Against My Better Judgement: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist (Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies) [Paperback]

John Dececco Phd (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1560238887 | ISBN-13: 978-1560238881 | Publication Date: October 24, 1996 | Edition: First Edition

Against My Better Judgment: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist is an extraordinary and moving account of the life of a gay man in his late 60s after he loses his companion of 40 years to cancer. A leading professor of psychology at Harvard University, Roger Brown bravely comes forth with his compelling story of grief, loneliness, and a relentless search for intimacy, healing, and self-acceptance. Readers gain insight into a stage of life experienced by gay men of which little is written or spoken due to the ageism that characterizes homosexual culture.

Against My Better Judgment reveals deeply personal truths that will prepare gay men for what to expect in the later stages of life. Universal in nature, these truths will speak to readers from various lifestyles and of all ages. Readers will recognize the book as a story of looking for love in all the wrong places, but will also see in it a process of discovery--both internal and external.

In the aftermath of his lover’s death, Brown turns to prostitutes for companionship, for relieving repressed sexual energy, and even for love. Through his unique relationships with three young men, he does not find the romantic love he so desperately seeks, but discovers that his idea of human nature has been formed by his particular life position and association with people who share his values, knowledge, and privileges. Once he goes outside his social and intellectual circle, he acquires a new perspective on life and realizes how far from universal truth his notions of humanity have been.

Readers of Against My Better Judgment will gain a different perspective on the complexities of love, relationships, fidelity, human nature, and the hardships of life inevitably faced by all humans--straight, gay, or bisexual. Gay men, lesbians, psychologists, widowers, therapists, and anthropologists, as well as sensitive readers of any background, will heighten their understanding of what it means to be human. This remarkable story makes a tremendous contribution to existing gay literature and the timeless struggle of art and literature to make sense of the universe and the place of humans within it. Echoing life, Against My Better Judgment, with its brutal honesty, intrigues and repels alternately, just as it elicits both sadness and laughter.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A searing personal memoir that will leave no reader unmoved." -- Philip S. Holzman, PhD, Esther and Sidney R. Rabb Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

"An extraordinary, moving, and 'shocking' memoir. There surely has never been one like it." -- Jerome Bruner, PhD, Research Professor of Psychology, New York University --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 253 pages
• Publisher: Harrington Park Press; First Edition edition (October 24, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560238887
• ISBN-13: 978-1560238881
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,691,884 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars ...And Beyond His Full Comprehension or Control?, June 25, 2004

By 

Brian Kevin Beck "infovoyeur" (Whitewater, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Against My Better Judgement: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist (Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies) (Paperback)

Well, a 65-year-old distinguished social scientist at Harvard loses his male lover of 40 years, and also retires. And for the next five years, to cope, he pursues young men, specifically "escorts," a.k.a. hustlers or male prostitutes or callboys. Pursues them with money, and with love, but also for their love or companionship. The book is his candid memoir of that turbulent interlude "with" the three "boys" Grant, Skip, and Patrick..

You can imagine the dismal results. Especially because underlying his five-year pursuit seems to be his life-long volatile personality structure. (Should the social psychologist, have undergone psychoanalysis earlier? A graduate of same, I think so-I fear so.) Anyhow the resulting book is both case-study, and possibly "literature," as in dynamic truthtelling, even perhaps the genre of tragedy.

Brown seems driven by an unresolved neediness garnished with a Jekyll-and-Hyde syndrome. Saccharine lovingness toward the boys, and then the sour sauce of hatred from their inevitable joltings and jiltings of the professor. Who at the end sees himself as "an old fool irrelevant to their young lives."

Specifically, Brown's style of relating to these young panthers is not heroic at all but tragicomic. A combination of attempted bear hug... ritual mating fire-dance... co-dependent orbiting... pugilistic hatred when rebuffed... and operatic laments by the "maiden" ever spurned...

Better he wrote it than not. At the end he stops with boys because his five-year foray was inconclusive. He had hoped that ambiguities would be resolved, meaning clarified. "That never happened." He stopped learning anything new. He found no satisfying closure toward enlightenment. "The obscurity all remained and new ones were added but I saw that that was the way it would always be."

Perhaps we the readers can learn more. That the unanalyzed, or unexamined, life is unworthy to live. That to "know thyself" truly-one's motivations, goals, identity-is as vital as the Greeks said it was twenty centuries ago. Brown says this on the next to the last page: "It is a lonely universe, one of many it seems, and in passing through it one needs close company, a Primary Other." Well, first, if one possesses one's own true Self, one is less lonely. And second, neither his problematic, troubled 40-year "marriage" nor his hopeless liaisons with the boys, show him as consonant with his true Self. And so I can feel that there in Brown's fantastic footsteps, but for the grace of Psyche, go we. Myself, anyhow...