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The tragic story of Oliver Sacks’s celibacy
Last edited Mon Aug 31, 2015, 03:06 PM - Edit history (1)
The tragic story of Oliver Sacks’s celibacyMorning Mix
By Justin Wm. Moyer August 31 at 6:21 AM
When Oliver Sacks was 18, he faced a prospect most young people dread: a belated talk about the birds and the bees with his dad. ... “You don’t seem to have many girlfriends,” Sacks wrote his father said in his memoir, “On the Move,” released earlier this year. “Don’t you like girls? … Perhaps you prefer boys?”
Sacks didn’t try to hide. ... “Yes I do – but it’s just a feeling – I have never ‘done’ anything,” Sacks told his father. ... He pleaded with his father not to tell his mother – but his father did. The news did not go over well — to say the least.
“You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.”
....
When Sacks died this week at 82, he was memorialized as a brilliant doctor and author — the man immortalized by Robin Williams in the film “Awakenings.” Yet, many tributes gave short shrift to an astonishing fact about a man who seemed so empathetic when trying to puzzle through his patients’ most debilitating neurological afflictions and open about his own depression and drug use: He lived in self-imposed celibacy for more than three decades, only coming out in the past few months. And it didn’t sound all that fun.
By Justin Wm. Moyer August 31 at 6:21 AM
When Oliver Sacks was 18, he faced a prospect most young people dread: a belated talk about the birds and the bees with his dad. ... “You don’t seem to have many girlfriends,” Sacks wrote his father said in his memoir, “On the Move,” released earlier this year. “Don’t you like girls? … Perhaps you prefer boys?”
Sacks didn’t try to hide. ... “Yes I do – but it’s just a feeling – I have never ‘done’ anything,” Sacks told his father. ... He pleaded with his father not to tell his mother – but his father did. The news did not go over well — to say the least.
“You are an abomination,” she said. “I wish you had never been born.”
....
When Sacks died this week at 82, he was memorialized as a brilliant doctor and author — the man immortalized by Robin Williams in the film “Awakenings.” Yet, many tributes gave short shrift to an astonishing fact about a man who seemed so empathetic when trying to puzzle through his patients’ most debilitating neurological afflictions and open about his own depression and drug use: He lived in self-imposed celibacy for more than three decades, only coming out in the past few months. And it didn’t sound all that fun.
ETA, 3:05 p.m.
Here's a comment:
Singing_in_the_Snow
2:57 PM EDT
I can't imagine saying something like this to either of my sons! That poor, poor man to have accomplished so much professionally in the face of much personal pain.
For myself, I don't think either of my sons are gay, but if they are, so what? I love them so much, I couldn't love them any less! I'm so proud of them. And if they are gay (and I think that would already be decided by now, as they enter young adulthood), I would want for them the same things I would want if they are straight:
* To be good people with good hearts who help and give back to their families and their communities.
* To find someone who they love and respect and who will love and respect them back and to be able to marry and raise a family with them, if that's what they want.
* To live a satisfying, full life.
Too bad Dr. Sacks couldn't have found someone to say this to him earlier in his life. I'm happy to read that he did find personal happiness in the end.
2:57 PM EDT
I can't imagine saying something like this to either of my sons! That poor, poor man to have accomplished so much professionally in the face of much personal pain.
For myself, I don't think either of my sons are gay, but if they are, so what? I love them so much, I couldn't love them any less! I'm so proud of them. And if they are gay (and I think that would already be decided by now, as they enter young adulthood), I would want for them the same things I would want if they are straight:
* To be good people with good hearts who help and give back to their families and their communities.
* To find someone who they love and respect and who will love and respect them back and to be able to marry and raise a family with them, if that's what they want.
* To live a satisfying, full life.
Too bad Dr. Sacks couldn't have found someone to say this to him earlier in his life. I'm happy to read that he did find personal happiness in the end.
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