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"The Only Place You'll Find a Happy Gay is in a Coffin"

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EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

The Only Place You’ll See a Happy Gay is in a Coffin

Sex maniacs no longer rape, transsexuals return to their original gender without surgery, gays boldly fall in love with women, men remain men until age 80... To achieve all this, you only need to visit psychotherapist and sexologist Yan HOLAND, head of the sexual perversions department at Nizhny Novgorod Clinical Neuropsychiatric Hospital No. 1 and chief psychotherapist of the Nizhny Novgorod region. Komsomolskaya pravda is the first newspaper to which Yan Genrikhovich has agreed to give an interview.

Yan Genrikhovich developed his unique methodology, curing 60 homosexuals, 5 transsexuals, 30 people with severe sexual perversions, and dozens of people with severe obsessive neurosis. The first results appeared in 1967. Goland's dossier contains about 10,000 video and audio cassettes with recordings of patients. He is one of the creators of the first Soviet edition of "Private Sexopathology," and the author of more than 50 monographs. Long before Kashpirovsky and Chumak, he began conducting public psychotherapy sessions. Now he conducts sessions once a week in the Kremlin Concert Hall of Nizhny Novgorod. As an author of rare accomplishment in the field of medicine, he is listed in the "Who's Who" directory—but holds no academic degrees or titles.

— Yan Genrikhovich, whom do you choose [to be your patients]?

— Drug addicts, alcoholics, people suffering from schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis are immediately rejected. With the rest, I have long conversations. I'm primarily interested in the motive for being in my office. If a person has an internal need to change their lifestyle, if they view their attraction to the same sex as abnormal, degrading them as a person, preventing them from having children and a family, I begin treatment. With those who would never have come to me if gays were suddenly given freedom in this country, I part ways.

— And are there many like that?

— Enough. But even those who sing the praises of the gay lifestyle still understand the tragedy of their passion. I remember once a university professor who had served time for sodomy came to me to seek my expertise. He kept singing hymns to homosexuality. I asked him: would you want your own son to run around public bathrooms looking for a lover, writing ads there? No, he said. A happy homosexual can only be seen in a coffin. It's a heavy cross to bear. Even in the hopeless Brezhnev era, people would decide to open up to a doctor. Once a deputy minister came from Moscow. He literally begged: I want to be a normal man, not a minister. For the entire treatment period, he got a job at the supermarket next to the hospital—as a meat cutter. Now he's happy, married, has two children.

— It’s known that treating homosexuals with psychotherapeutic means, let alone transsexuals, is practically impossible. Freud himself tried to help such people, but unsuccessfully.

— Over the years, people have tried all kinds of treatments for homosexuality: electroshock, hypnosis, insulin. They’ve tried transplanting various organs, even castration. But it's all useless. One Czech doctor even invented the following method: he would have the patient look at photographs of men while taking emetics, to help him develop an aversion. I had a young mathematician from Novosibirsk who also took emetics, then ran to the dormitory basement where he lived and shouted: "Men disgust me!" It didn't help.

I use all methods of psychotherapy. Therapy’s cornerstone, as is well known, is psychoanalysis. Everything else is applied depending on the disease. If when treating neurosis I use this neurosis, here, on the contrary, sessions last 6-7 hours with hypnotic suggestion, demonstration of slides, videocassettes. Sexual outcasts have a mass of neurotic experiences, I try to remove them, extinguish the attraction to their own sex. Gradually the patient enters a state of sexual-psychological vacuum, when the attraction to their own sex is already absent, but to the other is not yet developed. The reaction to this sexlessness varies. Some are happy—finally free, others worry—the doctor took away attraction to their own kind, but will he give another in return, just as strong? Others alternate between joy and depressed states.

Then comes the consolidation of results, developing attitudes toward the opposite sex. If before, all women looked the same to homosexuals, now they not only distinguish among them but create their own ideals of beauty. They begin courting, go to ballroom dancing, discos. To feel like real men, they work out their muscles in bodybuilding, wrestling, or weightlifting. Those lacking education read or watch movies.

— Does your program include intimacy with women?

— They themselves develop the need for it. My patients don't passively absorb, they actively engage in self-training. One homosexual takes one and a half to two years, a transsexual—up to 5-7 years. Transsexuals remember with horror their terrible desire to change their gender. After all, they still wouldn't have been completely happy, since they couldn't have children.

— Based on your unique experience, are you able to tell us why a person becomes homosexual or transsexual? When does this terrible breakdown happen?

— There's the so-called "core" group with congenital homosexuality. A cruel joke of nature. But that's a very small percentage. For the rest, everything starts in childhood, when a person's sexual nature forms. Among my patients are completely different people—from workers to high-ranking officials, from both rural and professorial families. Many genuinely talented people. The main role in upbringing is played by family. When a boy grows up alone among girls, seeing an undressed peer for the first time, he naturally goes into raptures. When fathers aren’t themselves examples of masculinity, or are henpecked by authoritarian mothers. Or are simply drug addicts, alcoholics. Homosexual contacts are greatly facilitated by all kinds of closed educational institutions, various boys' choirs, the army, naval collectives.

— Have you encountered any future Chikatilos?

— I’ll do you one better. There was one guy with the pseudonym "Sadov." When he was brought to me, he was no longer satisfied with sexual pleasure from seeing the ripped-up body of a cat or a dog. He wanted to attack children, adults, to taste human flesh. One can only imagine what he could have become in time. He had quietly and fiercely hated people since childhood. His father wanted to make his son a great violinist and hit him on the head with a violin when he played poorly. Then he changed his mind—started making him study mathematics in hopes of raising up his very own Einstein. “Sadov” was oppressed at home, laughed at in school, three aunts—old maids—read him moral lessons. As a result, he became a sadist. Now he works as a lawyer, he's married, he’s raising children. Everything's normal.

People aren't born sexual perverts, they become them. These people discover their “hobby” in some provocative situation or other. This is called imprinting, when memory fetishizes the moment of receiving sexual pleasure. Sometimes it reaches absurdity. You could make films crazier than Buñuel’s. One of my patients was riding a tram and asked a seatmate to punch his ticket. He refused. He felt a surge of indignation, suddenly bit the other man’s ear—and experienced a powerful orgasm. From then on, he started going out in the evenings "hunting" for lone passengers in public transport. He couldn't help himself. Of course, he was later imprisoned, but for hooliganism. Another of my patients once accidentally saw the exhumation of a young girl's corpse. A third got satisfaction only at the sight of passersby with a bandaged arm. It all started in his childhood, during the war. His family lived under occupation. Once the boy met a wounded German on the street, and unexpectedly became aroused. That was the catalyst. Risking his life, he started climbing through barbed wire into the territory of a German hospital. Soon, any random passerby with a bandaged arm would provoke his lust. It got to the point where he would break his own arm and run to the emergency room for bandaging. However, no sooner would he get home than he would immediately tear off the cast and run to another emergency room. He knew all the emergency rooms, all the orthopedic departments in area hospitals. A crazy life. After treatment, I specifically put him in an orthopedic department for a week, and everything cleared up.

In total, about 40,000 sexual perversions are described in men, fewer in women. They are more conservative, less inventive. With each such patient, you have to do psychoanalysis, lay out their whole past life, discover where everything came from.

— They say that among suicides there are many men who killed themselves precisely because of an obsessive idea of impotence.

— I can tell you right away: 98 percent of impotent men suffer from psychogenic impotence. It didn't work once or twice, and they've already convinced themselves: I can't do it anymore. They start treating with hormones, vitamins—no result. They're a finished person. But all that's needed is psychotherapy. How many such patients I've had—I've practically pulled them out of nooses. After psychotherapy, everything went smoothly for them. A man can remain a man until he is 80 years old. And at the same time, he can completely control his sexual actions, and his intimate encounters will last as long as his beloved desires. Now, if on top of that he also masters ethics and family psychology, any woman will say: I've seen all kinds of guys, but never a man like this. There’s also basic general advice: don't drink port wine, don't abuse spicy seasonings, don't have a big belly, exercise. And most importantly, know what and who you're living for.

Interview by Nikolai YEFIMOVICH. (Our correspondent)

This pseudoscientific interview with a spurious expert—the interviewer even states that Yan Genrikhovich Holand has “no academic degrees or titles”—appeared in a mainstream Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya pravda, the year following the repeal of Article 121 of the Russian (previously Soviet) criminal code, which had prohibited “sodomy [muzhelozhestvo]” since 1933. Intentionally or not, the article’s title recalls a line from the 1970 American film The Boys in the Band, a psychological exploration of the self-loathing and self-destructive behavior of American gay men in the late 1960s: “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.” The idea that gay men are socially “unviable” and incapable of leading satisfying, productive lives is a through line of this piece.

At no point does the interviewer, billed only as Nikolai Efimovich (no last name), question how this uncredentialed “expert” achieved the position of “head of the department of sexual perversions of the Nizhegorodsky clinical psychoneurological hospital” and “pre-eminent psychotherapist of the Nizhny Novogord region.” Nikolai Efimovich does not interrogate Holand’s generalizations about the “tragic nature” of the gay “passion”; the supposed sordidness of gay courtship, which Holand claims is centered around public toilets; and the characteristics of “real” or “normal” masculinity.

In the one case where Nikolai Efimovich registers an objection, he himself misrepresents accepted scientific wisdom by suggesting that Sigmund Freud ultimately concluded that homosexuality was an incurable pathology (in fact, Freud determined the opposite). By repeating that homosexuality is incompatible with broader Russian society and reiterating that the procreative heterosexual family is the only possible model of “normal” existence for the Russian citizen, both Holand and Nikolai Efimovich frame existing mores as permanent and objectively correct. Neither wonders whether post-Soviet society might be in flux, or asks if the possibility of organic social change could mean that gay men might be more integrated into society—able to live fulfilling lives without shame or fear of persecution.