Straights

All my life I have been despised by straight men.  Not because I was a thief, or a liar, or a rapist.  Not because I was cruel or vicious or evil.  But because I didn't conform to their image of what a boy, or teen, or man should be.  For something I couldn't help, because I was born that way.  They were happy enough for me to pretend to be what I wasn't, to lie to myself and them.  They were happy enough for me to do without love, and without the affection and caring that they got from their partners, because their partners were women, and I (for a long time) wasn't even allowed to make love to a man because it was illegal, punished by a prison sentence.  Their contempt has scarred me and deformed me.

"There had never been a time when he hadn't thought of himself as one of this company the mischance of battle had brought together: one with a secret, as many others had of one sort or another; one with an oddity, but there were plenty of those.  Lovell, who had owned a freak-booth that toured the fairs; Jansen, who was three parts coloured; Willis; Charlot; Odell, who had started with the handicap of 'talking posh'.  Now in a cold solitude he imagined, everywhere in the shadows, men quietly watching, curious, or mocking, or repelled, according to their kind, but all thanking their Maker for the solidarity that didn't include him."  [The Charioteer, by Mary Renault]

But if I say I despise and dislike and mistrust straight men, the response I get is that that is "so unfair", that "not all straight men are like that", and so on.  Indeed.  Yet the anger and hurt and disdain inside me aren't salved by exhortations to be "forgiving"  and "understanding"  and "accepting".  Bitter experience has taught me again and again not to trust men, not to let them into my heart, even as friends, not to rely on them to accept me for what I am.  No one can say I am stupid, and one definition of stupidity is to go on doing the same thing again and again even though what you do doesn't work and merely gives you pain.

And behind this whole cultural hate-fest lies the Church, with its assiduous drip-feed of homo-hatred and lies: "abomination", "intrinsically disordered", "kill the gays".

I cannot forgive or forget.

Dieux du Stade

Gods of the stadium.

How beautiful well-kept young men can be.  The Athenian pattern (though not the Macedonian, hence Alexander the Great's lifelong love affair with Hephaistion)  was for an older man to love a younger.  The terms were erastes for the older "dominant" lover,  and eromenos (which means the loved one) for the younger.  Such a relationship is beautifully described in Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine.

As for me, I don't need to have sex with these guys.  I love looking at them though.  They are beautiful.  Kaloi eisin.  I think the Greeks would have agreed.

Majorca Flats -- 87

Keith stared down at the linen table-cloth and the shining “hotel silver” cutlery. Then he looked at the array of liquor bottles stored on the shelves behind the counter.

Jason waited patiently,

At last, Keith muttered, “Have you ever wished you weren't gay?”

Jason thought about it. “Well, at the beginning I had a relationship with a bloke at school. It didn't seem such a big deal, in a way. I read this book called The Charioteer which starts with a scene in a boys' boarding school. It's written by, um, …..”

“.... Mary Renault. Yeah, I know it. What gay guy doesn't?”

“ … anyway, in it she says something like 'some people are like cattle, which will lick up salt wherever they can find it if they are deprived of it. What she was saying is that with us 15, 16, 17 year olds, we wanted sex, and since we couldn’t have girls, being in a boys' boarding school and all, we were attracted to each other. And it was half expected but by the same token totally expected that after school we would get over it and get married, and most of the men did, eventually.”

“But you didn't?”

“No. But it never seemed 'gay' to me, if you know what I mean. My guy,” and here Jason had to stop and swallow the lump in his throat, “my guy,” he went on, his voice strained, “ he was so straight-acting. He was just a regular bloke who loved me. We didn't go to gay pubs, we didn't sleep around, he had lots of straight friends who knew about us. It was so … ordinary. So I've never felt 'gay'. I mean, I am, but ….” And he thought of Luigi, and decided that he had to see him again, just to tell him the truth about himself.

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Scars of My Stumblings

There is a prejudice amongst some gay men which maintains that women cannot write good gay fiction.  This is piffle.  How they can seriously believe this when one considers just Mary Renault's wonderful gay novels, for example,  I don't know.  (I've previously mentioned her here and here)

Some of the most erotic m2m fiction I have read has been written by women.  And so has some of the most romantic and moving.  In fact, it was a woman, Devil Kat, who taught me to write smut.  I miss her very much.

Anyway, one of the many places you find find quality original slash is Slash Archive.  And I'd like today to draw your attention to just one wonderful tale, Scars of my Stumblings, by GioGio.  Beautifully written, moving, clever, insightful, erotic:

I followed the boy's eyes to the door, nodded in an unmistakable gesture of acquiescence. A matter of moments to disentangle myself from the girl, somebody's sister, mumbling excuses about needing air and stepping outside, trying to become the man I am, not like my father, never like my father, but not entirely unlike him either.

[....]

The sun was rising into impossibly blue skies as he pushed me back on the bed and sprinkled long lines on my bare chest. The straw he had taken from god knows which place traced along my skin, making me sigh at the new sensation. Then his tongue followed the straw and kept going, even after the last of the lines had all but disappeared.

[....] 

His tongue flicked across a nipple that had hardened, I don't recall whether from cold or lust, and traveled all the way down my torso again until it came upon cotton. I suppose I must have moaned again as his fingers struggled with buttons. Then hot breath brushed across unblemished skin and I felt soft, hesitant licks to my dick, and I don't think I've ever again felt so alive.

Interleaved with this memory is the present reality of unbearable loss.  Don't ever say women can't write great romantic and erotic m2m.  Course they can.  And I give thanks all the time that they have and they do. 

[The photo comes from this site]

Serendipity

Serendipity. Isn't it a wonderful word! Good old Horace Walpole and the eighteenth century enlightenment.

In this case, I meant that I find wonderful things when I start researching for the posts I write. Mostly -- though not always -- I'm looking for pictures to go with my rants. But as the Wikipedia item on serendipity says, an informed search, that is, one where you can see the usefulness and relevance of pictures or articles even if Google hasn't done the linkages for you, makes for some very satisfying discoveries.

I was looking for an image to go with my May-September Relationships piece, and I came across this website, a collection of images on non-western homosexuality.

A few thoughts popped into my head when I found it. First, it is a common lie from the Christian-Fascists that homosexuality is a western evil, introduced to noble savages by our degenerate culture. The images (and other work) suggest that the opposite is true: homophobia is the evil introduced by us into more primitive societies.


Consider for example the picture of the of the oh-so-Christian conquistadors murdering "sodomites". The brave Spanish soldiers are having a bit of a party, murdering evil gays. Look at their insouciant, even joyful attitudes. What fun it all is, to be sure. In Reay Tannahill's Sex in History, she describes how many pre-Columban cultures were tolerant of homosexuality. In one culture from meso-America, a young man was given a male slave to satisfy his hormonal urges on reaching adolescence. The big no-no wasn't gay sex, it was fathering a child with an inappropriate woman, because that created all kinds of obligations for the family. Better to let him get his rocks off with a young man. One wonders whether the scion of the family and his slave ended up fond of each other.

This familial reason for promoting adolescent homosexuality is probably one of the reasons the Greeks tolerated and even encouraged the pattern of a young man being taken in hand by an older to show him how to be a man -- a bisexual man -- something Mary Renault uses to great effect in her novels set in Ancient Greece. After all, the Greeks also exposed babies to control population.

So we have the thoroughly decent and endearing Spanish conquistadors murdering evil sodomites and then we also have a photograph of a indigenous American vase in the shape of two men fucking. You know, I think I'll just pop down to Target and get an anal sex jug. So much for homosexuality being a western import! (Reay Tannahill also says that the priests of the new imposed religion in Spanish America were always asking their parishioners to tell them during confession whether they'd had sex in the "proper vessel" -- the Indians used heterosexual anal sex as a birth-control device)


The next thought that struck me was one I've often mentioned: that in a world where it doesn't matter whether you have sex with your own or the "opposite" gender, bisexuality would be normal and widespread. Have a look at the charming picture of the Threesome in India, the glorious peacock eyes of all three participants, the one man up the other who is in turn fucking the woman. I love the way they have taken off all their clothes except their headdress. I love also the sublime looks on all their faces. Glorious.








The final thought was that perhaps May-September relationships are historically all too common. Look at the utterly charming painting of the Sheik and his boy enjoying a party in the garden. Maybe I should have chosen this image to illustrate my May-September piece.

Final point: it seems to me that the more you look, the more you dig, the more you find that gay and bisexual is universal, throughout all cultures and all times. And that when Judeo-Christianity is absent, mostly it's tolerated and in some cases even welcomed.

The Two Marys

I tend to read books and watch films which make me feel that there is stuff, that there are places in the world, which are good. Yup, I know. We have pollies and captains of industry and born-again self-righteous pricks. And the Taliban (recently in the news for hanging an eight year old). Charming. And prissy bureaucrats who say 'them's the rules, fucker.' Selfishness and cruelty and ignorance and greed.

So as an antidote I read and watch escapist entertainment. Real enough to allow me to suspend disbelief but unreal enough to involve 'happy endings'.

Mary Renault and Mary Stewart are two authors who thrill me as well as make me feel some things might be all right with the world. No gay man of my generation won't know about Mary Renault. The Charioteer was one of the first mainstream novels to treat gays sympathetically. In fact, together with Victim it is credited with helping bring about the repeal of the anti-gay laws in Britain. I didn't know any other gay blokes. I had no idea how to be a gay. There were no gay bookshops where I lived. All I knew was that I was deeply in love with a man. The Charioteer helped me survive, helped me chart a course through the wild country of gay, helped me set up the guidelines and parameters which still direct me today: that gay is not immoral, that bi is 'gay plus, not minus', that the sex isn't all, that there can be a kind of 'exalted paganism' which is an alternative to the narrow, vicious and hurtful dictates of Christian fundamentalism.

The Last of the Wine, her next book, was the first set in ancient Greece, and again, it showed a world where same-sex love was ordinary, not a repulsive sin and a 'crime against nature' (which on the other hand of course much of modern industry and life is, though the aforesaid captains of industry wouldn't agree with you.) Her stories celebrate us. And are also enthralling, magical, convincing.

The other Mary, Mary Stewart, wrote romantic thrillers as well as a series about Merlin and Arthurian Britain. Her romantic novels are het, and I'm never quite sure whether to identify with her heroines or heroes. Her heroines are spunky, courageous, and altogether attractive, unlike so many heroines from this kind of novel. The villains are always blonds with blue eyes (how we laughed) and the heroes always dark-haired and dark-eyed. But the romance is special, and, even on the tenth rereading, the stories still gripping.

Both Marys are old-fashioned now. They wrote for the educated middle classes, people who could speak some French, who knew at least some Greek and Latin, people who didn't have to struggle against penury. The inimitable Jane says, apropos of poverty,

I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else. And the distinction is not quite so much against the candour and common sense of the world as appears at first; for a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.

That's from Emma, and that minx is talking to Harriet whom she hopes to raise up in the world.

The middle classes the two Marys wrote for could afford holidays on the Continent, at a time when working class families were lucky to have two weeks at Eastbourne. Both Marys loved Greece, and obviously visited often, setting many novels there and in the Levant generally. Greece after all, when it was pagan and also under the Christian Byzantine Empire, covered the whole of the eastern end of the Mediterranean. (Maybe next post, I'll talk about Cavafy, a modern Greek poet from Alexandria who managed to fill his poetry with the losses of the glories of Ancient Greece and combine it with his own melancholy attempt to find love as a gay man)

I grew up poor. That kind of middle class expansiveness was unknown to me. So these stories were also escapist in another way. I could pretend I was a well-off, confident member of the middle class, that I knew what was what, that I belonged on the broad airy uplands of prosperity, that I too had visited Vienna or Thebes or pre-civil-war Beirut.

Even though both authors have dated, they're still very good at their craft. And both of them celebrate love: Mary Renault gay and Mary Stewart het, but honestly, there's not that much difference. We all need love. And escapist romance never hurt anybody.

The Cum-and-Go Culture

Men from my generation of gay-shaded men (and surely it happens even now) would meet a bloke, rut like crazed weasels, and part. A purely animal lust. Let me say at once that there is nothing wrong with lust. We treat sex dichotomously: it is either sacred (the most sacred being marriage between a man and a women) or it is profane (a random pick-up at a bar; opening your legs for any man;taking it up the bum.) This split derives from religion (St Augustine, in particular.) The religious horror of pleasure for pleasure's sake is a Christian invention. Sex within marriage is sanctified (though even there, the Catholic church still teaches that if a man lusts after his wife, he is committing a sin) because its purpose, supposedly, is for the procreation of children, not for anything so revolting and immoral as pleasure.
 

We are supposed to feel bad about profane sex, and uplifted about sacred sex. Just take a quick look at all the ads and stories about marriage in women's magazines. Marriage is the ultimate goal of sex. Man and wife can fuck all day, and their friends and parents smile indulgently. But any other form of sex, ending with male-to-male sex at the bottom of the rankings, is 'disgusting', 'dirty', 'immoral' to varying degrees. Yet it's the same part A into slot B. In one set of circumstances it's desirable, wonderful, ecstatic and uplifting. In another it's grubby or worse. Huh? And this entirely confected vision of 'good' sex and 'evil' sex contaminates and spoils all forms of sex, even the holy matrimony kind, because it means you always have to be careful to keep your actual sex uplifting. By doing it in the dark perhaps? Or only in the missionary position? Oral sex is profane. Anal sex evil. But the missionary position is... sanctioned by the Lord. This nonsense is especially pernicious to gay relationships. We struggle against the silent or noisy disapproval of society, but the unsaid and implicit values make us doubt ourselves, even if we are not aware of it. We can't have vaginal sex, because we both have cocks. Struggling with our own self-esteem, our own self-worth, we accept society's implicit valuation of our sexual relationships. Society thinks our sex is profane. And if it is profane, what is the point of bonding, of being fond of our sparring partner, of taking the trouble to care? So we cum and go.

But there is more than one force colliding here.

Another arises because it is so hard to meet another gay man in a “normal” context. You can meet men, but you don’t know if they’re gay and they don’t know you are. If you make advances at a straight man you can be reviled or beaten up. If you work hard at developing a friendship with a man in the hopes that it will prove to be love, you run the risk that he may turn against you when you tell him you're gay, or, accept it but make it clear that he “just wants to be friends”, leaving you with the broken heart. So the 'natural' process of getting close to someone—the process straights have—can’t occur, except in an all-gay environment, or one where gays are completely accepted—the theatre, perhaps, or ballet. In our society, confessing that you’re gay is enough to distance most men. So we (gay-shaded men) are exaggeratedly careful not to touch other (apparently straight) men. We are careful not to be too intimate, to stand too close. This taints our relationships with straight men as well as with gay men. Which is why gay bars exist: it’s good to let your inhibitions go—though, even there, many don’t, hidebound by their (our) cultural taboos. You know that the blokes in the bar are at the gay end of the spectrum. The problem is that gay bars are primarily pick-up places. Perhaps in gay quarters in major cities there are bars which cater for gay clients, but which are otherwise not much different from “ordinary” bars. The lights are normal, there’s a pool table, and it’s just a bunch of guys. But most gay bars I’ve been to have been meat racks. Where you can't use the toilets because guys are fucking in them.

After a while, we become conditioned to enjoy the process of picking someone up. The chase and the sex becomes paramount. Not the friendship, not the companionship. It’s exciting to single out a guy, to make the approach, to take him home, to fuck him and be fucked. And then you exchange phone numbers in the morning without either of you meaning to get together again. Any male body will do—his is just one of many possibles. When I first started out on the meat rack circuit, I naïvely thought that they meant the nice words they said, that we had at some level become friends. Wrong. Yet soon I was no different—though I ached inside. These are the unwritten laws of the culture. I won’t call it “gay culture”, because there’s so many more varieties than this one. But if you are the only gay you know, and closeted, you learn how to “be” gay in the cum-and-go culture. You think that that’s the way it is. How else is a young gay man to be accultured? Not just a rhetorical question. It’s up to us older guys to show young gay men that there are other ways to be gay. There’s a role for “wise old queens”, as Ethan Mordden puts it. Which is not to suggest that all the older gays around are queens. I speak for myself—and I'm far from wise.

The third force operating here is that men—or at least younger men—want sex much more often than women do. Clichés and generalisations, I know—and my lady gets furious with me if I say this. Consider oxytocin. It’s a hormone that among other things appears to be implicated in bonding: mother to baby; lover to lover. I read somewhere that women’s levels of oxytocin build during the course of the evening, over dinner and coffee and chat. Men’s rise sharply during sex but soon subside afterwards. That’s why a woman will tell you she loves you over dinner, a man (if at all) as he cums. If you put two gay-ish men together, then sex will likely form a much more important part of their relationship than it would between a man and a woman, or between two women. There are obvious exceptions. Matt and Andy from Cross Currents, Petey and Danny in Map of The Harbor Islands, the protagonists in It Started With Brian, all were friends first and lovers afterwards. My guess is that these relationships will be as enduring and rock solid as any het marriage. Because they started with love first and sex after, the sex became holy. I believe that men can love very deeply. Most men, most straight men, anyway, love another man 'with pure hearts' (that split between sacred and profane sex again), and never take their love beyond the deeply emotional. Yet those who do must experience the deepest love between men: sexual, emotional, spiritual.

If you see the way many straight men behave with their pickups, you can see the roots of the cum-and-go culture. Straight guys can be just as offhand and indifferent to their women the morning after as any gay man with his fuck from the night before. The goal for both kinds of men is the fuck, not a permanent relationship. So, when you combine the dynamics of external and internal homophobia with a (biologically determined?) predilection for sex and lots of it, and you get a remarkably dysfunctional culture. Again, I emphasise that this is only part of “gay culture”, whatever that is. And it only works when you’re young. (Who needs an invisibility cloak? Just be an older guy and go into a gay bar. You disappear from view.)

There’s an irony in all this. Straight men can be very close to each other. Obviously, I don’t know from personal experience, as a gay-ish outsider, but I can see it in others (my sons, for example) and the more thoughtful and eloquent straight friends I know have talked about their experiences often. In a rational world, two male friends would not regard it as a big deal to take the friendship to another level, thus combining the drive to fuck with the profound need for friendship. But they would be coming from the affection/love end of the relationship, not the I-need-to-get-my-rocks-off end. And I believe that would make all the difference.

So what do you do if you are an old, ugly, lonely gay, and the only way you’ve ever connected is via the meat rack network? I dunno. I opted out of that, and got married. My lady and I are friends, very good friends. We love each other and are happy together. I am not lonely in the way a solitary man in a big city – which perhaps he went to because it had a gay quarter and let him be open about his sexuality with at least some people – would be. One good friend looks after a disabled gay man. He does it because his friend’s family have discarded him. Disabled and gay? Too hard. My friend does it because he wants to put something back into the world. They’re not lovers. But at least he isn’t alone.

So maybe the place to start is to be friends first. Yet, the “culture” (or innate male drives) contend against this. Another friend, who has had no lover for years, said “there has to be chemistry” when I suggested that he just be friends with benefits with the gay guys he knows. But why? Is “chemistry” another term for hot tight butts and a 7-inch cock? The chemistry of Matt and Andy, Petey and Danny, Brian and Sam is not about looks or pecs or tight bum holes or big cocks. It’s about love. And – speaking as a mostly gay man who grew to love his wife and for that reason finds her sexy and desirable – isn’t love the key? So – and prolly I’m gonna piss off some people here, but tough – how much of the cum-and-go culture is our problem? Yeah, homophobia drives us gay-shaded blokes into this corner, nous autres as Mary Renault describes it in The Charioteer. But what can we do about it, to offset the pernicious influence of others and of our self-hatred? Maybe, it’s to be friends first. Not just acquaintances, but to care, about our community and the new people coming into it who need to learn to love. Maybe, if we are friends first, we can be more later. If we related to each other as people first, and as sex objects second, isn’t it possible that we’d find the love and companionship we long for? Then again, maybe that's impossible for men to do. Our curse: not the knowledge of the apple in Eden, but the desire for a fuck, no matter what, and its inevitable concomitants, loneliness and emptiness.

I can’t pretend to know the answers. My own life has been pretty fucked up. But what I've realised is that I must keep writing, because what I’m writing about is the alternative way of connecting with men , an alternative strand in gay culture (and it has many strands) which is about male bonding, about love, and how even plain people can be happy. It sounds presumptuous and pretentious to say that I can make a difference, but if all of us give up, then we definitely won’t change things. You must do what you can to make things better, with the people you know personally, and the world at large.

Book and Film Lists

One of Amazon's very clever innovations is to use the (free) input of its customers to create added value for customers and itself. Stuff like customer reviews and customer lists. I've created two lists, though I will be setting up more; one for romantic gay or bi stories; and one for good gay films.

Looking through the list of books I'm struck by how many are 'slash': Swordspoint, The Fire's Stone, The Protector, Luck in The Shadows, Wraeththu, Fire From Heaven, just to name a few. Now traditionally (and some would say, strictly speaking it still is so) slash is about taking heterosexual characters from say Star Trek or Starsky and Hutch and have the two blokes get so close they discard societal taboos and become lovers. At first, slash was written by women for women. But gay-shaded blokes like me find the emotional sensibility of women when they write about men very appealing. I never liked the cum-and-go culture of gay life prevalent when I was a young man. My attraction to men was always much deeper than sex, sometimes, indeed, instead of sex. I'm not saying men don't turn me on. I like cuties of both genders. What I am saying is that my relationships with men were always, from my side, about love and friendship and companionship, and I could (and often did) do without the sex.

So I was drawn to m2m stories written by women, starting with Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault, and then of course (which gay-shaded man hasn't read it?) The Charioteer. To my way of thinking, slash has broadened from Spock/Kirk (which is where the term 'slash' comes from, where it was and still is used to indicate the pairing) to any m2m story whether written by a man or a woman where the 'feel' is like the first slash stories, or like the stories written by Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar (her Memoirs of Hadrian, about the Emperor Hadrian and his Greek slave Antinous, is a masterpiece) and their ilk, which are not 'slash' but are written by women. And I consider that I write 'original slash', reflecting my propensity towards romance rather than sex.

There are sex scenes in my writing. I've put them in partly because I object strongly to the fact that heterosexual sex scenes are treated as acceptable, but homosexual sex scenes are preceded by a warning ("may offend"). In ElvenSword there is a het sex encounter between Fluin and Ilya, and it seemed only reasonable to put in m2m sex between Fluin and Steppan or Fluin and Lthon. But the drivers of the relationships between my characters are love and affection and respect, and only secondarily sex. As it happens, writing good sex scenes is hard. They take me much longer than even dialogue which is hard to get to appear natural without being natural. Real dialogue is elliptical, confusing and boring when written down -- think of the transcriptions of Nixon's phone calls.

As it happens, right now I'm working on Will and Emma's sexual reconciliation in Footy. The hard thing isn't the sex. The hard thing is making her forgiveness and his love convince within the context of the bedroom scene while Sean, Will's lover and Emma's friend, is alone in the bed in the spare room. So I suppose I'd better go and finish it!