Peter Gajdics's Blog
January 5, 2017
First Blog for my book, "The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir"
I'm thrilled to have been accepted into the Author program at Goodreads. My book, "The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir," will be published May 16, 2017, by Brown Paper Press, in Long Beach, CA.
In 2004, when I first started to write this book while living in Budapest, Hungary, I had just emerged from a four-year medical malpractice suit against my former psychiatrist, "Dr. Alfonzo" for treating my sexual orientation in an effort to "change" me from homosexual to heterosexual.
Long before that lawsuit, for six years I had lived in a psychiatric house, called "the Styx," along with several of Alfonzo's other psychiatric patients. Back then, we had all considered ourselves "a family," with Alfonzo, our "father." Our "therapy" turned into a cult where, at one point, we'd become the doctor's domestic (unpaid) servants. The doctor's treatment of my homosexuality, specifically--the conversion therapy--was not something I could have ever predicted. But as he continued to prescribe more and more psychiatric medication, and everyone at the Styx lived in complete isolation from the outside world, I could not "see" my way out of what had become a living nightmare.
The level of betrayal, once I left the Styx and recovered from the medications the doctor had prescribed to me over those six years, was staggering. Writing helped save my soul, my sanity. It helped me make real what at the time still seemed unreal.
I wrote this book because I felt it was an important story to be told. Gay men and women and trans people everywhere face adversaries that the heterosexual population simply could not quite fathom. Writing about the lives we live helps educate others, maybe sometimes even change laws, but it also helps us, the writers, because we know that we have not silenced ourselves, as our oppressors had hoped and planned we would. We have not slipped back into the shadows of invisibility.
www.inheritanceofshame.com
In 2004, when I first started to write this book while living in Budapest, Hungary, I had just emerged from a four-year medical malpractice suit against my former psychiatrist, "Dr. Alfonzo" for treating my sexual orientation in an effort to "change" me from homosexual to heterosexual.
Long before that lawsuit, for six years I had lived in a psychiatric house, called "the Styx," along with several of Alfonzo's other psychiatric patients. Back then, we had all considered ourselves "a family," with Alfonzo, our "father." Our "therapy" turned into a cult where, at one point, we'd become the doctor's domestic (unpaid) servants. The doctor's treatment of my homosexuality, specifically--the conversion therapy--was not something I could have ever predicted. But as he continued to prescribe more and more psychiatric medication, and everyone at the Styx lived in complete isolation from the outside world, I could not "see" my way out of what had become a living nightmare.
The level of betrayal, once I left the Styx and recovered from the medications the doctor had prescribed to me over those six years, was staggering. Writing helped save my soul, my sanity. It helped me make real what at the time still seemed unreal.
I wrote this book because I felt it was an important story to be told. Gay men and women and trans people everywhere face adversaries that the heterosexual population simply could not quite fathom. Writing about the lives we live helps educate others, maybe sometimes even change laws, but it also helps us, the writers, because we know that we have not silenced ourselves, as our oppressors had hoped and planned we would. We have not slipped back into the shadows of invisibility.
www.inheritanceofshame.com
