September 27, 2025, is the fiftieth anniversary of the ignominious death in prison of my sorely regretted and dearly beloved friend Mark Frechette. He was 27 years old. World famous as the star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point, he was, for me, the friend who cured me of my schizophrenia. We were both victims of psychiatric abuse, having been incarcerated in insane asylums against our will, deprived of all our human rights, humiliated, mistreated, and tortured, all for the sake of obtaining a psychiatric cure for being ourselves. Mark had been hospitalized for six months and I for fifteen, when we became friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in June 1966. Mark managed to escape from the Hartford Institute of Living by consummating his affection for an Afro-American nurse in an elevator and obtaining her keys to the hospital as a recompense. I was released from what was originally called the McLean Asylum for the Insane after thirteen months there, when my parents’ insurance money ran out. I was then transferred to a less expensive hospital where I remained for two months. When we met, Mark was 18 and I was 20 years old.
The Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, was published by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013. It contains the psychiatrists’ latest invention, called “Prolonged Grief Disorder.” The good news is that so far no pharmaceutical company has claimed to have produced a pill that would reduce the symptoms of grief. Of course selling such a pill would bring in billions of dollars, since everyone experiences grief at one time or another. Thus its advent is already predestined. Among the symptoms of this mental disorder that I show are anger, bitterness and sorrow, as well as the fact that the grief has lasted more than one year. I would now like to explain why I will refuse to take the anti-grief medication when it appears. I am proud and grateful for carrying the burden of grief for Mark lo these many fifty years.
Mark’s life fell apart when he was fourteen years old and a Catholic priest in Stamford, Connecticut, named Laurence Brett, persuaded Mark that he should let him conclude Mark’s confession by fellating Mark. Scores of boys fell victim to Father Brett’s sacerdotal sexual abuse. We will never know how many of them suffered traumas that destroyed their lives, but certainly Mark was not the only one. Whenever an adolescent boy discovers that the Church cannot be trusted, he has every right to think that all human institutions can be dangerous. Father Brett managed to escape from the United States when the FBI tried to arrest him. Until he was abused by the priest, Mark had been an ideal student, getting straight A’s and enjoying stamp collecting. Suddenly he became a juvenile delinquent, burglarized houses, and escaped to Greenwich Village. His parents tried in vain to sue the Vatican to pay for Mark’s psychiatric care, which began on December 27, 1965, when three thugs came to their house, put him into a straitjacket and took him off to a state mental hospital. He was later transferred to the Hartford Institute of Living.
When I discovered Mark in Harvard Square in June 1966, he was working as a sandwich-board man, advertising the Paperback Booksmith on Brattle Street. My friend Camille, who had been a fellow patient of mine at McLean and who was a bipolar Lesbian, convinced me that we should make the acquaintance of this handsome young man. She took me by the hand and we approached Mark. After a minimum amount of small talk, Camille told Mark: “Young man, my friend here would like very much to tell you that he finds you an aesthetically pleasing ornament to Harvard Square.” She then gave Mark my address. He came over that evening and we immediately became friends, especially since we had both been victims of psychiatric abuse. Our anger at the world was infinite and we wanted to be part of some revolution. We knew very well that our lives had been totally destroyed by the adults surrounding us, by psychiatrists, priests, and parents. First the adults make us insane and then they punish us for being insane, for any involuntary incarceration in mental hospitals is seen as a form of punishment. The main difference with a regular prison is that a prisoner knows exactly how long his term is for, whereas psychiatric patients have to deal with the idea that they might be locked up until they die.
I told Mark that a psychiatrist at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire had driven me insane by trying to cure me of my homosexuality, starting at age sixteen and lasting two years. Conversion therapy is now illegal throughout Canada and is rightly considered to be a form of torture. I told Mark that the obvious cure for me was by making love with him, and he consented. Thus I carry my grief for him with gratitude and with pride and would refuse to let any psychiatrist tell me that it is a mental disorder or that I should try to rid myself of it.
My grief is profound and everlasting. Wherever I go, it accompanies me. I have enjoyed intimacy with a good number of men and women, but with each of them I have felt that I was being untrue to Mark. Not only was he my first lover, and my most beautiful one, and my perfect soulmate, he was also the person who cured me of my so-called incurable schizophrenia. When we were together, I could actually feel the demons of paranoid schizophrenia leaving my soul. With Mark, I knew summits of carnal ecstasy that were never repeated with anyone else.
I remember three sentences that Mark told me. The first occurred when he was living in my room at Harvard, breaking all the rules. He looked up from the book he was reading and told me: “I have an undying love and admiration for you.” I knew then that I would never forget this moment and these words, and I was right.
The second sentence came when I announced to Mark, in June 1968, that I was leaving the United States forever. This was the first time that Mark directed his anger against me. He said: “America needs you.” We both wanted desperately to start some sort of revolution in America, and I was just running away, like the rats that are the first to leave a sinking ship. Both Mark and I detested what America was and what it was becoming. When I was in Germany, Mark wrote to me that America would “bleed and burn and crumble.” He carried on the good fight, when I was enjoying life in Europe and Québec.
The third sentence was spoken in the Charles Street Jail in Boston, in September 1973, right after Mark’s revolutionary outburst. He saw me worshipping him just as much as before and said, “I really fucked you up.” Psychiatrists would probably say that my “prolonged grief disorder” is proof that Mark was right.
Why was Mark in prison? On August 29, 1973, Mark and two friends tried to rob their local bank, all three carrying fully loaded revolvers. One of Mark’s friends was shot dead on the spot by the police, and Mark was sent to prison for six years. Some people think that Mark wanted to make the robbery in order to have money to produce what would have been his fourth film. It was based on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Perhaps Mark identified too much with Roskolnikov and just wanted to know what it feels like to make a senseless crime. But unlike Roskolnikov and other idealistic revolutionaries like the Unabomber and Luigi Mangione, Mark never killed anyone.
I think that the real reason for his senseless foray into crime was his feeling that his life would just be incomplete if he did nothing to promote revolution. He called it “an act of revolutionary protest.” Did he actually think that he might spark a widespread movement of social, cultural and political discontent? Did he think that the masses would rise up and welcome him as their saviour? Someone working at the Hartford Institute of Living sold Mark’s psychiatric record to a journalist who commented that Antonioni would never have hired Mark if he had been aware of Mark’s psychiatric past. Likewise, I have often told myself that the four universities where I have taught would not have given me a job if they had known that I was once hospitalized for being what psychiatrists considered to be an incurable schizophrenic. Actually, my university in Québec has responded very positively to the published accounts of my mental disorders.
Mark would have been a good saviour for the American people, but Heaven needed him. He was certainly my own saviour. When he was locked up in Norfolk Prison in 1974 and I was a lecturer at the University of Bonn, I told him: “You are the suffering Christ.” It was totally sincere. I meant it as a metaphor. It was a simile saying: You are like the suffering Christ. But when he died a year later, what was once a metaphor became a theological reality, at least for me.
My seventeenth century Boston Puritan ancestors thought that God gives us signs to strengthen our faith. There are four such events in this story that can be interpreted either as being meaningless coincidences or as being signs that my eschatological affirmations about Mark are correct.
The first is the amazing fact that both the Protestant Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the Protestant German theologian Paul Tillich announced in the year 1920 that the twentieth century was the propitious moment in history for the advent of the Second Coming of Christ. Yeats published his famous poem with this title in 1920 and in the same year Tillich said for the first time that his theology was one of the Kairos. Kairos means the appropriate moment in Greek. In the New Testament it means the right moment for the arrival of the Son of Man, also called the Second Coming or the Messiah or the Parousia. Tillich and Yeats did not know each and I am certain that they had not even heard of one another, and yet they had the same strange idea the same year. Was it a coincidence or a sign from God?
The second sign or coincidence were Mark’s two deaths, the first one in the film Zabriskie Point, and the second in real life. Both occurred with the form of a cross. In the film, Mark is killed by the police while seated in a small airplane whose wings, when seen from above, form a cross with the airplane fuselage. In his real life, Mark was asphyxiated in a prison gymnasium with a barbell of 150 pounds of weights on his throat. The juxtaposition of the barbell and the bench that Mark was lying on forms a cross. We shall never know for sure if his death was an accident, a suicide or a homicide. An official investigation was made and it was determined that it was an accident. His friends and family thought that he was killed by fellow inmates. My last psychiatrist, who was incarcerated in another Massachusetts prison at the time, told me that rumors in his prison spoke about a murder.
The third sign or coincidence is the number 27. Mark and I determined together that the number 27 occurred often in his life and my life for important events. For example, he was taken to his first mental hospital on December 27, 1965. On March 27, 1965, I wrote my essay for the theologian Paul Tillich and it contained 27 pages. Then Mark died on September 27, 1973, at the age of 27. Are these coincidences or signs from God?
The last possible sign is Jesus saying: “I will come as a thief”. And Mark was a thief.
I am grateful to my grief, for it is all that is left of Mark for me. I have no desire to reduce the pain, the anger or the sorrow. I dislike psychiatry because psychiatrists think that they should erase pain and suffering with their pills and their words of wisdom. But pain and suffering are part of the human condition and every person has the duty to learn to live with his or her share of unhappiness. It is not easy but it is a universal part of life. As the French song says, “Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment. Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie. » « Joys of love are but a moment long, pain of love endures the whole life long.” I am convinced that it is the absence of the right kind of love that causes mental illness and that the presence of the right kind of love cures mental illness. This is the story of Mark’s love for me and how it cured me of my paranoid schizophrenia. He showed me that I did not need to be afraid of my homosexuality and that I had as much right as anyone else to live my life on my own terms, without the interventions of psychiatrists.
One source of joy for me is an interview that Mark gave to The Boston Globe when he was in the Charles Street Jail. In the September 9, 1973, edition of the newspaper, Mark says that the three years that he and I spent together were the best years of his life. “In 1966, 67 and 68 there was something happening. There was incredible interchange. We haven’t changed. Everybody else is gone. Where did they go?”
Mark continues to visit me in my dreams. His message is always the same: “As you can see, I am still alive. All the stories about me dying were lies. I have just been in hiding. Now I have come back to you.”
