ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and 1980s, and perhaps even later, strange things sometimes happened when the subject of Harry Stack Sullivan's sexuality came up. The excellent biography of Sullivan by his good friend, Helen Swick Perry, said nothing about Sullivan being gay. There is something appropriate about the fact that the writer whose work is such an important inspiration for interpersonal psychoanalysis was gay. By the time Mark Blechner's article appeared, most interpersonalists, maybe all, knew that Sullivan was gay. But knowing this fact as a social reality was not the same as integrating it into interpersonal theory. Blechner's article made it necessary after that to include Sullivan's sexuality in any consideration of his work, because Blechner shows that Sullivan's homosexuality was hardly incidental to interpersonal theory; it was integral to it. An important contribution to the subject that Blechner opened was made by Naoko Wake's book about Sullivan.
