The Noonday Demon

by Solomon, Andrew

  I had a rough time in connection with my sexuality and went through difficulties familiar to many gay men. There were no problems, to the best of my recollection, until I was seven years old. But in second grade, the tortures began. I was clumsy and unathletic; I wore glasses; I was not interested in spectator sports; I had my nose forever in a book; I formed friendships most easily with girls. I had an age-inappropriate fondness for opera. I was fascinated by glamour. I was shunned by many of my schoolmates. When I went to sleep-away camp the summer I was ten, I was teased and tormented and regularly called a faggot—a word that bewildered me as I had not formulated sexual desires of any kind to myself. By the time I was in seventh grade, the problem had become broader. At school, the watchful eye of a liberal faculty offered some protection, and I was just odd and unpopular: too academic, too uncoordinated, too artistic. On the school bus, however, brutality reigned. I can remember sitting rigidly still there, next to a blind girl with whom I’d made friends, while the entire bus chanted abuse at me, stomping their feet to the rhythm of their invective. I was an object not only of derision but also of an intense hatred that confused me as much as it pained me. This horrible period did not last very long; by the time I was in ninth grade, it had all abated, and I was not unpopular (at school or, indeed, on the bus) by my senior year. But I had learned too much about abhorrence and too much about fear, and I was never again to be free of them.

  Within my family, I knew from the start that homosexuality was not going to be well tolerated. In fourth grade, I was taken to a psychiatrist, and years later my mother said she had asked him whether I was gay; he apparently said that I was not. The interest of the episode, for me, lies in my mother’s having had intense concern already in my prepubescence about my possible sexual identification. I am sure that the benighted therapist would have received a commission in short order to straighten out the problem of my sexuality had he assessed it more accurately. I never told my family about the taunts at camp or at school; eventually someone told his mother about what happened on the school bus every day and his mother told my mother, who wanted to know why I hadn’t said anything to her. How could I? As I began to experience piercing sexual desire, I kept it secret. When an adorably cute guy made a pass at me during a glee club trip, I thought he was just trying to get a rise out of me and that he would betray my ugly news to the world; and to my eternal sadness, I rebuffed his advances. I chose instead to lose my virginity to a stranger whose name I never learned in an unsavory public location. I hated myself then. During the years that followed, I was consumed by my terrible secret, and I bifurcated myself into the helpless person who did revolting things in basement lavatories and the bright student with lots of friends who was having a great time in college.

  By the time I got into my first serious relationship, when I was twenty-four, I had incorporated bushels of unhappy experience into my sexual self. This relationship, which seems in retrospect to have been not only surprisingly affectionate but also astonishingly normative, marked my transition out of an accrued misery, and for the two years I lived with him, I felt that light had come to the dark part of my life. Later, I believed my sexuality was somehow implicated in my mother’s suffering during her final illness; she hated what I was so much, and that hatred was a poison in her that seeped into me and corrupted my romantic pleasures. I cannot separate her homophobia from my own, but I know that they have both cost me dearly. Is it surprising that when I began to feel suicidal, I chose to court HIV? It was just a way to make the internal tragedy of my desires into a physical reality. I have supposed that my first breakdown was tied to the publication of a novel that alluded to my mother’s illness and death; but it was also a book with explicit gay content, and surely that too was implicated in the breakdown. Perhaps, indeed, that was the dominant anguish: forcing myself to make public what I had so long immured in silence.

  I can now recognize the elements of internalized homophobia, and I am less subject to them than I was in the past, and I have been in meaningful, longer relationships, one of which continued over many years. The road from knowledge to freedom is, however, a long and arduous one and I battle my way down it every day. I know that I have engaged in many activities referenced in this book in part as overcompensation for homophobic feelings of unmasculinity. I go skydiving, own a gun, did Outward Bound—all that helps to make up for the time I spend on my clothes, in the so-called feminine pursuit of art, and in the erotic and emotional embrace of men. I would like to think that by now I am free, but though I have a lot of positive emotion associated with my sexuality, I believe I will never escape fully from the abnegation. I have often described myself as bisexual, and have been in three long-term relationships with women and those have occasioned great delight, emotional and physical; but if matters had been reversed and I had had a great sexual interest in women and a minor interest in men, I would certainly not have tried the experiment of alternative sexual identity. I think it is likely that I entered into sexual relationships with women in good part so that I might further prove my own masculinity. Though this effort has led me to certain high joys, it has been an effort of sometimes devastating proportions. Even with men, I have sometimes tried to act out a dominance I didn’t necessarily feel, attempting to redeem my masculinity still in the gay context—because, in fact, even liberated gay society homophobically looks down on yielding men. What if I hadn’t spent so very, very much time and energy running away from what I perceive to be my unmasculine qualities? Would I perhaps have been able to avoid altogether my experiences of depression? Would I have been whole instead of fragmented? Perhaps. I think, at the very least, that I would have had years of happiness that are now forever lost.

  To examine further the question of cultural difference in defining depression, I looked at the lives of the Inuit (Eskimo) peoples of Greenland—in part because depression is high in that culture, and in part because the culture’s attitudes toward depression are particularly distinct. Depression affects as much as 80 percent of the population there. How can one organize a society in which depression plays such a central role? As a possession of Denmark, Greenland is currently integrating the ways of an ancient society with the realities of the modern world, and transitional societies—African tribal communities that are being folded into larger nations, nomadic cultures that are being urbanized, subsistence farmers who are being incorporated into larger-scale agricultural developments—almost always have high levels of depression. Even in the traditional context, however, depression has always run high among the Inuit, and the suicide rate has also been high—in some areas, about 0.35 percent of the population per year commit suicide. Some might say that this is God’s way of indicating to people that they shouldn’t live in such a forbidding place—and yet the Inuit peoples have not abandoned their icebound lives to migrate south. They have adapted to tolerate the difficulties of life above the Arctic Circle. I had assumed before I went that the issue in Greenland was primarily SAD, depression resulting from a three-month period when the sun never rises. I had expected that everyone dipped in the late autumn and began to improve in February. This is not the case. The prime suicide month in Greenland is May, and though foreigners who move to the northern part of Greenland get terribly depressed during the long periods of darkness, the Inuit have adapted over the years to the seasonal shifts in light and are generally able to preserve adequate mood during the season of darkness. Everyone likes springtime, and some find the darkness dreary; but SAD is really not the central problem of the Greenlandic people. “The richer, softer and more delectable nature becomes,” the essayist A. Alvarez has written, “the deeper that internal winter seems, and the wider and more intolerable the abyss which separates the inner world from the outer.” In Greenland, where the springtime shift is twice as dramatic as in a more temperate zone, these are the cruelest months.

  Life is hard in Greenland, so the Danish government has instituted terrific programs of social support services, and there is un
iversal free health care, education, even unemployment benefits. The hospitals are spotless, and the prison in the capital city looks more like a bed-and-breakfast than like an institution of punishment. But the climate and the forces of nature in Greenland are unfathomably harsh. One of the Inuit people I met, a man who had traveled to Europe, said, “We never made great art or built great buildings, the way that other civilizations did. But for thousands of years here, we survived.” It struck me that this was quite possibly the greater achievement. The hunters and fishermen catch just enough to feed themselves and their dogs, and they sell the skins of the seals they eat to pay for the minor expenses of their lives and for the repair of sleds and boats. The people who live close to the old ways in settlements or villages are mostly warmhearted; they are storytellers, especially about hunting escapades and near escapes from death; they are tolerant people. They have a wonderful sense of humor and they laugh a lot. Because of the climate in which they live, they have a high rate of trauma: of freezing, of starving, of injury, and of loss. Forty years ago, these people still lived in igloos; now they have Danish-style prefabricated houses with just two or three rooms. For three months every year, the sun goes away entirely. During this period of darkness, hunters dressed in trousers of polar-bear fur and coats of sealskin must run beside their dogsleds to forestall frostbite.

  Inuit families are large. For months on end, families of perhaps twelve people stay unremittingly inside in their house, usually gathered in one room. It is simply too cold and too dark for anyone to go out except the father, who goes hunting or ice fishing once or twice a month to supplement the stock of dried fish from the summer. There are no trees in Greenland, so no jolly fires are burning inside; traditionally, in fact, there would have been only a small lamp burning seal fat inside an igloo where, as one Greenlander I met put it, “we all sat around together for months on end watching the walls melt.” In these circumstances of enforced intimacy, there is no place for complaining or for talking about problems or for anger and accusations. The Inuit simply have a taboo against complaining. They are silent and brooding or they are storytellers given to laughter, or they talk about the conditions outside and the hunt, but they almost never speak of themselves. Depressiveness, with concomitant hysteria and paranoia, is the price paid for the intense communality of Inuit lives.

  The distinctive features of Greenlandic depression are not direct results of the temperature and light; they are the consequence of the taboo on talking of yourself. The extreme physical intimacy of this society necessitates emotional reserve. It is not unkindness; it is not coldness; it is simply another way. Poul Bisgaard, a gentle, large man with an air of bemused patience, is the first native Greenlander to become a psychiatrist. “Of course if someone is depressed within a family, we can see the symptoms,” he says. “But we do not, traditionally, meddle with them. It would be an affront to someone’s pride to say that you thought he looked depressed. The depressed man believes himself to be worthless and thinks that if he is worthless, there is no reason to bother anyone else. Those around him do not presume to interfere.” Kirsten Peilman, a Danish psychologist who has lived in Greenland for more than a decade, says, “There is no sense of rules that include intruding on anyone else. No one tells anyone else to behave. You simply tolerate whatever people present and let them tolerate themselves.”

  I went in the season of light. Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of Greenland in June, when the sun stays high overhead right through the night. We took a fisherman’s small motorboat from the five-thousand-person town of Ilulissat, where I had landed in a small plane, southward toward one of the settlements I had selected in consultation with Greenland’s head of public health. It is called Illiminaq, a place of hunters and fishermen with a total adult population of about eighty-five. There are no roads leading to Illiminaq, and there are no roads in Illiminaq. In the winter, the villagers travel across the frozen terrain by dogsled; in the summer, access can be gained only by boat. In the spring and autumn, people stay at home. At the time of year when I went, fantastical icebergs, some as large as office buildings, flow down the coast, grouping near the Kangerlussuaq ice fjord. We crossed the mouth of the fjord, navigating among the smooth, oblong shapes of older ice that had turned bottom up, and chunks of broken-off glacier, as big as apartment buildings, that were corrugated with age and curiously blue—our boat humble in the face of such natural majesty. As we progressed, we gently pushed aside the smaller icebergs, some of which were the size of refrigerators; others were like floating dinner plates, and they crowded the clear water so that if you let your sight line follow the remote horizon, you would have thought we were sailing through unbroken sheets of ice. The light was so clear that there seemed to be no depth of field, and I could not tell what was near and what was far away. We stayed near the shore, but I could not tell the land from the sea, and most of the time we were canyoned between mountains of ice. The water was so cold that when a piece of ice broke off the lip of an iceberg and fell in, the water dented as though it were custard, reclosing itself into smoothness only a measurable few seconds after it had split. From time to time, we’d see or hear a ringed seal plopping himself into the frigid water. Otherwise, we were alone with the light and the ice.

  Illiminaq is built around a small natural harbor. There are some thirty houses, a school, a tiny church, and a store, which gets supplied about once a week. Each house has a team of dogs, who far outnumber the human residents of the place. The houses are painted in the bright, clear colors that the locals adore—Turkish blue, buttercup yellow, pale pink—but they hardly make an impression on the vast rocks that rise behind them, or on the white sea that stretches in front of them. It is hard to imagine a place more isolated than Illiminaq. The village does have a phone line, however, and the Danish government will pay for helicopters to airlift local people in a medical crisis if weather permits a landing. No one has running water or water-flow toilets, but there is a generator, and so some houses, and the school, have electricity, and several houses have televisions. Every house has an inconceivably beautiful view; at midnight, when the sun was high and the locals were asleep, I would walk among the silent houses and the sleeping dogs as if I were in a dream.

  A notice had been posted outside the store a week before I came, asking for volunteers to discuss their mood states with me. My translator—a lively, educated, activist Inuit woman who was trusted in Illiminaq—had agreed, despite her misgivings, that she would try to help me persuade the reserved local people to talk about feelings. We were accosted, somewhat shyly, the day after we arrived. Yes, they had some stories to tell. Yes, they had decided to tell them to me. Yes, it was easier to talk about these things with a foreigner. Yes, I must talk to the three sage women—the ones who had started this whole business of talking about emotions. The Inuit are in my experience kind people, and they wanted to help, even when that help involved a loquaciousness somewhat alien to their usual way. Because of the recommendations that had been sent ahead for me, and because of the fisherman who had brought me in his boat, and because of my translator, they made me part of their intimate community while granting me the courtesies due a guest.

  “Ask no open questions” was the advice of the Danish doctor in charge of the district that included Illiminaq. “If you ask them how they feel, they won’t be able to tell you anything.” Nevertheless, the villagers knew what I wanted to know. They did not usually give answers of more than a few words, and the questions had to be as concrete as possible, but even if the emotions were not available to them linguistically, they were clearly present conceptually. Trauma is a regular part of the lives of Greenlandic people; anxiety after trauma was not uncommon; neither was a descent into dark feelings and self-doubt. Old fishermen at the docks told me stories of their sleds going under (a well-trained dog team will pull you out, if the ice doesn’t break further, if you don’t drown first, if the reins don’t break) and of having to go miles in subzero temperatures in wet
clothes; they talked about hunting when the ice was moving and the thunder of sound made it impossible for one man to hear another, and you felt yourself rising up as a chunk of glacier shifted position, not knowing whether it would soon turn over and plunge you into the sea. And they talked about how, after such experiences, it had been difficult to keep going, to wrest the next day’s food from the ice and the darkness.

  We went to see the three woman elders. Each of them had suffered terribly. Amalia Joelson, the midwife, was the closest there was to a doctor in town. She had had a stillborn child one year; the next year, she gave birth to a child that died the night after it was born. Her husband, mad with grief, accused her of killing the child. She herself could hardly bear at that time to know she could deliver the children of her neighbors but could have none herself. Karen Johansen, the wife of a fisherman, had left her native town to come to Illiminaq. Shortly afterward, in rapid sequence her mother, her grandfather, and her older sister died, all independently. Then her brother’s wife became pregnant with twins. The first twin was stillborn at five months. The second was born healthy but died of sudden infant death syndrome at three months. Her brother had one child left, a six-year-old daughter, and when she drowned, he hanged himself. Amelia Lange was the minister in the church. She had married young, a tall hunter, and she had borne him eight children in rapid succession. Then he had a hunting accident: a bullet ricocheted off a rock and his right arm was split halfway between the elbow and the wrist. The bone never healed, and the break line would bend like an extra joint if you took his hand. He lost the use of his right arm. A few years later, he was just outside the house during a storm and was blown over by a strong wind. Without his arm to break his fall, he broke his neck and has since been largely paralyzed from the head down. His wife has had to care for him and move his wheelchair around the house, bring up the children, and hunt for food. “I would do my work outdoors and cry the whole time while I did it,” she recalled. When I asked whether others had not come to her when they saw her weeping at her work, she said, “They did not interfere so long as I could do the work.” Her husband felt he was such a burden to her that he stopped eating, hoping to starve himself to death, but she saw what he was doing, and seeing it broke down her silence, and she pleaded with him to live.