Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Thanks to the reader who sent a clip from the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists regarding their upcoming Washington, D.C., gabfest called "'The Gay Agenda': The Intersection of Mental Health and Public Policy."

The homo shrinks are, according to the forwarded document, to launch their symposium with a talk by USCF's Robert Kertzner on "The Public Policy Implications of a Research Report on the Mental Health Implications of Marriage Denial."

"Marriage denial"? This is now being posited as a mental health syndrome? Evidently so. Dawn missed the 2006 release of "I Do, But I Can't: The Impact of Marriage Denial on the Mental Health and Sexual Citizenship of Lesbians and Gay Men in the United States" in the journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy.

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f course, the screed offered nothing of real value on "sexual citizenship" (offering a handjob to an elderly shut-in, generously performing in public when at the baths, sharing expensive silicone lubes when socializing, and so forth). Instead it was a collection of predictable yammerings about self-esteem, depression, stress, etc., etc., etc. -- all the fault of not being able to marry. (Though to its credit, the piece did frequently suggest that it was the negative financial impact of missing marriage at the root of so much psychic woe.)

Dawn longs for the heady old days of gay liberation, when homos sought freedom from psychiatry's clutches, not its soul-sapping embrace; when rather than sentimental appeals such as "I Do, But I Can't" activists were more likely to pen defiant polemics like "I Could, But I Won't."