Category Archives: Roger Brown

Roger Brown

On June 6, a U.S. Treasury note in my portfolio would mature and its value was $30,000. I had decided after Al’s death had ceased to engulf my mind and I had a chance to check out my retirement funds, to consolidate my assets, think about my likely life span, and face the fact that I did not care much about enriching any of my relatives. I had decided, after all, that I had no interest in increasing my equity and so would try to spend all my income and gradually reduce my capital. My goal was to spend my last penny as I drew my last breath—“a neat trick not easily managed,” my great friend in psychology, Stanley Milgram, had commented.

Roger Brown, Against My Better Judgment: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist, New York, 1996, p. 173

Roger Brown

Loneliness is not the same as the lack of a strong sexual-romantic bond, but the two are close. For everyone, the category of persons who might meet this need is very specific and usually small. For me, the category was large enough but disastrously out of reach: handsome young men with a touch of vulnerability about them.

Vulnerability is easy to find, but the young and handsome seemed ruled out for me at sixty-six and beyond because of the ageism of gay men. I was pretty sure of this because I myself felt it so strongly. Albert Gilman and I were young together and passionate together and so were able to love one another—in changing ways, to be sure-over many years; but then I thought of making a new beginning, the idea of doing so with someone my own age was distasteful. And so I had to suppose that young gay men felt that way about me. I was categorically eliminated as an object of attraction to anyone for whom I felt an attraction.

Roger Brown, Against My Better Judgment: An Intimate Memoir of an Eminent Gay Psychologist, New York, 1996, pp. 2-3