' ("John Wayne Gacy: Crime Library," 2006, p.4) Gacy was married to a woman whose father owned a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, but rumors began to swirl that Gacy had made passes at the young men working at the chain. Gacy was incarcerated for an incident involving a man he had paid for sex and then attempted to have beaten by a thug for hire. ("John Wayne Gacy: Crime Library," 2006, pp.3-4)
Moral
Morally, Gacy came from a conservative Catholic background, was active in many Catholic organizations and the Boy Scouts, yet engaged in gay sexual practices, even when he was married. He was sent to jail for sodomy and battery, yet was a model prisoner. His father was an alcoholic, although Gacy idealized him. There was a profound tension between his outer and his inner persona.
Theories of Personality
Erikson
Erik Erikson attempted to refine Freud's theory of personality, although he saw development as proceeding as a period of stages like Freud. He focused on the child's emotional and social stages of development. The first stages involve learning to trust and model one's behavior. If parents are "unreliable or inadequate," as were Gacy's, the child learns mistrust rather than trust. Mistrustful children are socially withdrawn and as adults their behavior is, "characterized by depression, paranoia, and possibly psychosis." (Boeree, 1998, "Erik Erikson") According to this theory, Gacy's psychosis is the result of his childhood upbringing in an abusive home, which created the seeds of psychosis. His only touchstone for normal behavior was his involvement in conservative and community-based organizations that he could not fully fit into because of his homosexuality. Gacy's fixation on young men also seems like an attempt to recreate the father-son stage in a positive fashion, but he also modeled his abusive adult persona upon his father, symbolically assuming the more powerful and violent paternal...
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