Showing sex

In my writings and in the pictures I post here, I show sex.  People making love.  People fucking, if you want.  And the thin-lipped sometimes criticise me. 

Let me explain.

Sex is one of the things we do--or would like to--often. It's intensely pleasurable.  It bonds us to our lovers.  It makes the world seem a better place.  And it helps make other ties--love, affection, friendship--stronger.  It's a good thing, and frankly, most of us need more of it.

Now murder is a bad thing.  Yet it is depicted all the time in fiction, and violence and war is shown on TV.   Why is this OK, when showing love isn't?  How many people do you know who've been murdered?  Murder is the great taboo, the great evil, in our society.   It should be the greatest no-no.  It seldom happens, but when it does it makes headlines and provokes sorrow.  Yet many regard sex, especially gay sex, as worse.  When I was growing up, it seemed to me that my parents were more disgusted by gayness than by murder.  And that's obviously perverted. (Just think about it for a minute.)

Very few people, except those who live in unlucky countries, know someone who's been murdered.  But almost everyone has had sex, and often, if they're lucky, made love. And they know others who've had sex too.  When you walk down the street, seeing all the other people, remember that: these people have had sex, some of them many times.  Quel scandale!  Yet we mustn't mention it?  We mustn't show it?  We must pretend it's something unimportant and trivial?  Fuck that.

I have to mark my blog and my writings as "X", "Adult" ,"may offend".  Yet I do not apologise at all, nor do I think showing sex is wrong (it may be tedious, but that's another story).  Sex is wonderful.  We should celebrate it and enjoy it and give thanks for the gift of it.  And I'm going to go on writing about it and showing pictures of it.  And if that offends, well, tough titties.

Big day coming

They're supposed to make you happy.  But my upcoming big day isn't.  I'm conscious of my health, of all that's going wrong with me.....

And Sex at Dawn is depressing the hell out of me.  All that talk about declining testosterone.

First world problems!  I have enough food, a roof over my head, money to buy books, and it's spring!  Trees in blossom and bud, daffodils richly yellow everywhere.

Sometimes, though, these nostrums fail to convince.

Ah well.  Onwards and upwards.  En avant mes braves!

Gay Sex by any name . . .

 . . . "but I'm straight"

This is an old report, but I remember commenting on it then, in a group which has now vanished.  The article reported a major study comparing men's sexual identity compared with their actual sexual activity.  About 10 per cent of men who say they are straight have had sex with other men, yet claim they are not gay.  Seventy per cent of them are married.

Point one:  this was ten per cent who admitted to having gay sex.  Yes, the interviewer may have promised anonymity, but  . . .  The report indicated a class divide with working class or members of a minority group or the foreign-born having a higher percentage of men who do this.   I don't know what this means.  Are middle-class whites more in tune with their inner selves, and therefore more likely to be open about their sexuality (which would imply a higher proportion of middle-class than working-class or minority men identify as gay) or are they just better at not telling the truth to unknown interviewers?  It's very hard to believe that the same-sex class divide reflects real divisions in same-sex desires.  But it surely reflects differing perceptions of "truth".  And given unwillingness to admit to a shameful/sinful social predilection, the real number is probably the higher one.

Two:  in the article, a local (Ozzie) spokesman said "many of the 10 per cent would be unwilling to be identified as gay because of the fact that same-sex relationships are still stigmatised, even in a relatively liberal place."  Well, yeah, some.  Except they would prolly not have told the interviewer about the fact they were having sex with men, would they?  Actually, they may simply not think of themselves as gay, either because they like sex with women as well as men so are bisexual (or, better, identify with one of the many bisexualities), or because they regard "gay" as queeny men who dress up in feather boas and wear thong undies.  They're not like that, they believe, even if they do like to fuck men or be fucked by them.  Labels.

"Male" men may enjoy and seek out sex with men but still think they're "all man". If we start talking clichés here, these are men who will bond by talking about how the cement they're standing on has been laid (a recently overheard conversation between two ostensibly straight guys) , or what their car is, or which footy team they barrack for.  They think of themselves as belonging to the whole male tribe (in a way I don't.)    And the cultural majority has defined "male" as identical to "not gay".  Therefore, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of all the blokes they know, including possibly some of those they're fucking, they're straight.  No matter how many times you and I might say "straight? yeah, right," they regard themselves as essentially male except that they fancy a root with a bloke.  Who'm I to piss in their Wheaties?

Three:  these are big numbers.  The UK income tax authorities (not known for their heart) did an analysis about the percentage of the population who would use the new civil marriage provisions, because this would cut tax paid by gay and lesbian couples.  They decided that 7% of the population was gay or lesbian.  This suggests that something just under 20% of the male population either identifies as gay or identifies as straight but is having sex with other men.   Kinsey said:

25 per cent of the male population has more than incidental homosexual experience or reactions (i.e. rates 2-6) for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. In terms of averages, one male out of approximately every four has had or will have such a distinct and continued homosexual experience.

(from my article The End of Gay: the reference "2-6" is from the Kinsey scale, and means all except exclusive heterosexuals)

Think about this:  in a randomly selected group of men, say the blokes in the train or on the tram or in a supermarket, one in four (according to Kinsey) or one in five (according to this analysis) has had more than incidental sex with another man.

 

Four: because these blokes don't think of themselves as "gay" they probably won't support gay rights causes.  It doesn't mean they won't favour gay rights, but we tend (on the whole) to fight harder for causes closer to home than those which (appear) not to really impact us. Similarly, the Christian-Fascists and rocko rightists can say that there are few gays.  The man in the tram will go on thinking that gays are flamers, not "real men" like him, because the at least one in ten of the men around him who have periodic sex with men remain invisible. This is of course why gay rights advocates get so pissed off at these men: the more gay-shaded men are hidden, the more stereotypes are accepted, the harder it is to fight for the right to be accepted as normal.  Hence the continued need for gay pride parades, stereotypes and all.  But do the stereotypes make it more likely that straight-acting gay men or the men discussed in this article will be less willing to support us?

I used to feel that I was the only man I knew who was attracted to other men.  But I have become convinced that there are many, many men who might have sex with other men in the right circumstances. Those "right circumstances" will vary: two sportsmen who are attracted but convinced they're not gay because they're both so "manly": the man on the path in New Zealand who flirted with me (he's not gay, perhaps he thinks, because he hasn't fallen in love with a man, and doesn't want to share a house with one, even though he likes sex with them); the man who loves his wife and his kids but likes to bottom sometimes; the man who simply feels that his affection for his mate needs to be expressed sexually; the man who doesn't even notice the cultural mores, so doesn't really "know" that having sex with your friends is "wrong".  Male (and surely also female) sexuality is much more fluid than we are led to think.

Homophobia and behaviour modification

Years ago I read about a psychology class who decided to test the theory of behaviour modification. Their professor used to lecture peripatetically*, wandering from one side of the lecture room to the other. They wanted to see if they could stop him doing this. So, every time their prof spoke on the left side of the room, they would all hum, look out of the window, scratch, and pretend not to listen. When he was on the right side of the room they listened avidly, in absolute silence, rapt. It took just one lecture to get him to stop going from side to side and to lecture only from the right side of the room. Elated by their success, they decided to try to get him to talk from the left side of the room in the next lecture. But he abruptly cottoned on their plan, and resolutely and ostentatiously began to once again walk from one side of the lecture theatre to the other.

Now what is this telling us?

If you don't know about other people's attempts to try and influence you without your noticing it, you may be subtly persuaded to do what they want. But once you do become aware, subtle persuasion can have the opposite effect: it can make you obstinately do the opposite of what they want. It can make you annoyed, angry, furious.

Why does this matter to us?

Well, let me give you a personal example. My upper back, just below my neck has been aching and hurting for a while now. It gave me headaches and made me feel sick. The muscles either side of my spine were too sore to touch. It was horrible. But all at once I realised that I had been walking around avoiding others' eyes, bending my head forward so I didn't have to look at them. Because I was ashamed. No, not for being gay. For being old. And poor. I recalled both previous occasions when I was laid off from work. I felt that I was no longer a worthwhile human being, that I had failed, that I was a nobody. And I avoided their gaze. I tried to avoid being noticed. I realised that I was doing it again.

If you are a rich old person, you are looked up to. Rupert Murdoch, you may be sure, does not hide his head. He is powerful and rich. He is respected because he is powerful and rich. He respects himself. He feels confident and proud of what he is and what he's done. (Without good reason in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there.) I am neither powerful nor rich. I -- unconsciously -- felt ashamed that I had failed to earn a vast salary, drive a Mercedes-Benz coupé, go on holidays to Paris flying business class. Now you may say this is foolishness, and so it is. But once I realised it I was angry at myself. In a rueful sort of way. I started walking upright again. I have to keep reminding myself, because I had fallen into bad habits, but I started walking upright, strongly, proudly. I may be poor, but being poor is not a moral failing. At least not to normal people. I can't answer for the neo-cons and others of their ilk -- for them poverty is a sign of moral turpitude. As good as reason as any to reject their philosophies with contempt and derision.

This train of thought was prompted by the news item I linked to in Darl. In the article, the writer talks about elderspeak, a patronising and belittling way of talking to older people:

'Elderspeak sends a message that the patient is incompetent, and begins a downward negative spiral for older persons, who react with decreased self-esteem, depression, withdrawal and the assumption of dependent behaviours.'' Researchers found that those who have a positive attitude towards ageing live an average of 7½ years longer than those who don't.

Obvious when you think about it. And it applies to everyone. Talk down to a homeless street person and their self-esteem is damaged even more. Love one another as I have loved you. Love means respect, it means having compassion, it means stepping outside your own skin to imagine what it's like to inhabit someone else's.

We gays and gay-shaded blokes are subject to a constant barrage of implicit and subliminal negative behaviour modification. Straights can get married. They can have children. Magazines, and newspapers and TV and films and songs and opera and ballet are filled with heterosexual love, happy or otherwise. Their love is sacred, uplifting, God-given. Ours is profane. It is constantly implicitly made clear to us that we are inferior, that we do not count. And that's without even mentioning the explicit hate-filled comments and opinions and behaviour of the Christian-Fascists and Islamofascists.

Our reaction is like those of the professor I started this rant with. If we are unaware, we unconsciously accept the negative impact, we develop internalised homophobia, we grow to hate ourselves and our tribe. We all know about closeted religious homophobes -- Ted Haggard, for example. Once we become aware, though, we get angry. I have a straight friend (of sorts) who asks me "why do gays make so much fuss?" Well, it's because we have to constantly struggle against the negative treatment of society. We have to fight back. We have to make a fuss. Or we are lost. Anger is liberating. It makes us walk upright -- and proud.

For decades gays survived in ghettos, just like Jews. In a gay ghetto, our tribe could ignore the hatred and the silent (but no less potent) disdain of society. And we didn't need to get angry. Other gays understood us. We were with our tribe. But even there there was deep self-hatred. I asked in the Darl post why so many gay men advertise for "straight-acting" contacts. I think you can see what my answer is going to be. But I'll leave that for next time.

(BTW, if you click on the pics, you can see where they come from. My way of giving credit where it's due. The lower image comes from a particularly interesting blog)


* another nice Greek word: peripateo means 'I wander around'.

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.