Was he queer … or just Irish? Reading the life of Harry Stack Sullivan

Abstract

This paper examines Helen Swick Perry’s (1982) biography of the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan’s life and works are briefly reviewed. In contrast to other gayaffirmative writing on Sullivan, my reading attends to Perry’s citations of Irish-American identity and Catholic upbringing in her presentation of both Sullivan and his aunt Margaret Stack as lonely loveless Irish heterosexuals, a presentation which obscures these gay and lesbian lives. I conclude with an anti-essentialist argument drawn from Sullivan’s own writings to avoid essentialist readings of the relationship between his life’s events and the meanings of his works.