issues
Chapter 10
Is Homosexuality a Diagnosis?
Since homosexuality is the subject on which many social issues are fought, could it not be the central feature for a study of perversion, a word whose very connotations reek of moral, that is, social, issues? Of course. But because of its complexity and murkiness as an object of study (and especially because there are many conditions in which homosexual behavior occurs), I have kept homosexuality to the side in this search for the meaning of perversion. That cannot be done, however, in regard to social issues, since homosexuality is so pertinent at present. And because it is important, I am troubled at the way this vexatious issue is argued; it is too important to be decided by cleverness, faulty data, authoritarianism, or sophistry. Short-term gains won by noise, wit, or cunning in time diminish the worthiest causes.
I doubt that anyone yet is expert enough to tell us what to do about the social issues raised by psychiatric diagnoses, because no one can know what would happen as the years passed even if suggestions for social engineering were to be acted upon. While we can affect social issues by such jerry-building as is done with psychiatric diagnoses, in time the price paid is too high—and unnecessary. The same attitude applies to all the sexual aberrations—variants and perversions—in which the perverse person does not physically harm his partner or does not, as in the seduction of children, the mentally defective, or the psychotic, take his pleasure by force or other undue influence.