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Murder as an attempt to manage self-disgust
Published in David Jones, Working with Dangerous People, 2018
On an individual level one sees the same pattern repeated. Men who profess the most anti-gay views and the most discomfort with homosexuals show a greater level of sexual arousal on being shown homosexual videos than non-homophobic men.23 In prisons, a form of paranoia can develop which gives rise to sudden and unexpected violence. James Gilligan uses the term ‘homosexual panic’. This occurs when ‘an inmate experiences a degree of homosexual stimulation that is intolerable to his self esteem and his sense of his own masculinity’.24 The confined space and claustrophobic structures of prison can produce such extreme reactions but I would argue that this is only the ordinary individual reaction writ large. For example, a young man, James, described how he had only come to realise that he was gay during his second sexual relationship. When his partner told a third party, James was physically sick. The nausea arose at the point of having to see something about himself that he did not want to see. It was not the content of his stomach that demanded expulsion but a mixture of dread, fear and disgust. Once out, the anxiety diminished and James became accepting of his sexuality.
Sexual Emergencies: A Psychiatrist's Perspective
Published in R. Thara, Lakshmi Vijayakumar, Emergencies in Psychiatry in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, 2017
T.S. Sathyanarayana Rao, Gurvinder Kalra
Other rare sexual emergencies that a psychiatrist may come across include cases of homosexual panic, which are more of historical importance nowadays, and even cases of gay individuals who are in a crisis about coming out before their family members.
Protecting our greatest natural resource: Our youth in schools
Published in John A. Liebert, William J. Birnes, Psychiatric Criminology, 2016
John A. Liebert, William J. Birnes
Kazmierczak was well trained in weapons and killing now, but on February 13, 2002, he was taken home and once more dumped on his parents' doorsteps with neither explanation nor advice. This trauma was severe, because he felt successful in the army and was more comfortable than ever with its structure. He would comment that he was mixed with “maggots” in the army and they did not think. For that reason, he was not compelled to use his expressed “special powers” to read minds. “Maggots,” he said, had none to read. There came a psychological blindness over him that seemed robotic. He was at ease killing without emotion. It was perfect, until something suddenly went haywire and he was hospitalized once again. Did he make a suicide attempt? Did the army start a security clearance investigation because of his advancing training in a now-post-9/11 military? This question will likely never be answered, but there were anecdotal reports of problems with bunk mates. Was it homosexual panic? By now, reportedly, Steven had already had homosexual relationships. Regardless, the military was over for now. It would come back, however, and once again with the false sense of security of stopping psychotropic medications when recruited for the navy. Ironically, his final and promising reach for a life as a sailor came just before he took his own war to Cole Hall, massacring people once calling him “Psycho” and “Strange Steve” for holing up in a dark room by himself, logging on to macabre music and suicidal mass murder games on the Internet. But nobody thought for a moment, unlike the cases of Cho and Loughner on other large state campuses, that Steven was a real soldier capable of such atrocities. A navy recruiter knew and encouraged him to enlist for the surge in Iraq but told him he had to get off his medications first. So, he did. And that would prove fatal.
Madman in the Closet: “Homosexual Panic” in Nineteenth Century New England
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2021
To summarize, Andrews’ behavior was irrational on every count. The absence of motive and plan, the unfitness of the location, his cruelty and redundant violence, his indifference to the possibility of capture, all these in conjunction with both men’s history of easy-going manners and shyness, to say nothing of their deep affection for each other, make the assault appear inexplicable, except, that is, as a product of insanity. What makes the insanity explanation even more plausible is how closely Andrews’ behavior seems to fit Kempf’s (1920, p. 478) original “homosexual panic” formulation, where a man who is in denial about his same-sex desire becomes “horrified … swept off his feet into a hell of hallucinated temptations and demons of destruction” when faced with the fullness of that desire—the “pressure of the perverse craving.” According to this model, Andrews “craved” Holmes, but was unable to handle the religious, moral, and social implications of yielding to that craving, committing “the crime against nature.” He was not only unable to yield to this craving, he was unable to accept the idea that he could yield, the idea that he could be such a person. This is where the concepts of “the closet” and “coming out” intersect with “homosexual panic.” Andrews’ panic (and violence), in this formulation, stems from his inability to acknowledge his desire for another man—his inability to “come out.” He could not accept his desire to engage in what was then called “sodomy.” So, to protect himself from recognizing that he desired his long-term friend, and thus to protect himself from seeing himself as a sinner in jeopardy of losing his place alongside God, Andrews cast that sexual craving from his mind and attributed it to Holmes, what amounts to a paranoid projection or delusion. According to Kempf’s model, Andrews’ explosion of violence was a reaction to a perceived threat, not a real one; he assaulted Holmes based on his belief that his friend was trying to rape him.