Writing About the Cure
By Charlie Langfur, written October 2024
I have written all my life and learned to trust important events in my life as apt subjects for my writing. One such event that impacted me in a big way was when I was asked to leave high school to be cured of being gay in 1964. The school was Northfield School, an old and distinguished prep school in the sweet rolling hills of northern Massachusetts. I was there on a scholarship from my mother’s boss even though I came from a family always struggling financially.
In 1964, you ask? Back then, being a lesbian was considered to be a disease with the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychological Association (APA), but no one told me about it until I was forced to return home to Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, to see a psychiatrist every week to be cured. In 1974, the medical establishment altered the diagnostic code for gay people (homosexuals at the time) so that the disorder was no longer considered pathological. The APA made the change first. The fact that there was no such disease (and therefore, no cure) in the 1960s emboldened me and gave me the courage to try and talk my way out of things without talking about being gay at all. The Harvard therapist from Northfield School told me what I said to him was private (between us), but then he and the headmaster sent me home anyway without any warning. “I did not say I was gay, the Northfield doctor did,” I told my New Jersey therapist, but he told me I had to say more to be cured, even though I had no idea what more was any more than he did.
A couple of years after all this, I wrote a short story about what happened called “Curing Sarah,” and in it I tried to make sense of what happened and also to memorialize it for me in some authentic way because it impacted my life in every way possible for many years. Writing about it saved me and helped me understand what happened in a way I could absorb. After I wrote “Curing Sarah,” I began to send it out for publication, even more so after the APA declared gayness was no longer a disease in the 1970s, but the story was always rejected (some with and some without comments). Some years ago, the editor of Zoetrope wrote me, “God, I think this is a funny piece, but I couldn’t possibly publish it.”
But finally in 2012, the University of Southern Kentucky accepted it for Ninepatch: A Creative Journal for Women and Gender Studies. The story is still online and last month my neighbor told me she read and loved it. I’ve reread it and feel it still holds up. The tone matches how it was back then, and it shows how it led me to my life today. I am still writing and sending out my work for publication and recently my poem, “The Way Back,” was nominated for the Best of the Net 2025 by Yellow Arrow Publishing, and I was asked to write a poem for Poetry East’s special issue on Monet (a plumb piece for an organic gardener like me).
Over the years I have learned with writing to never give up on what I have to say. Writing has helped me through good times and bad, reflecting my life as an LGBTQ and green writer, in times when what I had to say was okay and when it was not. Recently Paul Iarobbino, an editor for Bold Voices, who is putting together an anthology of defiant moments in gay lives asked me about putting a reprint of “Curing Sarah” in his publication. He said it had “historical value” but wanted his editors to rework it in a first-person narrative. I politely declined because even though a reprint is a good idea, I know the text is right the way it is now—at least for me it is as a writer and a person. The tone works and so does the style.
Writing helps me pave a way through the difficult, and I try to write my way out of difficulty every chance I get. Nowadays, aging presents many experiences for me to do this, and I finally wrote my first short essay about what an elder is. So, I keep writing and changing and learning anew, and as always I write on.
You can read “Curing Sarah” for yourself at encompass.eku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=ninepatch.
Charlene Langfur is an LGBTQ and green writer, an organic gardener, a Syracuse University Graduate Writing Fellow in Poetry in 1970 and she has hundred of publications in poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. She lives in the southern California desert in the Palm Springs oasis.
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