Erase Her: A Survivor’s Story: How the Best Years of My Life Were Stolen by Conversion Therapy

By Cassandra Langer

As a nice Jewish girl raised in an upwardly mobile, status-seeking family, Cassandra Langer never conformed to her mother's gender expectations. When her mother fell prey to a cult leader representing himself as a child behavior expert, Langer was incarcerated for two years as a teenager and barely escaped a lobotomy. The author hopes that those who feel helpless might find some skills to survive and thrive in this book. Her story of surviving 20th-century conversion therapy is set in 1950s Miami and upstate New York. She aims to put secular conversion torture in a historical context to understand the development of homophobic policies and systems active now in red states such as Florida with its "Don't Say Gay" laws.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667857213

Book preview

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About the author

Art historian and critic Cassandra Langer became the accidental biographer of Romaine Brooks, A life (1874 – 1970) when a search to uncover the artist’s aesthetics led Langer to rethink the flawed narrative of Brooks’ life. The award-winning author and former Smithsonian post-doctoral fellow is best known for her books, Mother and Child in Art, What’s Right with Feminism, A Bibliography of Feminist Art Criticism and Feminist Art Criticism.

Langer earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees at University of Miami and her doctorate from New York University. She returned to New York University in the 1990s to become a certified USPAP Art Appraiser.

She taught Art History and Criticism at Florida International University and the University of South Carolina. She has been a visiting scholar at Hunter College, Queens College, School of Visual Art, and The Feminist Art Institute.

Her articles and reviews have appeared in Art in America, College Art Journal, Arts, Art Criticism, Woman’s Art Journal, Art Papers, Ms. magazine, Women’s Review of Books, Cleo Psyche, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Review.

Dr. Langer has lectured widely and authored essays for the Museum of the City of New York, the State of South Carolina, and the Winston-Salem Art Center.

She organized several exhibitions including: Home is Where the Heart Is at White Columns Gallery reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times. Her chapter, What is Feminism? was selected as a teaching tool for The Aims of Argument, 5th edition by Timothy W. Crusius and Carolyn E. Channel and her Selected Bibliography of Feminist Art Criticism was included on G.K. Hall’s Women Artists on Disc. She is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015, and is currently finishing this conversion therapy memoir: Erase Her; Volume 2: Sun, Sea and Sex.

Cassandra Langer maintains a Romaine Brooks fan page and group on Facebook. Learn more at http://www.Romainebrooks.com, FB fan page Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) and http://www.cassandralanger.com

Books and Catalogues by Cassandra Langer

The Rising South; A Critical Overview.

NEA/SECCA: Southeastern Seven III

(Winston - Salem, North Carolina: Southeastern Center

for Contemporary Art, 1980)

Faces of the South, in U.S.A. Volta Del Sud: arte contemporanea della

Carolina del Nord, Della Carolina del Sud, della Georgia

(Roma: Fratelli Palombi, 1984)

Feminist Art Criticism: an annotated bibliography

(NY: G.K. Hall & Company, 1991)

Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology

eds., Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer and Arlene Raven

(Michigan: U.M.I. Research Press, 1988)

Thomas Aquinas Daly

Cassandra Langer, curator Anthony Bannon

(NY: Burchfield Art Center, 1989)

Positions: Reflections on Multi-racial issues in the visual arts

Surviving Schizophrenia curator Cassandra Langer

(NY: Feminist Art Institute, 1989)

The Many Masques of Eve

Cassandra Langer, curator Mary Ann Wadden

(NY: Hillwood Art Museum, 1991)

New Feminist Art Criticism: Art, Identity, Action

eds., Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer and Arlene Raven

(NY: Icon editions, HarperCollins, 1994)

The Robert R. Preato Collection of New York City Art

Cassandra Langer, curator Jan Seidler Ramirez

(NY: Museum of the City of New York, 1994)

Representing Queer Family Values in Art

curator Cassandra Langer

(NY: White Columns Exhibitions, 1997)

How Feminism Has Changed American Society,

Culture and How We Live from the 1940s to the Present

(NY: ASAJ Press, 2001)

Rainbow Blues: Poems and Watercolors

(NY: Painted Pony Press, Lulu, 2013)

Romaine Brooks: A Life

(Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2015)

Visages of Venus: Poems and Watercolors

(NY: Painted Pony Press, Lulu, 2021)

Acknowledgments

I know my memory is good. If I have forgotten to mention anyone among the many resources I consulted for this partial memoir documenting my roughly three years of conversion torment I hope you will forgive me.

Special thanks to Irene Javors who encouraged me to open my lock box and revisit my two-and-a-half-year ordeal to her graduate class in Clinical Therapy at Yeshiva University. I never wanted to revisit those sufferings again. I am grateful to Louise Bernikow for cutting the fat from my initial draft. I appreciate the generosity of my friend Suzanne Stroh in volunteering to format, proofread and make editorial suggestions for organizing my story of being tortured by Dr. Samuel Kahn and his cult of followers in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The support I received gave me fresh insights into understanding what happened to me as a vulnerable fourteen year old, and in processing the deep psychological wounding I experienced during the mid-nineteen fifties when heterosexism damaged so many gay lives especially those of girls and women. I am grateful to all those who supported me in my efforts to offer this memoir as a testament to the idea that it can and does get better if we survive. Sarah Yedinsky was kind enough to read the draft and offer excellent suggestions. I am grateful to Sally Cowan, my therapist and friend for her patience and encouragement in struggling through the many painful memories I revisited to give an honest portrayal of what it is like to go through the agony of conversion brutalization.

Thanks to Louis Proyect, of Woodridge and his blog The Unrepentant Marxist that enabled me to contact other Quakerbridge survivors including Steven Preistein for giving me a picture of myself as a rebellious teenager. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr. Kahn’s daughter Susanna from his marriage to Elaine Toister for sharing her insights about her parents with me. Harriet, Kathy, Gail, Beth, Erica, Edith, Martha, Cat and so many others who experienced Kahn’s bizarre treatments and corroborated my history, filling in areas where my memory was unsure.

To my oldest Miami friends all I can say is thank you for helping me with memories from our shared youth; my graphic designer friend Roxanne Panero who helped me with ideas for the cover for this book and was there in some of my darkest hours, my oldest and best friend of over sixty three years, Adrianne Momi who always had a ready ear for my doubts and misgivings. My sounding board, fellow writer William DuPriest; my sister outlaw, birth certificate forger and dyke extraordinaire Merrill Mushroom; writer/activist, and guardian of southern lesbian creativity, my dear dancing partner Sylvia Pardo and librarian consultant Patricia Scherer and all those who weathered the cultural clashes during some of the worse persecutions our bohemian community experienced during the 50s, and ongoing.

Special gratitude is owed the gay and arts communities I am privileged to be part of, including: Alessandra Comini; Maria de Guzman; Jim Saslow; Gail Levin; the late Jill Morris, Steven Goldstein and Joan Schenkar, among too many others to mention here.

This book is about how from the ages of fourteen to seventeen my life was stolen from me and never given back.

Erase Her

A Survivor’s Story: How the Best Years of My Life Were Stolen by Conversion Therapy

©2023 Cassandra Langer

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

print ISBN: 978-1-66785-720-6

ebook ISBN: 978-1-66785-721-3

Contents

Chapter 1. Delinquent

Chapter 2. Blindsided

Chapter 3. Ice Pick

Chapter 4. Shoplifter

Chapter 5. Delphine

Chapter 6. Mother

Chapter 7. Cousin

Chapter 8. Grandmother

Chapter 9. Problem Child

Chapter 10. The Setup

Chapter 11. Quakerbridge

Chapter 12. Drugstore

Chapter 13. Resistance

Chapter 14. Despair

Chapter 15. The Hot Seat

Chapter 16. The Black Bluebird House

Chapter 17. Erasure

Chapter 18. Tea Dancer

Appendix

Endnotes

List of Illustrations

For all the survivors,

I dedicate this book to you.

CL

Author’s Note

I wrote my memoir in the voice of the intelligent, rebellious fourteen-year-old girl I was. This is a true story. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. But there is one name that should never be erased–Dr. Samuel Kahn.

Chapter 1

Delinquent

I BARELY GOT THROUGH my last semester of high school. Coral Gables, Florida, in April 1959 was a tropical suburban paradise, buzzing with teenage high anxiety. Kids getting ready for the prom. Seniors biting their nails, waiting for college acceptance letters. We were on deadline with the Coral Gables High School yearbook. My pals were running around trying to get photos, comments, and orders. But I was in detention, missing out on all the action.

I looked around the classroom. Every old wooden desk, complete with an inkwell, was filled with delinquent kids. One guy had brought a gun to school. Some other kid had drawn an obscene picture of the teacher on the blackboard. Another kid was in there for talking disrespectfully to the teacher. Telling your teacher to fuck off in 1959 was so bad that it made you a social pariah. I was in detention with all the hoodlums.

I was there that day, and most days through May, because I was defiant. Something had snapped inside, and I could no longer hold back from mocking the authority. I refused to do my homework because I thought the exercises were stupid. I talked back to the teacher when I knew that the facts did not support the teacher’s interpretation. I hung out with the wrong crowd and got caught smoking in the bathroom. I didn’t follow the dress code. I was reported for graffiti and for being the class clown, spoofing on the teacher behind her back. I was really bad most of the time, no question about it. It must have been a delayed reaction, which today we would call PTSD, from the trauma I had suffered at reform school. A reform school that was so terrifying, I had barely escaped being lobotomized.

At home, I would shut myself in my room, play Elvis so loud that it blew out my stereo speakers, and read the Beat poets, Edith Hamilton, and the ancients to recover from my ordeal.

My mother barged into my room without using the brass knocker I’d installed. She had that self-righteous look on her face, and I knew what was coming. I braced myself for the lecture to begin. I was a disgrace to the family. Why couldn’t I behave like my brother? I could tell Mother was staring at my puffy face, my bloodshot eyes. I wasn’t a stoner or a druggie. I was a wreck. What was wrong with me was, I had a crushing inferiority complex. I beat myself up over my mother’s rejection and my failure to live up to her impossible expectations. I was angry, confused, and ashamed. My nightmares woke me in the middle of the night. I would lie there, trembling with fear and not knowing why. I cried into my pillow so that no one could hear me. I was never able to go back to sleep before the alarm rang around 6:00 a.m.

You could make an effort, Sandra, Mother said with an edge. You can’t expect to hang around here all summer and do nothing.

I knew that she wanted me out of her hair. I wasn’t keen on working at Dixie Gas company, the family business, and sweating my brains out, trying to reconcile billing records under the supervision of Jim, the office manager. Following my father’s orders, Jim would make my life hell if I failed to account for literally every penny.

Mother said, You can go work at the Colony Hotel and earn some money for college. I’ve already discussed it with your father.

The Colony Hotel? Summer in the Catskills where I’d grown up? The Colony wasn’t exactly a crown jewel of the Borscht Belt, but it was less pretentious than The Concord or Grossingers, and more fun. Plus, it was owned by friends of the family whom I’d known since I was a baby.¹ Gertie and Henny Katz were ok, and they had been at Mom and Dad’s wedding.

You could always count on Gertie for cookies and strudel, and Henny had always been nice to me. I cheered up a little. The Katzes could get me a job teaching arts and crafts. They had pull.

I was dying to escape, so I said, Okay with me.

What could go wrong?

Chapter 2

Blindsided

HOW STUPID could I be? Why didn’t my mother’s offer throw me into high alert?

I had seen the blue books hidden in the hall closet where Mother kept her Reader’s Digests and self-help books. All the pamphlets published by The Optimist Society were baby blue in color. The author’s name was bigger than anything else on the covers: Samuel Kahn, M.D. It had been over a year since my father rescued me from Quakerbridge, where Kahn was head of school. But the pamphlets kept piling up. I had to sift through them to find the meditation books I was looking for. Why didn’t I connect the dots?

And then there was Dina Katz. Gertie and Henny’s daughter. She was seven or eight years older. I hadn’t known her at all, growing up with the Katz boys, Freddie and Herbie, my summer pals in the Catskills. Dina had always been that older sister you never pay attention to, the one always coming and going from the hotel, until the day I saw her standing in the doorway at Quakerbridge. By the summer of 1959, I knew she had fallen deeply under the influence of Doctor Kahn. But Dina was married to Stephen Epstein, and they lived a million miles away in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. I should have connected her with The Colony Hotel. But I didn’t. I was too deep into my own shit. Just trying to keep myself together, day to day. I really thought I’d seen the last of Dina Katz. Big mistake.

After a three-day drive, my parents and I arrived at the Colony Hotel on a beautiful, bright-blue-sky, Catskill Mountain day. The sun was shining lemon yellow through green leaves overhead as we walked into the lobby.

I left my parents chatting with their friends and hurried to the camp staff quarters behind the main building. I followed behind a fellow counselor, Michael, who was moving my trunk on a wheeled cart.

I heard the blue jay’s piercing cry as the cart bumped along over the damp ground, weaving between sedimentary outcroppings along the way. The stones underfoot were brown, flint gray—some smooth, some broken.

This is it! Home sweet home for the summer.

I looked up and saw an old, run-down wood cabin shaded by a mix of tall trees.

Pushing open the battered screen door, Michael made a courtly bow and waved me in. It was a bunkhouse.

Take your pick, my lady.

I knew he was joking because many of the beds were already taken. I spotted a single bed with its mattress upended next to a wall at the end of the room.

No sweat, he said, setting the trunk down with a smile. Looks like you lucked out. He grinned.

I guess, getting here a day or two early paid off.

Sure did. You got the last wall space. So, you’ll have a little privacy.

Michael was taller than I was, about five feet nine inches, with dark curly hair and midnight blue eyes. I noticed his full soft lips when he stopped and turned to me. Hey, he said, Just call me Catcher. Everyone does.

That’s a funny name for a nice Jewish boy, I joked. Why do they call you that?

He laughed. It’s because I’m the best shortstop on my baseball team. Then he turned his head to me, smiling. "Where have you been