Marry me

We all know the way it goes.  Finding out you're gay; hiding it from your family and friends;  telling them and all the stress and angst that involves; trying to find someone to love and falling foul of the cum-and-go culture; and at last, if you're lucky, finding someone to love who loves you.

This wonderful heart-warming video has that whole story.   Filmed in Oz (mostly in Sydney as far as I can see), it's just lovely.

Footy Chapter 19

You can read it here.

Inevitably, his thoughts drifted to his employer’s son and to what had happened between them. He felt suddenly very alone. He had no one to talk to about the new feelings that had been unleashed in him. He didn’t think he could talk to his brothers about it. And he had no real friends. The habits of self-reliance and lonely survival were hard to shake. He shook his head to clear it. What had happened was just a one-off. He wasn’t gay or even bi. He ignored the small dissenting voice in his head.

Majorca Flats -- 206

 “But now that you know that, you can do something about it.” Esmé was all sweet reason.

Luigi's smile was small and very sad. “We always knew. And it doesn't help.”

“What about us then, Lou?” asked Keith, looking unhappy. “I mean, I knaow … OK, we're not the only blokes around but … Oh fuck it!”

“I dunno. I don't want to … I don't want to promise stuff.”

“Who's fuckin' talkin' about promises?” Keith was furious, but trying to hide it. “I thought we had somethin' good, ya knaow?” His accent was escaping him again as he became upset.

“I've got to go,” said Luigi and stood up and without a backward glance, walked out through the back door (the door to the street was locked because the café was closed)

“What the fuck?” ejaculated Keith. He looked at Jason and Esmé. “What did I do?”

Jason sighed. “He has a thing about straight guys. Ever since Cody. Maybe before.”

“Stright? Me? Bugger me sideways with a wet banana!”

“Cody?” asked Esmé.

Jason explained. Then he added, “He's filled with self-hatred. He … I dunno … he's almost needs the beating up, the beastliness of the straight guys who hate him but are so attracted to him.”

Keith was staring at Jason in wonderment. “Clever clogs, aren't ya? See inta people's hearts, huh?” He pronounced 'see' 'say', his emotion was so deep.

Jason was deeply embarrassed. He muttered something.

Keith smiled suddenly. “It's OK. It's just that if you say into Lou like that you'll say inta may too. That's embarrasin'.”

Jason put his hand on Keith's.

“I suppose you know all about me, too?” asked Esmé, only half joking.

[Update: I like to give credit for all the art work I use, whenever I know where it's from.  I read the signature on this drawing as Crisio, and couldn't find a website for him/her.  But on closer inspection it's Cris '10 -- blame my eyesight! -- and I've found the website.  You can see more great gay-shaded pics from this artist here.]

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Episodes 1 to 460 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)

Majorca Flats -- 205

Gay pick up in the 50s

 “Well, yeah, but how did you two meet, then?” Esmé was accusing as she looked at Jason and Luigi.

Jason coloured.

Luigi smiled astringently at her, his shiny black-olive eyes a little cynical, a little sad. “It's not that easy, Esmé. We are outcasts. We can't meet people like you can, you know, a bloke fancies a sheila, he just goes up to her and makes with the happy noises, and then before you know it … But with us, if we go up to someone we fancy, he could be a raving homophobe, and next thing we've lost a tooth or two and are in emergency getting our jaw wired.”

“Yeah, and ...” began Keith.

“... hang on, lemme finish.” Luigi took a breath. “OK, so you try a different approach. You make friends with another man. You don't mention sex, you don't make passes, you just try to be friends, and fuck it, next thing you're in love, and you discover he's as straight as a plumber's rule, and you've lost your fucking heart to him. At least if you get down to business quickly, at least then you know that you're on the same page. That's why we pick blokes up.”

“Yeah, and the problem is that sometimes that's the only thing we have in common with them. That we can fuck.” Keith was bitter.

“Yeah, and then we get a kind of taste for the chase, we don't even want something permanent, or we don't want it enough, so we just keep on trawling the meat racks, and then when we're old we have nobody.” Luigi spoke softly but his tone was savage.

[Image from this delightful blog]

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Episodes 1 to 500 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)

Majorca Flats -- 204

The Vegie Bar, Brunswick St

Keith, Luigi, Jason and Esmé were sitting having coffee the next evening. after The Lord Grey had closed.

“Another victim,” said Esmé, who was leafing through a copy of The Age the café provided for its customers.

“Of what?” asked Keith.

“The Three M killings.”

Keith shook his head. “Three M?”

“Mt Macedon Murderer. You guys are so busy fucking each other that you aren't keeping up with stuff that matters.”

Keith looked at her then gave her the crooked grin that always turned her heart to water. “I'm all attention now, Ezzaloona.”

She swatted him with the paper. “Idiot. OK, listen everyone.” She waited until they were paying attention and then read out the report. When she'd finished there was silence.

“Poor fucker,” said Keith, at last.

“There are always the rumours, aren't there?” Luigi looked at the others. “You know, the pick-up with the sound-proofed van, who's as hot as, and so sexy and loving in the pub, then coldly slices you up and you're never seen again. The elegant old dude who keeps a leather dungeon where he expects the ultimate fuck.”

Esmé shuddered. “Men are such awful creatures!”

“Sorry,” said Jason. “If it's any consolation, I'm pretty vanilla.”

Keith was silent. He'd seen stuff which would haunt him always.

“Anyway,” Esmé continued, “I hope you blokes aren't picking up anyone.” She looked from one to the other, then said, “I would miss any of you idiots if … you know ...”

“Hey!” said Keith. “It's OK, Ezz. We don't pick up strangers. Right, Lou, Jace?”

“Nope!” said Jason.

Luigi was silent.

“It's just that men … gay men … like pick-ups and hot anonymous sex … you know.” Esmé was getting a bit pink and uncomfortable.

Keith stared at her. “Hey, love, daon't worry. That part of my life is over.”

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Episodes 1 to 500 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)

Majorca Flats -- 57

The next time Luigi saw a handsome manly bloke making eyes at him, he'd turned coldly away and pretended not to see. But it didn't last, naturally. He needed a man in his life. His own effeminacy turned him off other men like him, and though he knew such feelings were foolish and dysfunctional, it changed little. So, cautiously at first, and then more often, he'd tried picking up straight and straight-acting males. He found himself addicted to the hunt, the exchange of looks, the interpretation of what the other man meant by his expressions. Even the danger added to the spice. Like riding a motorbike too fast.

When he encountered Jason, he'd been visiting the meat-racks and cottaging for so long it almost seemed the whole point of gay relationships. A simple love between two guys seemed both vanilla – and unobtainable. He couldn't imagine coming home to someone, hearing a greeting from the kitchen or the lounge-room where the man he loved and who loved him would be waiting, welcome on his face and in his words.

The last thing he thought about as he went to sleep that night was not the sex they had nor how good Jason had been at it, nor about Jason's handsome face and muscular body, but about his smile.

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My First Time

I've already talked about the guy I fell in love with, long ago.  He gave me my first blowjob, and I reciprocated (so to speak).  It seemed obvious to me that I was gay: after all, I'd fallen in love with and had sex with another man.  A victim of the tightly confining logic of either-or, I was convinced that I couldn't possibly be bisexual.  You had to be one or the other, gay or straight.  You couldn't -- Heaven forfend! -- find both sexes attractive and desirable.  It took me a while to get over this nonsense.

But since I was (I believed) a homo, I felt that I had better learn how to be a proper homo.  I didn't much care for the clichéd image of a homo prevalent in films and books and general culture of the time, though even here, I felt the need to stand up for the right to be me.  I took up ballet, and made a point of telling everyone about it!  However . . . .  everyone knew that homos only made love by having anal sex.  My first guy and I hadn't done that, and so, after he dumped me, I decided, as I was embracing the whole gay identity thing, that I'd better find out what it was all about.  When I look back on the me of forty years ago, I'm kinda touched by my militant enthusiasm.  I was emphatically gay; I saw nothing wrong with it; it seemed to me that society and religion had got it all wrong; and that to pretend I was anything other than gay was dishonest, immoral, shabby and cowardly.

With this exemplary moral fervour, I set out to lose my virginity.  I was staying in a flat in a high-rise in Cape Town's Gardens suburb at the time (having moved out of the decrepit old house I was sharing with my guy) and I'd seen a guy around, who spent a lot of time eyeballing me.  He was not the sort of man I'd normally go for, old, very queeny, skinny, and balding with a comb-over.  But when needs must  . . .  In those days, I still had a lot of residual homophobia, convinced that real gays ought to be as macho and male as straights.  The multiple subtleties and tribes of gaydom were unknown to me, which wasn't really surprising since I didn't know any gay men, and wasn't a part of the gay "scene".  So I rather despised him.  I've learnt to be more accepting since.  Poor old bugger.  I noticed him a couple of years later wistfully (knowing he didn't stand a chance) eyeing a group of handsome young men.  I pretended not to know him.  The casual cruelties of youth.

Anyway, he ogled me and I made with the nods and becks and wreathèd smiles and we ended up in his flat, and one thing led to another and I finally found out what it was like to bottom.  A big flat blah.  It didn't hurt, it just felt a bit weird.  The earth didn't move for me: in fact the guy fell asleep after he'd come inside me (no condoms in those pre-AIDS days) and I had to bring myself to orgasm.  It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

The next day was my graduation ceremony, and I sat in the great hall and at lunch after with my parents revelling in the fact that now I was a real homo.  Good grief!  Was I ever that young?  It seems so.

Bound

I found this remarkable artwork on this unusual blog, unusual because it combines the erotic with intelligence.

We gay-shaded men are so often directed by our small heads, not our large.  And we always pay for it.

Nick Ayler, again.

In the latest DNA, there is a photo spread of Nick Ayler, who was the subject of a post I did a little while ago. In this pic he's clearly wearing AussieBum white nylon swimbriefs. (I've included a pic so you can judge for yourself whether I'm right about what he's wearing!)

He also gave a fatuous interview to DNA who were all gasp squirm and asked highly feeble questions, which he answered competently, with the usual bromides. We can all sleep well now we know he doesn't mind if we homos perve on him. Gott sei dank!

I suppose I'm no better, really, since I'm not interested in his opinions, just his looks. Sigh. The curse of gay-shaded males.

All the same, he is extraordinarily beautiful. Perhaps a little too ripped for my taste, but still. Lord, who am I to be picky?!

The one (a ficlet)

I knock. I hear laughter, but no one comes to the door. He was so nice, so sexy, so willing. Yesterday.

I thought he might be the one. What did I do wrong?

I see him at the beach a week later, his body gold against the white of his rugby shorts, eyes sapphire.

He ignores me.

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.

Hot versus Lovable

I've got heaps of thoughts on this, but no time to elaborate. So let's take just one. Why does our body betray us into thinking someone hot when they aren't particularly likable, never mind lovable? I don't think it's just a male thing, but I think we're much more prone to it than women are. Take a look at the pic. I find that so erotic, the body warm from the sun, the curve of buttocks, legs and doings, the contrast between the white and the tan. Yet for all I know, the guy is a total arsehole, up himself, arrogant, selfish and stupid. Yet.... something atavistic in me makes him so fricking hot. It's a bit shaming actually, that at my age I still sometimes think with my gonads not my head. I mean, he may be the nicest and most endearing bloke around. But I don't know, do I? And part of me doesn't care.