As Sax grew older, he began to feel as if he was being watched by people from outside. But he also saw a new kind of affection for humans—”Homo sap.” “They are quite complex (little) creatures (I say to myself),” he wrote in his journal. “They, authentically, endure a good deal. Talented, too. Brave, resourceful, challenged.”
Perhaps because love was no longer a realistic risk – he had now entered “elderly status” – Sachs could finally admit that he craved it. “I remain stabbed With love,” he wrote in his journal. ”A look. A look. an expression. A seat.” He estimated that he had at least five, possibly ten, more years to live. “I want, I want ••• I dare not say. At least not in written form.”
In 2008, Sachs had lunch with Bill Hayes, a forty-seven-year-old writer from San Francisco who was visiting New York. Hayes had never thought about Sax’s sexuality, but, as they started talking, she thought, “Oh my God, he’s gay,” she told me. They sat at the table for most of the afternoon, talking about their insomnia among other topics. After the meal, Sachs wrote a letter to Hayes (which he never sent) explaining that the relationship “has been a ‘forbidden’ area for me – although I sympathize completely. (really sad and possibly jealous) Other people’s relationships.”
A year later, Hayes, whose partner of seventeen years had died of a heart attack, moved to New York. She and Sachs began spending time together. At Sachs’s recommendation, Hess also began keeping a journal. He frequently wrote down his exchanges with Sachs, some of which he later published in a memoir, “Insomniac City”.
“It’s really a question of reciprocity, isn’t it?” Sachs asked her out, two weeks after they had declared their feelings for each other.
“Love?” Hayes replied. “Are you talking about love?”
“Yes,” Sachs replied.
Sachs began taking Hayes to dinner parties, although he introduced him as “my friend Billy.” He did not allow physical affection in public. “Sometimes this issue of not getting out becomes very difficult,” Hayes told me. “We’d have arguments, and I’d say things like ‘Do you and Shengold ever talk about why you can’t come out? Or do you ever talk about your dreams?’ Sacks wrote down sporadic phrases from his dreams on a whiteboard in his kitchen so he could report on them in his sessions, but he did not share what happened in therapy.
Kate Edgar, who worked for Sachs for three decades, had two brothers who were gay, and had advocated for gay civil rights for years, organized a pride march for her son’s school. He deliberately found a sex office in the West Village so he could be surrounded by openly gay men and see how normal it had become. For this reason, she began hiring homosexual assistants for her. “So I’ve been plotting at that level for a few years,” she told me.
In 2013, after being in a relationship with Hayes for four years – they lived in separate apartments in the same building – Sachs began writing a memoir, “On the Move”, in which she disclosed her sexuality for the first time. He recalls his mother’s curses and his decades of celibacy after learning he was gay – a fact he mentions casually without any explanation. Edgar wondered why it took him so long to come out, after so many years of analysis, but, he said, “Oliver did not regard his relationship with Shengold as a failure of therapy.” She said she guessed that Shengold thought, “This is something Oliver has to do in his own way, in his own time.” Shengold’s daughter, Nina, said that, “For my father to have a patient he loved and respected finally gives him the comfort of recognizing who he lived with throughout his life – it’s growth for both of them.”
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