In the summer of 1989, the United States Department of Health and Human Services released a study entitled "Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide." Written in response to the apparently burgeoning epidemic of suicides and suicide attempts by children and adolescents in the United States, the 110-page report contained a section analyzing the situation of gay and lesbian youth. It concluded that, because "gay youth face a hostile and condemning environment, verbal and physical abuse, and rejection and isolation from families and peers," young gays and lesbians are two to three times more likely than other young people to attempt and to commit suicide. The report recommends, modestly enough, an "end [to] discrimination against youths on the basis of such characteristics as...sexual orientation." On October 13, 1989, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, repudiated this section of the report-impugning not its accuracy, but, it seems, its very existence. In a written statement Sullivan said, "the views expressed in the paper entitled 'Gay Male and Lesbian Youth Suicide' do not in any way represent my personal beliefs or the policy of this Department. I am strongly committed to advancing traditional family values.... In my opinion, the views expressed in the paper run contrary to that aim."' It's always open season on gay kids. What professor who cares for her students' survival and dignity can fail to be impressed and frightened by the unaccustomed, perhaps impossible responsibilities that devolve on faculty as a result of the homophobia uniformly enjoined on, for example, teachers in the primary and secondary levels of public schoolwho are subject to being fired, not only for being visibly gay, but, whatever their sexuality, for providing any intimation that homosexual desires, identities, cultures, adults, children, or adolescents have a right to expression or existence. And where, in all this, is psychoanalysis? Where are the "helping professions"? In this discussion of institutions, I mean to ask, not about Freud and the possibly spacious affordances of the mother-texts, but about psychoanalysis and psychiatry as they are functioning in the US today.2 I am especially interested in revisionist psychoanalysis including ego-psychology, and in influential developments following on the American Psychiatric Association's much-publicized 1973 decision to drop the
