The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir

by Peter Gajdics

Overview

A powerful LGBTQ memoir of survival, trauma, and the unbreakable will to reclaim identity.

At twenty-three, Peter Gajdics entered what he thought was therapy. What followed was six harrowing years of forced "conversion" under the control of a rogue psychiatrist, a man who used primal scream sessions, psychiatric drugs and cult-like tactics to try to erase Peter's homosexuality.

Isolated in a makeshift group home with other patients, Peter was pressured to reject his real parents, obey "Daddy" and "Mommy" figures, and suppress every trace of his true identity. As the therapy spiraled into psychological and physical abuse, Peter fought to survive, escape and ultimately seek justice.

The Inheritance of Shame is a haunting and deeply personal memoir of conversion therapy and its devastating aftermath - but it's also a story of strength. Juxtaposed with his parents' hidden traumas - his mother's escape from a post-WWII concentration camp in Yugoslavia and his father's upbringing as a war orphan in Hungary - Peter's journey reveals the inherited legacy of shame that shaped his life.

Spanning continents and decades, this memoir explores generational trauma, resilience, gay identity and the healing power of truth. The Inheritance of Shame is a raw and courageous account of one man's fight to reclaim his sense of self- and a testament to the enduring strength of the human spirit.

Winner of the Independent Book Publisher Award, Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction and the Saints and Sinners Emerging Writer Award.

"Unforgettable... This book is appallingly appropriate in these times." - FOREWORD REVIEWS

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941932094
Publisher:	Brown Paper Press
Publication date:	04/26/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	436 KB

About the Author

Peter Gajdics (pronounced "Guy-ditch") is an award-winning writer whose essays, short memoir and poetry have appeared in, among others, The Advocate, New York Tyrant, The Gay and Lesbian Review / Worldwide, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Opium. He is a recipient of a writers grant from Canada Council for the Arts, a fellowship from The Summer Literary Seminars, and an alumni of Lambda Literary Foundation's "Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices." When not in Budapest, Hungary, his home away from home, Peter lives in Vancouver, Canada. This is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

In my grade nine sex-education class at my all-boys Catholic high school, I learned all about the "lifestyle of the homosexual," which sounded frighteningly similar to the life that I was already living. Like a revised Book of Revelation, the final chapter of our textbook explained it all, beginning with the homosexual's choice to act on an immoral and intrinsically disordered behavior and ending with their self-imposed misery, diseased body, and assured annihilation. There was no happy ending for the homosexual.
If I thought of anything during the endless hours of English, French, Mathematics, Catechism, History, and Social Studies, I thought only of how I could divide myself in two, like a wishbone, stray as far away from my desires as possible. Instead of homework each night, I lip-synched songs from my black Denon portable turntable: Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" . . . Three Dog Night's "The Show Must Go On." The Rolling Stones scared me because [my sister] Kriska had listened to the Stones before she ran away from home. Maybe if I listened to the Stones then I, too, would end up like her: an outcast, unloved, a runaway. So I listened to Queen instead, alone in my bedroom after dinner, acting out the lyrics to "Bohemian Rhapsody."
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality . . .
Despite my prayers the night before, the blinding light of day forced me up and out of the house each morning and back to school where facts and figures from all my classes flowed over me. Nothing stuck; nothing was absorbed. If the Catholic Brothers, each of them cassocked and clutching long wooden rulers, didn't mock me, make fun of my endless failed exams, my sixteen percents, then, when they read my grades aloud for all to scorn, they'd pronounce the first syllable of my last name like the severest of punishments.
"Let's see how poorly Mr. 'Gay-dicks' did on his French exam today, shall we?" Or else the other boys crowded 'round me during recess like crows around a carcass, chanting "Gay-dicks . . . Gay-dicks . . . Gay-dicks," as if my name were the worst thing I could be.

Editorial Reviews

"The Inheritance of Shame provides an in-depth account of the triumph of one man's sanity over a psychotherapy system designed to eradicate personhood. Particularly moving were passages of Gajdics's fondness for the very therapist who abused him, a kind of Stockholm syndrome most survivors of conversion therapy have experienced. A necessary, incredibly nuanced portrait of a survivor, The Inheritance of Shame will change lives." — GARRARD CONLEY, author of Boy Erased: A Memoir


"Unforgettable... This book is appallingly appropriate in these times." — FOREWORD REVIEWS

"Peter Gajdics carries us along effortlessly on his incredible struggle with family rejection, loss of self and ultimate recovery from the deep wounds inflicted by anti-gay "therapy." At this time of immense suffering for LGBTQ+ youth around the world, his emergence from shame should give hope for healing to all victims of this destructive practice." — JASON MARSDEN, Executive Director, Matthew Shepard Foundation

"Raw and unflinching: a powerful argument against conversion therapy as well as the healing power of memoir." — KIRKUS REVIEWS, May 2017

"In Peter Gajdics' memoir, we're taken into a real-life horror film of malpractice and corrupt psychotherapy, hoping at every turn of the page that our narrator escapes... A necessary and devastating memoir about the trauma of conversion therapy and the homophobia that persists to this day." — DANIEL ZOMPARELLI, author of Everything is Awful and You're a Terrible Person

"Peter Gajdics traces his transformation from 'a man whose food seemed poisonous to his hunger' to a writer who makes real what seemed unreal. Through unrelenting prose, his words provide a home for his orphaned father, tortured mother, and most importantly, his own identity that others wanted to drug, demonize, and destroy." — KATE GRAY, author of Carry the Sky

"Reflective but passionate, Gajdics takes the reader on an exploration beyond the what of his experience as a young, conflicted gay man and deeply into the chasm of his search to discover who he was.... This exploration is a hero's journey in which any reader, gay or straight, can find inspiration." — LAMBDA LITERARY, April 2017

"Peter Gajdics' multi-faceted memoir offers help for abuse survivors and those who care about them... His healing speaks to the power and fortitude of the human spirit. The Inheritance of Shame is both about damage and healing. This is a work of love." — MIKE LEW, author of Victims No Longer: The Classic Guide for Men Recovering from Sexual Child Abuse

"Cults come in many forms and unfortunately those who want to be normal sometimes become victims of these cults. The book focuses on the triumph of the human spirit and shows how everyone may be different in some ways but no one is born to be what others think they should be. At the end, be yourself and be happier is the theme of the book." — BEV SELLARS, Bestselling author of They Called Me Number One

From the Publisher

2017-04-18
The author exposes the wounds of his youth and how the therapy he sought out to heal them caused even graver harm."Remembering this brings me peace," concludes Canadian writer Gajdics in his debut memoir, which lays bare the psychological fallout from personal trauma most everyone close to him urged him to forget. The youngest child raised in a strict Catholic household, at age 6 he was sexually abused by a stranger in a school bathroom. Though Gajdics was plagued by nightmares and panic attacks, his mother's stoicism and father's domineering demeanor prevented him from sharing his trauma. Prior to immigrating to Canada, both his Eastern European parents had survived the ravages of World War II at great cost: the author's mother spent 34 months in labor and death camps, and his father lost his family early on; both looked to pass onto their children an unquestioning faith and silence as coping mechanisms. As he grew up, the author's pain and guilt resulting from the abuse and its repression were only compounded as he realized he was gay. Turning to sex as a means of escape, Gajdics was soon ostracized by his family and left Vancouver to pursue writing. In 1989, seeking to quell his inner turmoil, Gajdics had the misfortune of being referred to Dr. Alfonzo, a crackpot clinician who believed he would "revolutionize the field of psychiatry by being the first psychiatrist to find a cure for homosexuality." Much of the power of the author's courageous account derives from his unsparing depiction of the years of horrifyingly degrading "primal therapy" that rendered him "an emotional bulimic," his body "an earthquake" he felt "trapped inside," as Alfonzo stripped him of his autonomy with an unorthodox, toxic mix of psychotropic drugs. Writing through his slow recovery not only led to Gajdics' self-acceptance, but also helped his parents to open up about the atrocities of their childhoods as well. Raw and unflinching: a powerful argument against conversion therapy as well as for the healing power of memoir.

Kirkus Reviews