Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance

by Richard A. Isay

In a study that takes him from the developmental crises of homosexual adolescents to the complex dilemma of homosexual men married to women and the often surprising effects of AIDS diagnoses on the psyhological growth of both the men facing death and those who will survive them, Dr. Richard Isay draws on his own experiences and those of his patients to explore the crucial role sexual identity plays in all stages of human development.

Genres: LGBT, Nonfiction, Queer, Gay, Psychology

210 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Dominic Gadoury]

This was the first book I ever read about coming out. It was the book I used many decades ago when I first came out of the closet, and I will be forever grateful for it.

[Alex]

It's definitely a good thing that this book, originally published in 1997, feels antiquated. Attitudes towards gays have changed dramatically in last 15 years and I'm grateful to have been born when I was.

Maybe I didn't do my homework, but I expected this book to have a more singular, focused narrative. Each chapter focuses on a different group of homosexuals, i.e. those living with AIDS, those living in heterosexual marriages, teenagers, the elderly. I found the most compelling section to be the author's autobiography and the obstacles he faced with his peers in the psychoanalytic field. It's amazing to think that homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness until fairly recently.

While not a modern gay studies book by any stretch of the imagination, Becoming Gay gives one an appreciation of how today's society is relatively tolerant and supportive of homosexuals.

[Kate W]

Read as research for the novel, and it gets two stars for providing some insight into what it's like to be a gay adolescent or gay married man in deep denial. But Isay is about as narcissistic and self-absorbed a therapist as I've ever encountered. If not for him, apparently, gay men would still be getting shock therapy to "cure" them, and the feelings and needs of women married to gay men are dispensed with in a perfunctory fashion.

[Juan]

A potential life-saver.

[Salvatore]

Case studies on gay men accepting or not accepting their sexuality or their version of their sexuality. Also a product of 1990s psychology.

[enja reads]

Richard Isay's Being Homosexual was a groundbreaking work of psychoanalysis that championed a compassionate understanding of non-heterosexual sexuality, seeing it as innate, at a time when the norm was to view it as something abnormal and requiring psychoanalytical intervention with the intention of changing one's sexuality. Isay noted that such an approach fosters increased anxieties, depression and other psychological problems. While that work is intended for clinicians and secondarily for patients, the audience of Becoming Gay is broader. In this work, Isay gets more personal and shares with readers his lived experiences as a psychoanalyst and a gay man and how he managed those two identities at a time when being openly gay could have prevented him from entering into the profession at all.

This work debuted about seven years after its predecessor. Aside from more personal insight into the author's life and the things that shaped his philosophies, while still interesting, the work does not offer much that is new or different - except perhaps to explore the reasons why men who come to terms with their sexuality often do so between the ages of 40 and 45, when they become more aware of the finitude of life and a heightened desire to take advantage more fully of the time one has left, something he admits which is only a very recent phenomenon in human history, as life spans have increased along with material comforts in the post-war period. As our material comforts decline and life expectancy remains high, we must wonder if that will continue to be the case in the near future. There are already clues that it is less so in the years between the publication of Being Homosexual in 1989 and throughout the 1990s, when roughly 20 percent of gay men had previously lived heterosexual lives, and the publication of the new edition of this work in 2009. However, while greater acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community has grown significantly since the start of this century, many recent studies suggest that this tolerance may have plateaued and has actually been sharply in decline since the start of this decade, particularly with the rise of the "manosphere" and the rightward lean across Europe and the Americas - a reminder that historical attitudes are often like a pendulum, swinging right and then left, but never so very far to the left as it does to the right.

[David Stith]

A collection of psychoanalytic case studies which help to illustrate the unique set of burdens of the homosexual male. Quite dry in places - my favorite passages were toward the beginning of the book, the author’s own story of becoming gay. A harrowing read in some places, plodding and academic in others. A good resource nonetheless.

[Neil Mudde]

Way over my head, it is described as "The Journey to Self Acceptance" Dr. Isay is an academic, and the book is geared to academics, and difficult to understand for a lay person like myself, all this confusion about how your relationship ship was with your Father or Mother as a child, "thus causing one to become homosexual, which rarely reflected my personal situation. at an early age I knew I was different from my 6 brothers did not know what it was called, except I would often be accused of being "just like a girl" I was surprised the book was written in 1996 it seems more like something written in the early 50.s

[Jamie harrigan]

this book lead me to a safe life in my discovery of becoming a gay man.