The Juice Girl

Abstract

The lost feminine in gay men has deep ramifications in the individual psyche as well as in the collective. Gender paradigms based on patriarchy and domination of the feminine have impacted the development of gay men through the mechanism of splitting masculine and feminine into good versus shameful and safe versus dangerous psychological paradigms. The gender conundrums facing gay men are part of the larger cultural gender-identity deconstructions being elaborated within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) community. Gender-splitting, internalized violence to the self, and the problem of the masculine in gay male relationships are discussed as outcomes of the wounded feminine. The author's personal experiences of gender wounding and explorations of the unconscious through dream work serves as the basis for discussion of the wider social phenomenon of the loss of the “Girl” in the gay male psyche.

Keywords::

• anima
• boy
• dissociation
• dreams of feminine
• feminine
• gay male relationships
• gay men
• gender identity
• gender splitting
• girl
• internalized violence
• LGBTQ
• masculine
• violence against gay men

Acknowledgments

Deepest gratitude to Frances Tobriner who unrelentingly helped unearth the Juice Girl; Frances Hatfield who carried her to realization in this paper, being my unfailing editor on all drafts and a most thoughtful intellectual colleague; Rick Mullen and Anthony Palombit for constant inspiration and support; and Jackleen Holton for kickstarting the labor that led to the birth of the final version of this work. Many thanks for the crucial editorial help from the Jung Journal. An early version of this paper was presented at the Journal of Analytical Psychology Conference in San Francisco, in May 2009.

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

^1. The Associated Press reported in The New York Times, December 20, 2014, on the bathhouse raid in Cairo staged for the media to humiliate gay men for their immoral [sic] behavior. This event caps the worst decade of anti-gay abuses as reported by human rights groups.

^2. Timothy Williams and Tareq Maher noted in a New York Times article on April 4, 2009, that the relative freedom in the newly “democratic” Iraq had allowed a gay subculture to flourish there. The response was swift and deadly. The bodies of as many as twenty-five boys and men suspected of being gay turned up in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City. Most had been shot, some multiple times. Several had been found with the word pervert in Arabic written on notes attached to their bodies. Gay men and lesbians in Iraq have long been among the targets of both Shiite and Sunni death squads, but their murders were overshadowed by hundreds of overall weekly casualties during the height of sectarian violence. In 2005, the country's most influential cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, issued a religious decree that said gay men and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed.” He added, “These people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.”

^3. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (2014) reports the following:

• Reports of anti-LGBTQ violence remain steady in 2012, with 2016 incidents reported.

• Twenty-five homicides of LGBTQ people documented in 2012—the fourth highest yearly total ever recorded.

• Transgender women, people of color, and gay men face the most severe violence.

• LGBTQ people report substantial police misconduct when engaging with the police.

• Over half of anti-LGBTQ homicide victims in 2012 were transgender women (i.e., those transitioned/transitioning to women).

• Of the subgroups reported on, gay men were over one and a half times as likely to require medical attention as a result of their endured violence.

• Transgendered people were over one and a half times as likely to experience threats and intimidation compared to LGBTQ non-transgender survivors and victims.

^4. Rebecca Cathcart reported in the New York Times on February 23, 2008, the murder of a fifteen-year-old Oxnard, California, boy named Laurence King who demonstrated his gender fluency by wearing feminine clothes, women's jewelry, make-up, and declaring himself gay. Ten years after Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered because of his sexual orientation, this fifteen-year-old student died after another student shot him. In this tragic story, efforts to split the girl away from Lawrence King seemed to fail. The rage among his peers toward his Girl-self was enough to lead to his murder.

^5. On April 14, 2009, the online ABC News site (Susan Donaldson James) described the following: In Springfield, Missouri, less than two weeks before his twelfth birthday, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, beloved for his bright smile, came home and hanged himself. On a Monday evening as his mother was preparing dinner, she found him hanging by an electric cord from the railing of the third-floor landing. He was just eleven years old and his peers called him gay. They said he acted like a girl and bullied him. Girls, boys—anyone, it seemed—taunted Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover until he could take it no more.

^6. In Tyler Clementi's New York Times obituary on September 29, 2010, Lisa Foderado described the circumstances of his death. He jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge in New York after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, used a webcam to spy on Tyler's intimate encounter with another man. The mocking and humiliation he felt by the betrayal and subsequent disgust of his roommate and peers precipitated Tyler taking his own life.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes

Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, PhD, is a psychologist and Jungian analyst in private practice in San Francisco and Palm Desert, California, and a member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He has authored and co-authored a number of journal publications on the psychological and social consequences of HIV/AIDS and co-authored the first and second editions of Early Care for HIV Disease. As a clinician and researcher, he worked at Ground Zero in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic and has since continued to explore the numerous social and cultural woundings suffered by gay men. As an artist, he explores gender themes in multimedia expression. Correspondence:[email protected].