OLIVER SACKS
Capturing the legacy of the maverick neurologist and gay cultural icon
Oxford graduate, pilled-up San Francisco biker, maverick neurologist, cultural icon — Oliver Sacks was all these things and more. In a life filled with turmoil and hardship, his innate empathy for the suffering of others has left a scientific legacy that continues to inspire
When diagnosed with incurable cancer and given only months to live, Oliver Sacks responded in his typically idiosyncratic fashion — by inviting filmmaker Ric Burns into his home to shoot a documentary about him. The result, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, is an intimate portrait of a great man, told with the same extraordinary empathy that was his hallmark. Sacks was a scientist and a writer, but, above all, a healer. As an unassuming British neurologist, he made an unlikely public figure — and yet that’s what he became, despite his intentions.
Born in London in 1933, Sacks was the son of two Jewish doctors. His mother, Muriel
Elsie Landau, was one of the first female surgeons in England, and her eccentric behaviour included bringing a foetus back from work for her 11-year-old son to dissect. As his mother’s favourite child, Sacks was to feel her influence throughout his life. When he came out to her at the age of
18, she called him an abomination. “He never got over the wound,” says director Ric Burns, “but he also never got over the deep sense of love and inter-identification. As he said, ‘My mother and I were close. Perhaps too close.’”
Parental disapproval aside, being openly gay was dangerous in the 1950s, when even national heroes were vulnerable to acts of extreme homophobia. “This was Alan Turing’s England, where chemical castration was a real possibility for homosexual behaviour,” explains Burns. “The wounded identity that went along with homosexuality was deeply knit into who Oliver was.”
Despite this context, the young Sacks was determined to find a way to live authentically. “What do you do when your mother calls you an abomination? You move to San Francisco!” declares Burns.
Sacks plunged into the gay utopia of
1960s San Francisco with enthusiasm. He embraced the body beautiful and broke a weightlifting record in 1961. Gay poet and fellow British expat Thom Gunn numbered among his friends. Sacks took up biking and wore leathers, tearing around the coastal roads at dangerous speed. Then there was the other dangerous speed: amphetamines. Lots of them. Sacks quickly fell into a spiral of addiction. By the time he moved to New York City, his determination to find himself through drug-fuelled abandon had brought him to the brink of losing everything.
“Oliver only changed when he absolutely had to,” reveals Burns, “so his life was a series of careering, reckless near-catastrophes from the very beginning. At 32, he realised he was going to die if he continued taking amphetamines. Then he found the patients
“When Sacks came out to his mother at the age of 18, she called him an abomination”
in the Beth Abraham Hospital; in this ward in the Bronx they were warehousing incurables, and he discovered in them an extraordinary cohort of fellow travellers.”
His connection with these patients took him out of himself and focused Sacks on what was to become a lifelong passion – the determination to voice the experience of those who would otherwise remain voiceless. They were victims of the 1920s sleeping sickness epidemic that left them in an apparently vegetative state. Some hadn’t communicated for four decades. Although they were considered incurable, Sacks refused to accept the diagnosis and by using the drug levodopa he achieved what others had considered impossible, waking them from their long slumber.
The resulting book, Awakenings (1976), had some high-profile supporters, but it initially failed to either find a big readership or establish his reputation within the scientific community. Nevertheless, it was to have a profound impact on his life.
With the discovery of his vocation came other changes. Sacks now embarked on a 35-year period of celibacy. Writer and photographer
Bill Hayes, Sacks’ partner, elaborates. “His mother literally cursed him, but that wasn’t the only reason he remained closeted. As his fame grew — especially after the 1985 publication of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, where he really became a well-known intellectual who was sought after around the world — it became even more difficult. There was still stigma attached to being gay; Aids played a big role in that. He was also a very shy man. As his reputation grew, it became harder and harder for him to talk about his private life in public.”
The book was essentially a series of essays about patients who displayed unusual neurological symptoms, including the one who inspired its classic title. It wasn’t the obvious subject matter for a blockbuster, but it became a surprise global phenomenon.
“He didn’t really become Oliver Sacks as we know him until The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat,” adds Burns. “Then the film of Awakenings came out in 1990. People thought, he must really be a scientist if Robin Williams is playing him! Suddenly, he was being invited to conventions and given honorary dictates. In the film, he’s straight — the character has this tentative flirtatious relationship with a nurse. The alibi story continued…”
His success had become a kind of prison — but one that was not without its benefits. Hayes comments, “His work consumed him emotionally and also intellectually — and that was so important to him. He devoted all his time to his patients, and to writing, and to lecturing — that was his life, and he was very happy in a lot of ways. But there was this one missing piece.”
“His work consumed him emotionally and intellectually. But there was this one missing piece”
That finally dropped into place when Sacks contacted Hayes in 2008, a few months after the publication of the latter’s book, The Anatomist.
“Out of the blue, I got this handwritten letter from Oliver Sacks congratulating me and saying he’d enjoyed my book,” says Hayes. “I’d read two or three of his books and his profiles in The New Yorker, so I was flattered. I wrote back to say thank you, and then he wrote back to me, so a little correspondence started. I later moved to New York — which had nothing to do with Oliver living there — and we met and fell in love.”
So began the last great adventure of Oliver Sacks. “He was definitely ready,” continues Hayes. “When he was in his 20s and early 30s, he hooked up with men, had romances and heartbreaks — and then that ended. But at 75, he’d never had a real domestic relationship. He wasn’t looking for that. Then fate brought us together. It was one of the delights of being with him — seeing this 75-year-old, a brilliant genius who was also like a teenage boy falling in love for the first time. He loved the domestic aspect of being in a relationship, like making dinner together and setting the table.”
During his last years he also saw a new appreciation of his legacy.
“He was absolutely misunderstood as a neurologist,” says Hayes. “In the beginning, he thought he was a total failure because he didn’t have success publishing academic papers. He got a lot of rejections. But he was writing for a much broader audience, he was normalising and humanising some of these conditions for the general reader.
“He was looked down upon, patronised and condescended to — until the tipping point came. At the Columbia School of Medicine neurology department, they say that something like 70 per cent of applicants now cite Oliver Sacks as an inspiration. That really humbled him because he’d lived such a private life and wasn’t very aware of his public influence.”
Perhaps even more satisfying for Sacks was the impact that his writing about neuro-atypical conditions including Tourette’s syndrome, autism and Asperger’s had on those living with them. Months before his death, Hayes took
Sacks to a local gay bar that was throwing an Oliver Sacks-themed party to celebrate his life and work. When it was announced that he was in attendance, a line of people spontaneously formed to meet him. “I was standing next to him and the things I overheard were so moving,” remembers an emotional Hayes. “A young lesbian told him that he’d helped her family understand her through his writing. She was autistic. She just wanted to say thank you.”
“His life was not a tragedy,” concludes Burns, “it was a comedy, and like all comedies, it began and continued in turbulence until it found a remarkable, serene ending.”