April 1999

No one has ever breathed one syllable to me about the facts of my own life. Instead, I have been pressured, my life long, to join in the universal pretense that what is real is not real and what is not real is real. Here is my best guess about this history:

I cannot read anyone's mind. But everyone is always reading mine. I may have begun life as someone whose mind can be read by anyone who chooses, and only later have become one whose mental contents are always involuntarily present in the mind of everyone else. Or I may have been born with the latter condition, which I still have.

In my teens, when I discovered that I was homosexual, I suffered a severe mental disturbance arising from my sensitivity to the societal condemnation of homosexuality which prevailed back then. I may have been diagnosed as schizophrenic. What is certain is that I became the subject of a project of study and/or therapy centering upon my erotic orientation -perhaps a project to "cure" homosexuality (which was not removed from the American Psychiatric Association's manual of mental diseases until 1975), perhaps a project of research in schizophrenia--and that this is a U.S. government project, or, if conducted by a private entity, one in which the government is heavily involved.

Whatever its aim when it began in the 1930s, this project continues in full swing, I am still its subject, and it still focuses on my minority but perfectly commonplace sexual orientation or on my presumed "problems of adjustment" to that orientation. At about 16, I was confined--and, at 78, remain confined--in an invisible bubble, my life "scripted" for purposes of research or therapy (if it's therapy, I have no idea what disorder I am treated for) and controlled by a director who communicates with me and manipulates me by telepathy and with whose instructions everyone in my environment collaborates.

I am no longer mentally unstable. If I ever actually had schizophrenia, I exhibit no trace of it now. I am thoroughly adapted to my erotic orientation and to my telepathic condition. Only one problem remains: the project proprietors' reluctance to close their project, which no longer has any reason for being, their obsession with "fixing what ain't broke," and their resolve to keep me eternally mystified about who they are and what they are trying to do, or were ever trying to do, to me or for me or with me or about me.

For a person can have no peace of mind in a bubble, paralyzed, alienated, ignorant of the basic facts about himself that everyone everywhere knows except him. The entity conducting this project must unmask, demystify its operations, and terminate them, rescinding whatever legal instrument authorizes them. I am entitled to know, must know, everything about this project, in exhaustive detail. Until I do, I will remain a sane, rational, responsible citizen trapped in an invisible bubble, perpetually trying to claw my way out--relegated to a science-fictional limbo no human being ever yet was in.

My faceless keepers must meet with me, conclude their obsolete project, and talk to me about reality. That is why I am picketing here today. {04/99}

/s/ Harry Goldgar