Joseph Nicolosi, in his book Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, sees homosexuality as essentially a “male deficit,” which results from family problems, specifically an estrangement between father and son at a crucial stage of the son’s psychic development. As a result of this failure to receive the father’s approval, the homosexual seeks that sense of masculinity from sexual contact with men who seem to embody what the homosexual feels he lacks. “After years of secrecy, isolation and alienation,” Nicolosi writes, describing the psychic odyssey of one of his patients but describing Isherwood’s odyssey from Victorian England to decadent Berlin as well, “most young men find the gay world powerfully alluring, with its romantic, sensual, outrageous, and embracing qualities.” This psychological need for the father’s approval becomes, generally, through seduction by an older man, attached to sexual behavior which quickly becomes compulsive and self-destructive. The homosexual, according to Nicolosi, is attracted to “Mysterious men… those who possess enigmatic masculine qualities that both perplex and allure the client. Such men are overvalued and even idealized, for they are the embodiment of qualities that the client wishes he had attained for himself.”
Women, on the other hand, represent neither beauty nor pleasure, as they do to normal men, but a strange sense of heteronomous duty. Women become a challenge to which the homosexual does not feel adequate, and, with that, comes the sense that liking women and going out with them and having sex with them or marry them are duties imposed from without by forces alien to the “real self….”
Since sex for the homosexual is essentially an attempt to appropriate the masculinity that he feels lacking in himself from someone who seems to embody it, sex with girls has no purpose, since girls do not have what he lacks. Once it gets construed in this way, sex becomes an essentially vampiric act. It is either sucking the desired object to obtain its male essence, to being sucked for the same purpose. Isherwood makes this vampiric character clear, but in a slightly veiled manner, when he talks about Bubi, the first object of his homosexual attentions in Berlin: “Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself, forever, to possess him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi — for magical, not gastronomic, reasons.”
Again, Isherwood refers to magic, this time to a magic form of cannibalism that will allow him to keep “to Bubi all to himself forever, to possess him utterly, “in other words, to appropriate forever from Bubi what Isherwood himself lacks Cannibalism, as the case of Jeffery Dahmer showed, is nothing more than an extreme form of homosexuality. Both actions involved a “magical” ingestion of the desired characteristics of the other. In this regard, cannibalism is but one term in a series of psychic linkages that radiate out from the vampire, the prime representative of the Weimar Republic culture. With the breakdown of the family, the son does no get the needed affirmation of his own masculinity from the father. As a result, sex becomes an attempt to alleviate this male deficit. It becomes an exercise in feedon on another person, which gets fantasized sometimes as cannibalism but, more often than not, as a sucking off the liquid essence from the desire object in the actual act of felatio or in th symbolic act of vampirism. (Magnus Hirschfield, by the way, in his magnum opus listing all the sexual variants, lists vampirism as one and cites the specific case of a man who could not reach orgasm without first ingesting the blood of his spouse. The Marquis de Sade lists a similar instance in “Justine.”
In either case, the point of the act is to assuage the hunger-like feeling that is the physical manifestation of the deficit nature of homosexuality, but also of lust. As one of Nicolosi’s clients explains about his sexual involvement with a male he admired: “that power and control — I’ve always wanted to draw off of that, to be so together.”
Like a vampire, the homosexual “draws off” that power of sucking, by draining the desired object of its life-force and absorbing it into himself in some ritualistic “magical” banquet. Of course, this magic never works; in fact, it only exacerbates the loneliness and inadequacy which drove the homosexual to this form of sexual activity in the first place, and so, what arises in place of the “magic” is a compulsive, addiction like, vicious circle, in which the homosexual tries to compensate for a sense of masculine inadequacy by engaging in homosexual activity, which, once it’s over, only makes the sense of inadequacy seem even worse.
“Immediately after every homosexual experience,” one of Nicolosi’s clients explains, “it feels like something is missing. The closeness I wanted with another man just didn’t happen. I’m left with the feeling that sex is just not what I wanted.”
And once again, the vampire provides the best explanation of the cyclic nature of this pseudo-sexual activity. There is the depletion of death, the craving, the hunger for what the vampire lacks, which is temporarily alleviated by the sucking of fresh blood, but the transformation is eternally temporary, forcing the vampire, or, in this case, the homosexual, to engage in a never ending search for new partners / victims so that he can draw off from them a momentary escape from his feeling of isolation and inadequacy. “Considering the habit forming nature of sexual behavior,” Nicolosi writes, “the more homosexuality active the client is, the more difficult the course of treatment.”
Dr. E. Michael Jones
Libido Dominandi — pg. 246-248