There is a moment in Jeffrey Dahmer’s psychiatric interview with Dr Frederick Fosdal, recorded on January 9, 1992, that stops you completely. Fosdal asks him about his sexuality — when he knew, what he felt, what options he saw. Jeffrey’s answer is quiet and precise:
“I was 14 when I had the consenting meeting with Tyson at the club house — it was never talked about — there was no outlet. There was never any opportunity for a good sex life — I never saw any opportunity to meet anyone like that — it was just an issue that was never discussed in the community at all.”
Never discussed. No outlet. No opportunity.
This is not a man describing a preference. This is a man describing a wall.
America in the 1970s: The World Jeffrey Grew Up In
Jeffrey Dahmer was born in 1960. He was nine years old when the Stonewall riots happened in New York City in June 1969 — the moment often cited as the birth of the modern gay rights movement. Gay men and women fought back against a police raid on a Greenwich Village bar, and the world noticed.
But Stonewall happened in New York. Jeffrey grew up in Ohio.
The distance between those two realities cannot be overstated. The 1970s were a decade of paradox for gay Americans. In urban centres — New York, San Francisco, Chicago — a visible, increasingly confident gay culture was emerging. The Castro district in San Francisco became a neighbourhood. Gay bars multiplied. Publications emerged. A community, however fragile, was forming.
But in small towns, in suburbs, in the heartland — none of this existed. Or rather, it existed somewhere else, in whispers, in rumour, in something you might have heard about if you were lucky enough to know where to look. For a teenager in Bath Township, Ohio, it might as well have been on another planet.
The legal landscape was brutal. In 1970, sodomy laws — criminalising same-sex intimacy — were still active in every American state. By the time Jeffrey reached adulthood, some states had begun repealing them, but Ohio’s sodomy law remained on the books until 1974, and the culture around it changed far more slowly than the legislation. Gay men were arrested, harassed, fired, institutionalised, and disowned throughout the decade. The American Psychiatric Association had only removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 — meaning that for the first thirteen years of Jeffrey’s life, his sexuality was officially classified as a mental illness by the foremost psychiatric authority in the country.
Then came 1981. The first reports of what would become known as AIDS began appearing in medical journals. By 1982 it had a name. By 1983 it was an epidemic. By the mid-1980s, when Jeffrey was in his mid-twenties and living in Milwaukee, AIDS had transformed the cultural landscape around homosexuality into something even more terrifying — a plague, in the public imagination, visited specifically on gay men. The stigma compounded. The silence deepened. The already-narrow spaces where gay men could exist without fear became sites of shame and death in the eyes of a fearful country.
This was the world. This was the air Jeffrey Dahmer breathed as he tried to understand himself.
Bath Township, Ohio: No Language, No Mirror, No Exit
Jeffrey grew up in a household where emotional and psychological complexity was rarely addressed directly. Lionel Dahmer’s memoir is honest about this — a household of silences, of difficulties managed rather than spoken about, of a father who loved his son but did not know how to reach him, and a mother whose struggles with mental health consumed enormous amounts of the family’s emotional oxygen.
Neither parent ever discussed homosexuality with Jeffrey. Not once. Not in any form.
In the Fosdal interview Jeffrey reflects on this directly. When asked about his sexuality, he says that in the community he was living in, homosexuality was the ultimate taboo. He never met anybody of the same mindset as himself. He never saw any opportunity to live normally. And so when the desire first fully crystallised — at around fifteen or sixteen, he says — he could think of only one way to satisfy it, and that way was forceful and wrong. He knew it was wrong. But he had no other model, no other path, no image of what a life like his could look like.
This is crucial. Not having a model is not a trivial thing. Psychologists who work with LGBTQ+ adolescents consistently identify mirror absence — the inability to see yourself reflected anywhere in the world around you — as one of the most psychologically damaging aspects of growing up gay in an unsupportive environment. Without mirrors, identity formation becomes distorted. You cannot build a healthy sense of who you are when who you are does not appear to exist anywhere.
Jeffrey had no mirrors. No gay teachers he knew of. No gay relatives who were out. No books, no films, no television characters. No community. No language that applied to him.
What he had instead was shame — and the very particular kind of shame that comes not from something you have done, but from something you simply are.
The Double Life Begins
At fourteen, Jeffrey had a consensual sexual encounter with another boy — Tyson, at the clubhouse. He never spoke of it again. It was never mentioned between them. There was nowhere to put it, no framework to understand it, no adult to turn to. It simply happened and was buried.
Lionel, in A Father’s Story, reflects with pain on how little he knew of Jeffrey’s inner life during those years. He describes a boy who kept everything to himself, who would talk but never confide, whose innermost thoughts remained completely private. Jeffrey himself confirms this in the Fosdal interview, describing how he simply felt it was best to keep his private thoughts private — that he didn’t really trust them with anyone, not even family members. Not because he feared a violent response, but because there was simply no language available, no way to say it, no expectation that it could be received.
Brian Masters, in The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, traces the gradual internalisation of this secrecy. By the time Jeffrey reached high school he was already leading what he would later call a double life — not yet in the criminal sense, but in the most fundamental sense: a person whose inner reality bore no relationship to what anyone around him could see or know.
He was already, by his mid-teens, essentially alone.
Milwaukee and What He Found There
When Jeffrey eventually made it to Milwaukee — first briefly, then permanently from 1981 onwards — he found, for the first time, a world where his sexuality had a geography. There were bars. There were bath houses. There were men like him, or at least men who wanted something similar.
But even here, what he found was not what he needed.
In the Fosdal interview Jeffrey describes his experience of Milwaukee’s gay scene with a flatness that is quietly devastating. He went to bars. He went to bath houses — he estimates seventy-five to a hundred encounters over the years. He was, by the social conventions of that world, engaging with his sexuality. And yet what he describes is not satisfaction but a deepening of the original wound.
“The only long-term attachments that I was interested in was of a sexual nature — as far as regular friendships — it never interested me too much. After work I like to just go and do my own thing — go to the bars — try to meet the ideal person that I was physically attracted to.”
He was looking for something specific that the bath house circuit could not provide — not just physical encounter but permanence. Compliance. Presence. He describes daydreams not of violence but of lying with a good-looking guy, kissing, touching, in total compliance with my wishes. He wanted someone to stay.
“I guess I never took the time to really nurture any long-term relationships.”
And then, in answer to whether he might have found that if he’d looked harder:
“No. I didn’t. I guess I didn’t look hard enough.”
There is something almost unbearably sad about that answer. The pause before it. The admission of his own role in the failure. The recognition, from inside a prison cell in 1992, that somewhere out there were people who might have wanted what he wanted — and that he hadn’t found them, and that everything that followed came in the space between what he needed and what he could find.
The Question That Cannot Be Answered, Only Held
In the Fosdal interview there is one exchange that has stayed with us since we first read this document. Fosdal suggests that perhaps, had Jeffrey been able to form a compatible relationship, none of this would have happened. Jeffrey responds:
“And if I didn’t have such a desire for the total control and domination — right — if I wasn’t so selfish. I have to admit what I was doing was the ultimate in selfishness.”
He accepted responsibility. He did not blame his sexuality, his loneliness, his era, his community. He named his own pathology clearly.
But we are left — as the memorial always is — holding the complexity. The desire for control and domination did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a person who had spent fifteen years with no outlet, no language, no mirror, no community, no model of what love between men could look like. It emerged in someone for whom intimacy had never once been modelled as safe, reciprocal, or possible to sustain.
We are not saying the environment caused what he did. We are saying the environment did not help. And that is the minimum we owe to honest examination.
Fosdal asks him near the end of the interview whether he was lonely during his high school years. Jeffrey answers:
“During high school years it was frustrating to not be able to meet someone of my interests so it was frustrating — yeah it was lonely.”
“What about afterwards?”
“And afterwards.”
“Like in Milwaukee — are you lonely?”
“Uh-huh.”
He was lonely his entire life. In Bath Township with no language for what he was. In Milwaukee with seventy-five to a hundred encounters that left him exactly where he started. In prison, talking to a psychiatrist through the bars, describing daydreams of someone just lying there, kissing, touching, staying.
“I can take it to a point, but not years and years.”
He said that about loneliness. Years and years of it. He could take it to a point.
He reached that point. The world he lived in helped put him there.
Sources: Frederick A. Fosdal, M.D., psychiatric interview with Jeffrey Dahmer, January 9, 1992; Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, 1993; Lionel Dahmer, A Father’s Story, 1994. Historical context on LGBTQ+ legislation and the AIDS crisis drawn from documented public record.
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 