There were darker aspects of the legacy left me by my authoritarian parents and their Church. My childhood was haunted by fears of disasters more intense than any I had faced in real life.

Until about 30 years ago, I accepted my mother's version of my birth. She endowed this account with mythic qualities, although I was no hero or demigod, just a weak baby. I was born premature, in the seventh month, and according to my mother, immediately set on a pillow in a corner of the hospital room as unlikely to survive. Seeing this, my mother reportedly shouted something like, "That baby is going to live! I will not let that baby die!"

I heard this noble speech, with slight changes, many times as a child. It had a powerful and dubious effect on me. According to mother's story, her womb had not been properly repaired after the stillbirth of her first son a year-and-a-half before. As a result, I did not have a full womb in which to develop. And so I came out looking tiny and cramped, a bare, forked animal, and, as my mother had feared, even a slightly misshapen one. This was her way of accounting for the fact that I was premature and underdeveloped. In college, the first lines of Shakespeare to strike me were from Richard III's first soliloquy: "Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time/Into this breathing world, scarce half made up…." After my public defamation in 1960, I felt that a psychological dimension had been added to my deformity. Yeats writes in A Dialogue of Self and Soul of his own public shaming, of "That defiling and disfigured shape/The mirror of malicious eyes/Casts upon his eyes until at last/He thinks that shape must be his shape…." I was indeed a bony, awkward little thing. Mother did everything to make me look right, almost as though she were shaping a man out of clay, like the Lord God. Because she thought my nose was "too flat," she would regularly pinch it. In response to her love and care, I developed rapidly and was—by the end of my first year—a baby that she could be proud of, plump and healthy-looking, if the subject of far too much anxiety and cosseting.

Now my mother at 36 could hold her head high among the worthiest sisters in Zion. Since she had before her marriage devoted herself to her career, I think that she was surprised to discover that she loved mothering, and that a baby smiling back at her was unexpectedly satisfying. She and my father had taken the stillbirth of their first baby very hard. The infant had been named Carl, after my legendary paternal grandfather. To my distress, I was frequently shown my elder brother's picture—a tiny wizened corpse, dressed in a fancy lace gown. From her account, I derived a strong sense that my heroic mother had snatched me from the jaws of death, not left me to die like maimed babies in ancient Greece. My survival was proof of her dedication to motherhood, a state to which she did not take naturally. It was as though mother had willed me into being without the help of nature. Mother had little faith in childbirth, or other natural bodily processes.

Having swallowed anxiety with my mother's milk, I too developed a debilitating lack of faith in the body's ability to recover from even minor ills. Until I was about ten, I lived a good part of the time in doctors' offices, and was kept home from school for even the slightest sign of illness. I remember asking a visiting aunt, herself amused by mother's solicitude, "Am I sick or well today?" Indeed, my parents were always telling us how to feel about everything, and so I was unsure of many of my own responses until my early teens. The lines between love and excessive care-giving were never clearly drawn. I have often been unable to separate the two, and like my mother, I have occasionally mistaken care-giving for love. Since I had few feelings separate from mother's, I took for granted that I was sickly. I only discovered as an adult that my body was a miraculous self-healer, and that my overall health was good. But I have intermittently been a hypochondriac and have frequently not acknowledged my own strengths. I now see that I could have established an easier relationship with mother had she been either in bed and chronically ill, or else active and powerful. But she was both. In my youth, I saw her as an invalid; but as she grew older she became a powerhouse in the community and in her own home.

My birth (on January 4, 1919) had come at a very difficult time in world affairs and in the family. World War I had ended less than two months before. Many countries were feeling the effects, not only of the disastrous toll of war dead, but also of the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, in which more people died than in the war. My grandmother, Julia Pedersen Dorius, a gentle and beautiful Norwegian lady, and the only woman my father ever deeply loved, died less than a week before my birth—perhaps of the flu, and abetted by her diabetes. This was the greatest loss of my father's life, and I doubt that he ever saw my birth as a balancing of the scales, especially because from the beginning I stole his wife's affection. He never forgave me for this. My grandmother had been living with my parents on Capitol Hill, in a large house that father and his brother-in-law, a successful contractor, had built for him, his future wife and children. Father couldn't have known that he was luckily constructing a house that, when later divided into apartments, would enable his family to survive the Depression. My parents' marriage was not a love-match. Mother frequently said that she had married to have children, implying that it was not for love. One day, when we were all out driving, father told mother that although he did not love her when he proposed to her, he admired her more than any woman he had ever met. Although I was only eight, I was mortified for my mother, who was sitting beside him, saying nothing.

God clearly was an immanent presence for father and most Saints. And in my early years, when I tried to reach Him through prayer, He could suddenly seem very close. Since we were told in Church that all mortals exist as spirits before and after our lives on earth, the air around me seemed to be whizzing and whirring with unseen beings, benign and malign. Mormons today would perhaps have difficulty understanding the superstitious fears of a Mormon boy 75 years ago, many of them adapted from the folklore of the countries from which the Saints came. I was especially impressed by tales of the good and bad angels assigned to each of us, forever whispering contradictory messages into our ears—as in the medieval morality play, Everyman. Inevitably, the bad little voice in my left ear was usually louder.

As a boy, I thought that my father—praying aloud before breakfast as though he could conjure up spirits just above our heads—must have had a direct connection with God. As we knelt at our chairs, he would run through his entire repertory in his long, heartfelt prayers—from almost begging for help during the Depression, to extravagant thanks and praise to the Lord for any bit of good luck. In the Thirties, he became increasingly pessimistic as he moved from job to job. I early decided that I too should take no good fortune for granted, and I never have.

During high school, God became more and more inaccessible to me. I longed for more dramatic or sublime manifestations of the supernatural than I could find in the Mormon Church. And so I began turning toward the images I was continually discovering in art and literature. I wanted mystery and visual suggestions of something beyond myself. But Mormon chapels looked like barns. They were among the most barren of iconoclastic Protestant Churches, and Church services felt as secular as town meetings. I was starved for spiritual depth and resonance. I recall my entire youth at home as a constant, usually unexpressed, rebellion against my father and the Church.

In 1928, a year before the great crash, we traveled with my father on a business trip through the Rocky Mountain States, probably the last of his trips on which we were all invited. Upon giving birth to my brother Kermit, my mother's back was knocked out of alignment. She began to look so ashen that her brothers feared that she had inherited tuberculosis from their mother. One of my father's customers, a Dr. Arnoldus—to whom he had sold suits for many years—was an osteopath in a small spa town in Wyoming, appropriately named Thermopolis for its hot springs. When we stopped there for my mother to be examined, Dr. Arnoldus told my parents that if he could work with mother daily for at least nine or ten months, he could realign her spine and greatly improve her condition. Mother, who felt that doctors had always been her saviors, was eager to try this intensive treatment. Although we were then still thinking of ourselves as a family, my father soon left us at the hotel to continue his business in Montana. Meanwhile, I was disoriented and frightened. I had been taken from my home, neighborhood, school and friends in Salt Lake City—a metropolis by comparison—and plopped down in a small frontier town that I hated. Near the hotel were several menacing hot mineral springs. The earth all around us seemed undermined. I remember the overwhelming smells of sulfur and other infernal gases, and I especially feared falling into the belching, pungent springs nearby. I was grateful that I was not a sleepwalker.

In our small rooms in Thermopolis, I was bored and lonely, experiencing life chiefly through my mother's illness. Both to express and distance my feelings, I began to draw obsessively, with the workaholic zeal that has always made me happiest. I had no facility at drawing, but on days when I wasn't in school, I made hundreds of sketches from dawn until dark. As I now see, all my work concerned control and annihilation. I drew passenger ships encountering disaster, loaded with people dancing wildly over their graves. Doubtless with images of the Titanic and Lusitania in mind, I drew ships that had collided with icebergs or were wrecked by torpedoes. All of the passengers and crew in my drawings were falling into the ocean, clinging to the wreckage, or swimming frantically about, vainly expecting help. My visions were not limited to the ocean. The castles I drew were similarly threatened by fire, floods, collapsing cliffs, earthquakes, and other disasters. Strangely, I never included myself among the doomed; I was their creator and observer. Today I am amazed by my Schadenfreude. But I also felt that I too could have been among the victims. Perhaps, like Melville's Ishmael, I was saved to record their fate: "I only am escaped alone to tell thee." Ironically, one of the chief inspirations for my imperiled worlds was the riveting sequence in Chaplin's The Gold Rush, in which the tramp's cabin is teetering on the edge of a cliff, held precariously by a single rope from falling into the abyss, while Chaplin struggles for a footing inside. The feebly anchored and leaning shack would also become symbolic of what was soon to confront me back in Zion. The gloriously vivid and surreal predicaments in which Chaplin places himself in this and other early movies had a profound effect on me. Unlike me, Chaplin always got away. These situations are outrageously funny to most people, but to me as a boy they were also frightening. I have frequently since had trouble maintaining comic distance, even in farce.

In my drawings of castles, I was expressing both my apprehension of being dominated or destroyed and my desire to control. In the castle towers, my sinister doubles taken from radio serials of the day—Chandu the Magician, Fu Manchu, Dr. Moriarty, or any evil scientist—were the centers of the action. I saw myself as all of these malevolent tyrants, seemingly secure in their palaces. Perhaps I felt that I had a chance to survive my worst fears in real life—that of my mother's death and of my father's not returning from his travels—if I could face down these fictional crises.

Family home with Utah State Capitol Bldg. (in background)

When we returned to Salt Lake City just before the Depression, I enjoyed a brief period of security. Across the street from our house, on a hill of open fields and lawns, the stately Capitol Building was the most important landmark of my childhood. I exulted in its strength and grandeur. I found out later that it was a copy of many neo-classical copies. However weightless and fragile I felt, this huge, well-shaped, domed building, built of granite and marble, grounded me. Like Antaeus, I felt helpless when separated from mother earth. It also gave me a lifelong fondness for all forms of Classicism. I loved to draw the exterior and the floor plans of this and other majestic structures. Earlier at home I had built edifices out of blocks, Tinker Toys, and Erector Sets. Unlike my drawings in Thermopolis, I had always tried to make these creations solid and invulnerable, structures that could survive fire and earthquake. I viewed them as buffers against the vast spaces of the West, stretching out in all directions. Man's creations were always on a human scale, inspiring but not diminishing me like the colossal Wasatch range to the east of Salt Lake City. Strangely, I retained this feeling of being belittled and overwhelmed, even when I later visited the mighty gothic cathedrals of Europe. Perhaps my rejection of Christian belief blocked me from responding fully to some of the greatest architectural works in the world. Given my early absorption in buildings, I find it surprising that I didn't become an architect. But I have seen my reward: my brother, with whom I shared my enthusiasms, became a successful and award-winning architect.

Family at its Most Formal

After the Depression had begun, in a miracle of bad timing, my father and mother started remodeling our house in order to create three other apartments. Loving the status quo and all old things, father fought this renovation. But mother, as usual, prevailed, attempting to  fulfill some of her dreams about a model home—insofar as they could afford it. Later, she would refer to this new home in her classes. My parents of course could not have foreseen the depth and duration of the Depression. They soon ran out of money and all renovation stopped. My mother applied for a homeowner's loan, made possible by the Roosevelt administration. Meanwhile, we lived for what seemed an eternity in a few partly finished rooms, with a flimsy front entryway. The house looked as though it had been struck by a hurricane. The process of approval was exasperatingly slow, but the subsidy finally arrived. For over a year and a half, some of our rooms lacked doors, windows and even walls, and our old toilet was left standing in the middle of our new bare living room.

My fears of loss and disorder, expressed in Wyoming in my drawings, were immediately realized. Our embarrassment was sharpened by the feelings of our self-conscious mother, who was now living with her three children in a wreck. Our exposed rooms deepened the feelings of shame that I had associated with my bony body and its forbidden desires. Like my mother, I shrank from bringing friends home. Soon, my father's business dwindled and my mother began full-time work, occupying one position after another in the federal government's local emergency projects. Though he had only a few customers, father continued traveling off and on for about a decade, sending only pittances at the end of the month. He left all negotiations concerning the remodeling to mother. I could feel mother's indignation when she spoke of his total lack of responsibility. I did not yet understand that father may have stayed away because he could not tolerate the marginal position he held at home. Strangely, I didn't realize until my mid-teens that it was mother who had convinced him to give up teaching and "get out into the world."

In this troubled atmosphere, I slowly began to turn the all-seeing Mormon spirits presumably monitoring us into soul-destroying demons. In my 12th and 13th years—in an attempt to find autonomy and privacy, and to escape mother's perpetual demands—I decided to sleep in a room in the basement, vacant before it was converted into another apartment. At night, my room was lighted by one bare bulb hanging from the center. For months, I scared myself in what I now feel were ecstatic spells of dread. The night air was often roaring with menacing sounds. The fears born in this enclosed space haunted my imagination for years. In the dark, I felt that sinister forces were everywhere, conscious of my presence, hunting me down. In bed, I would cover my head with sheets and blankets, so that I couldn't see or hear the malign beings that circled around my room when I was asleep. I had already discovered my true black book, Dorothy Sayers' enormous Omnibus of Crime. To identify and even heighten my fears, I devoured these blood-curdling tales alone at night. Nothing was as exciting or real during the day as the nocturnal feasts of the supernatural found in my favorite section of this book. Since Church meetings felt empty and one-dimensional, I sought deeper feelings in these richer fictional worlds. Trembling inside the safety of my blanket-cocoon, I felt that if I could hide from the most ominous unseen presences before I fell asleep, I could get through the night. Since I couldn't dispel them, I could only hope to escape and outlast them. Being scared was thrilling and fear was my religion.

I knew that the Saints spoke of the ongoing divine "revelations" of Joseph and later Church presidents. But I turned their religious beliefs—what Mormons might have called white magic or miracles—into black. Although I could not believe in the Church's otherworldly visions, my own visions often seemed real. Why couldn't demons appear, I asked, as easily as angels? In trying to vaccinate myself against my fears, I was attempting, step by step, to turn my feelings of helplessness into confidence. Although it didn't occur to me at the time, I was reading and sleeping directly below my mother's bed, and so her presence was above me even in dreams. My greatest nightly fears were of a shapeless, fog-like incubus or succubus, that would descend on me during my sleep like a terrible weight and crush me, suffocating the life out of me. Oddly, these were my first erotic intimations. Knowing nothing about the mechanics of sex, I saw sexual union only in terms of these enveloping clouds. For some reason, I didn't want my genitals exposed. I trained myself, therefore, to sleep on my stomach. I now think that the power of these forces was indicative of the excessive control my parents had over me. Except in my free-floating mind, I was passive. During the day, I tried to counteract this passivity by reading and telling ghost stories to other children, sharing and partially alleviating my own fright. I thus learned the power of skillful storytelling, which served me well all of my life. As an adolescent, I learned to emulate the voice of the first-person narrator in Poe, confiding yet desperate, knowing yet almost hysterical: "Whatever you think, I am not mad."

Even after I moved back upstairs, my nightmares continued, although they perpetually changed in character. I would hear at night the slow, irregular footsteps of a lame and diabolical man mounting stairs and limping down a hallway toward my room. I knew that he would find me, even if I ran to the ends of the earth. No matter what I did, he would be drawn to me as toward a magnet, and he would threaten me with maiming or extinction. This was my most frequent dream; somehow, I never associated it with my hectoring father, but I was already a master of denial. Father's sudden and relentless verbal attacks during this period were my greatest waking burden. In his company, I always expected to fail.

My affinity with underground worlds remained with me long after most boys have outgrown their childhood bogeymen. I also had Oedipal dreams—now nakedly obvious—in which I was lying on my back, helpless as an overturned beetle, while a figure like my father probed or beat me with a club, a dream of helplessness that, like many others, never had an ending. Since these nightmares occasionally took the form of gigantic female specters stalking me, I think that they could have represented either parent. Many boys during puberty may find that fright is the only emotion powerful enough to disguise or embody Eros. And gay boys who have frequently been teased or hazed probably develop deeper fears. My fantasies left an unhappy legacy. When I put my passive dreams into action and started cruising in my later 20s, I would tremble uncontrollably whenever I was about to touch, or be touched by, a prospective partner. I had crazily crossed two wires in my brain that should have been kept far apart, but for many years the two unfortunately were inextricable. My eyes said, "Yes. This is what you want." But my entire upbringing said, "No. Your desires are evil."

I also projected my nightly fears of domination into my childhood games, but in these I usually dominated others. In the echoing corridors of the Capitol Building, I played the Bat and other malevolent characters, delighting and frightening the neighborhood children—most of them considerably younger than I. I wore a black eye mask and a black coat as a cape, left secret messages in prearranged places, and swept through the halls and down the marble staircases, with a gaggle of children shrieking ahead of or behind me. We usually kept just beyond the reaches of the exasperated janitors. I never wanted physically to hurt anyone or to be hurt; I recoiled from the idea. But frightening others, and being frightened by my own demons, could be exciting.

My childhood thus provided an unstable basis for the rest of my life—particularly for the public crisis that I had to endure many years later. Even my adult dreams oddly never reflected the fact that I had become a successful teacher, merely an apprehensive one. My dreams usually placed me in roles in which I was embarrassed or humiliated. I would often find myself in front of my class, confronted by a problem I couldn't solve, with consequent shame, as the students became impatient and hostile. In other dreams, I was lost in unknown neighborhoods of strange cities, struggling all night to find my way home. I was sometimes lost in labyrinths, in an old mansion or back in the Capitol Building. Despite what seemed like hours or days of trying, I could never find my way out. After 1960, my dreams were mostly about public rejection and exposure.

Throughout my life, I have found that many images from books and films have stimulated my dark reveries. Long before I discovered the optimism of Emerson or Whitman, I had read most of Poe's narratives, many of them like vivid nightmares. Because of my early film-going and my fertile visual imagination, cinema has always been my favorite medium. For many years, suspense, thriller, and horror movies have played significant roles in my life. In my youth, I was especially affected by Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera, Barrymore's Svengali, and Lugosi's White Zombie. Only recently have I realized that I played both the hypnotist and his victim in dreams deriving from these and similar films. In mid-adolescence, I abandoned my demonic world for subtler, usually psychological terrors. And in later years, I became suspicious of any kind of hypnotic power; I felt too susceptible to it. I feared that it might threaten my identity.

With several exceptions, stories about "normal" families have rarely been the staples of my movie or reading diet. Being gay separated me from these everyday worlds. In heterosexual love stories, I have, like many gays, often identified with women and their love for men—partly because female actors are permitted to be far more expressive than males. The night I discovered the work of Alfred Hitchcock, I knew I had found a kindred sensibility. A friend took me to see Rebecca, and I identified entirely with helpless Joan Fontaine. I was so terrified by Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers that I could hardly sit through the film. I realized later that Judith's power over Joan suggested that of my mother over me. Today, even though thrillers increase my spinal tension and pain, I still love to watch them repeatedly. Because I know them so well, they now enchant instead of frighten, and I can somehow be taken out of myself again and again.

Hitchcock and I must have had similar dreads. But he turned his neuroses into gold, in a formula so reverberating that it works most of the time. He creates entire worlds in which character, plot, and action become increasingly unpredictable and menacing. But his films are also cathartic, because by the end of the movie, I feel I have endured and therefore partly freed myself from the characters' fears. Like his leading men or women, I often feel in my imaginative life trapped between the police and the villains, caught between good and evil. Hitchcock specializes in uncovering the danger that lurks in the commonplace. And I take delight in identifying with his vulnerable protagonist-victims, whose predicaments Hitchcock skillfully compels us to live through. I readily agree that the director's sleights-of-hand don't work as well in all movies as in his masterworks. In some, his willfully leaping over too many sequences of improbabilities (which in most films I happily accept), and his building up to extravagant crowd-pleasing climaxes, seem excessive. But in a film like Vertigo, he creates magic.

On a more profound level, I have often assigned films by Ingmar Bergman to my classes at Yale and San Francisco State. Ever since I saw The Seventh Seal in 1957, I have wondered how I could have survived without his films. Bergman's working with extraordinary actors in his own repertory company, and his collaboration with gifted cameramen like Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist—all help to create works of art that offer some of the most searching views of the sexes, especially of women, and of the pervasive anxieties of our time. In several films, he comments on the destructive isolation from life of intelligent, but emotionally deprived people—the intellectual, the doctor, the clergyman, or the artist. This insight has particular relevance for an egghead like me. In Wild Strawberries, Professor Borg's dreams, memories, and reflections on a life of detachment and coldness have illuminated corners of my own limited life. I watch my favorite films by Bergman, Kurosawa, and Welles repeatedly, and I anticipate many more journeys through their greater works.

During the last two decades, I have freed myself from most of my earlier nightmares. But many nights I still seem to be laboring hard, packing for a long journey, or preparing for some public performance. I am frequently searching without ever finding. I am always behind and trying to catch up. Fortunately, I never dream that I am disabled. Although during the day I now walk with the aid of a cane, I still dream from the perspective of a fast-moving camera, rushing to complete my duties, and never coming to rest. I remain as driven as ever, happiest when I'm at work. Often in dreams I find myself in places I left long ago, never in the place where I am currently living. And now, for the first time, after over five years of verbal recall and reconstruction, I have at times been able in dreams to reach my goals. I have even had "reward" dreams, in which I am able to find things or friends I thought I had lost long ago. Clearly a burden has been lifted.