![]() It’s quickly determined that he is a risk to himself and needs to be hospitalized, and Gaines manages to convinces his grandfather to pay for him to be institutionalized at Payne Whitney, an upscale psychiatric hospital where Marilyn Monroe stayed briefly, rather than the cheaper, scarier-seeming one to which he had originally been committed. Beset by these symptoms and too terrified to tell anyone about his sexuality - it’s the 1960s and widespread acceptance of homosexuality certainly hasn’t reached Borough Park yet - the 15-year-old Gaines tries to kill himself by smashing his hand through two panes of glass. By then he had developed rather severe OCD and anxiety as well. ![]() At a fairly early age, he realized he was gay, and he writes that “I kept it a secret that I was a homo as best as I could, and I watched how other boys moved and walked and talked, and I tried to look and be like them.”Īround puberty, Gaines begins having intense, shameful sexual fantasies about other boys. Gaines was always a bit flamboyant, a bit dramatic. Right at the beginning of One of These Things First, the excellent memoir by Steven Gaines released last month, a journalist, author, and radio host, we learn that Gaines never fully fit in Borough Park, the working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn where where he grew up. Photo: Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Hamptons Magazine
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