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.”
Sacks wrote that his mother’s words had to be understood in the context of the times. Homosexual acts were not decriminalized in England until the 1960s; his mother, he wrote, “had an Orthodox upbringing.” Yet, her denunciation would prove crushing to a young man about to embark on a brilliant career as a psychiatrist.
“Her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality,” he wrote.
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.
References to Sacks’s “celibacy” crop up in news stories in the mid-1990s after the publication of his 1995 book “An Anthropologist on Mars” — with no reference to Sacks’s sexual orientation. Some of Sacks’s comments are, more or less, heartbreaking.
“I’ve been alone and celibate for so long I can’t imagine it otherwise,” he told the Daily Mail in 1995.
