Book Review of WHY I DON'T CALL MYSELF GAY--How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace by Daniel C. Mattson, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2017, 300 pages.
Review by Samuel A. Nigro, MD, retired psychiatrist, copyright c 2017
Why I Don't Call Myself Gay is a poignant illuminating testimony of author Daniel Mattson's journey into and out of homosexuality. As most, he uses the word "gay" as a benign generic term for homosexuality and sexual identity disorders of behavior.
Part One is "The Prodigal and His Return." He tells his story from birth. His earliest puzzlement and lack of self-confident-giving information about the puzzles of self (and "sex") development. Comparing himself to other boys evoked ideas with consequences linked to unhappy disturbing doubts about himself. Negative ignorant reinforcements from others provoked defenses of joking, flight, body preoccupation, projection of self as being the male to whom attracted, and rationalization of being different. Suddenly the defenses became the symptoms when cultural impositions of adulthood stir the anxieties of violence as pornographic serpents destroy the natural naivety and human-interactional-innocence of normal healthy childhood. Mattson's story is inspiring and illuminating as he found the angelic and human natures of knowing the virtues especially "courage," perhaps the one "manly" quality he knew he had. His childhood reveals a self-obsessing with no empathic "normalizing" of his maleness from others--a likely universal gay experience of inadequate reinforcement in the pursuit of manhood from all others.
Part Two is "Reclaiming Reality" --fifty-two pages of transcendence as his consciousness finds truth, oneness, good, and beauty. The chapter on "Why I Don't Call Myself Gay" is a philosophical masterpiece. Unfortunately, he falls short in not labeling the "cult" nature of "gay" when contrasted to genuine human synthesis in Nature and Nature's God which is possible with any disorder be it diabetes, hypertension, homosexuality, or any disorder not lived as a cult. "Normal people" with diseases/disorders do not do what "gays" do: enthusiastically embrace their illnesses; obsess about genitals; celebrate with genital parades and six foot penises; promote their genders totally intolerant of others; recruit the vulnerable by pornography and suggestibility; seduce children especially those developmentally immature even preventing therapeutic efforts; antagonize and entrap those who disagree; claim victimhood as they victimize others; and totally fill the definition of "cult." One cannot be one-with-humanity in a de-humanizing cult, which unfortunately, "gay" has come to mean.
Part Three is "How to Run the Race: Living Out the Daily Battle for Chastity"--virtue as part of the ultimate purposes for all humans! Jesus and the saints are better to follow than the pseudo-celebritism of contemporary frauds selling junk food and junk ideas pervading every society. Virtue works.
Part Four is "A Miscellany: Reflections on the Catechism, Friendship, and Loneliness"--an intellectual analysis of genuine humanbeingness as suffering converts to joy by transcendence of the ultimate human purposes of life, sacrifice, virtue, love, humanity, peace, freedom and death without fear.
The final Part Five is "The Most Important Things"--humility and magnanimity! Read this book! Pass it on! There is more to our beingness than struggling confusion rejecting nature and Natural Law. One gets a touch of Eternity from Mattson--a supernatural smile of the pre-BigBang Immediacy of God--the Unrestricted Act of Transcendence as revealed by that Guy who rose from the dead and this author who metaphorically did the same.
This is a Transcendent book: true, unifying, good and beautiful--the opposite, in general, of most electrono-celluloid-print promulgations of today which present self-righteous arrogant malicious targeting, negating, retaliating, lying, shaming, condemning, bad-mouthing, censoring, ostracizing First Amendment Fakery, suggestibility, and non-being--all junk if not evil. Kindly remember that a definition of "evil" is "the promotion of non-being"--My father would often remind, "Got a problem, find the lie!" Mattson expanded: "Got a problem, find the Loving Truth! and be free!". He did it and tells how.
I add a message to be learned and prayed from earliest childhood:
St. Hildegard (on the Holy Spirit, the Big Bang, the pre-Big Bang, the Statimuum, and Eternal Life):
I am that supreme and fiery force that sends forth all the sparks of life. Death has no part of me, yet do I allot it, wherefore I am girt about with wisdom as with wings. I am that living and fiery essence of the divine substance that flows in the beauty of the fields. I shine in the water, I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. Mine is that mysterious force of the invisible wind; I sustain the breath of all living. I breathe in the verdure, and in the flowers, and when the waters flow like living things, it is I. I found those columns that support the whole earth...I am the force that lies hid in the winds, from me they take their source, and as a man may move because he breathes, so doth a fire burn but by my blast. All these live because I am in them and am of their life. I am wisdom. Mine is the blast of the thundered word by which all things were made. I permeate all things that they may not die even if they seem to die. I am life...Eternal Life. (The Statimuum: the Immediacy of All Transcendence Ever--
rejoining The Unrestrained Act of Thinking--God! or "Ur AT" only obtained by Love)
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