Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?

As Sacks grew older, he felt like he was looking at people from the outside. But he also noticed a new type of affection for humans: “homo sap.” “They are quite complex (small) creatures (I tell myself),” he wrote in his diary. “They suffer, authentically, a lot. Gifted too. Courageous, ingenious, stimulating.”

Perhaps because love no longer seemed like a realistic risk – he had now entered a “geriatric situation” – Sacks could finally admit that he wanted it. “I continue to be stabbed for love”, he wrote in his diary. “A look. A glance. An expression. A posture. He guessed he still had at least five, maybe ten years to live. “I want, I want ••• I don’t dare say it. At least not in writing.

In 2008, Sacks had lunch with Bill Hayes, a forty-seven-year-old writer from San Francisco visiting New York. Hayes had never thought about Sacks’ sexuality, but as soon as they started talking, he thought, “Oh, my God, he’s gay,” he told me. They stayed at the table for much of the afternoon, discussing, among other things, their insomnia. After the meal, Sacks wrote Hayes a letter (which he never sent) explaining that relationships were “a ‘forbidden’ area for me, although I completely sympathize with him.” (indeed nostalgic and perhaps envious) the relationships of others.

A year later, Hayes, whose partner of seventeen years had died of a heart attack, moved to New York. He and Sacks began spending time together. On Sacks’s recommendation, Hayes also began keeping a journal. He often wrote about his exchanges with Sacks, some of which he later published in his memoir, “Insomniac City.”

“It’s really about mutuality, isn’t it? Sacks asked her, two weeks after declaring their feelings for each other.

“Love?” Hayes responded. “Are you talking about love?”

“Yes,” Sacks replied.

Sacks began taking Hayes to dinners, although he introduced him as “my friend Billy.” He did not allow physical affection in public. “Sometimes this issue of not being away became very difficult,” Hayes told me. “We would have arguments, and I would say things like ‘Do you and Shengold ever talk about why you can’t go out? Or do you only talk about your dreams?’ » Sacks wrote stray sentences from his dreams on a whiteboard in his kitchen so he could report them during his sessions, but he did not share what happened during therapy.

Kate Edgar, who worked for Sacks for three decades, had two gay brothers and for years advocated for gay civil rights, organizing pride marches for her son’s school. She intentionally found an office for Sacks in the West Village so that he would be surrounded by gay men living openly and could see how normal it had become. She tended to hire gay assistants for him, for the same reason. “So I was kind of plotting on that level for a few years,” she told me.

In 2013, after dating Hayes for four years — they lived in separate apartments in the same building — Sacks began writing a memoir, “On the Move,” in which he disclosed his sexuality for the first time. He recounts his mother’s curses when she learned he was gay, and his decades of celibacy – a fact he mentions casually, without explanation. Edgar wondered why, after so many years of analysis, it had taken him so long to come out, but, she said, “Oliver didn’t view his relationship with Shengold as a failure of therapy. She said she guessed that Shengold had been thinking, “This is something Oliver needs to do in his own way, in his own time.” » Shengold’s daughter, Nina, said that “for my father to have a patient that he loved and respected finally finds comfort in identifying who he has been his whole life – that’s growth for both of them. »