We have always been here

By Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell From  Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love ca 1900.

Cowboy

I wonder why cowboys are so sexy.  Is it because they are seen as manly?  And is that because of internalised homophobia, that we somehow see 'manly' men as more 'valid' than us homos?  Is it because they are all men together in nature, forced into a rough male companionship because they need each other out there in the bush? 

When I was a boy I used to read westerns avidly, and I still remember, all these years later, a story which reached a soaring romantic pitch for me.  A man and his friend are escaping from a town having been in a gunfight.  The man is bleeding from a gunshot wound, and can only ride slowly.  His friend refuses to leave him to his fate, but rides by his watching over him, waiting for the inevitable.  For a lonely, bullied, queenie boy at school this summed up my hope for a friend in my life, long before I had any idea of my sexuality.  Someone who loved me despite everything, someone strong and manly who was my friend, despite me being effeminate and not at all manly, someone who would stick by me through thick and thin. 

I've moved on from that, I think.  I hope.  After all, friends come in many guises.  But there is still a romantic frisson when I see a real cowboy and remember.

Postcard

Only to hold your hand in mine, 

makes me forget my tears

Hope on my pathway seems to shine. 

The sad world appears. 

When in your eyes love light I see, 

all the sad world is true-telling me

that you are to me

all that I am to you. 

NE 

Dunlop, Mo, Aug 25, 1911

We have always been here, we gay-shaded people.  There has always been love between men, often never consummated.  Love makes the sad world bearable.  We should celebrate it and be glad it exists.

Bud sex

When Did Touch Between Male Friends Become Taboo? (Source)

The original of this article was in Spanish, but I have attempted to translate it.

What is "bud sex"?  Heterosexual men having sex with each other for pleasure.

A somewhat unconventional way to enjoy sex.

Each person experiences their sexuality how they want to and in the most pleasurable form possible.  With the sexual revolution, this terrain is in every case much broader where there is more space for experimentation.

In that framework, for some time now the term "bud sex" has begun to be used.  This expression refers to sex between male friends.  It is used for those heterosexual men who have intimate relations with another male with the sole objective of getting pleasure.

These men are not bisexual, nor homosexual, nor are they even confused in their sexual orientation: they are simply heterosexual guys who look to get pleasure without emotional or sentimental ties with people of the same sex.

The men taking part in "bud sex" can be married and even have children.  The practice is seen as obtaining sexual relief, caused sometimes by circumstances, for example in prisons, where there is no opportunity to share intimate moments with a woman.

Since these are heterosexual males, pre-agreed rules are set up before coitus so that there is no confusion.  Among those: no kissing, caresses, or any other manifestation of affection, nor to meet up with the other person (too) frequently.

I've been banging on about this for years, just like I've been talking about toxic masculinity: when being gay ceases to carry any stigma, then lots of men will have sex with other men.  "Bud sex" is at the extreme end of impersonal sex.  It's just fucking.

But it is equally possible to have what the French call une amitié amoureuse, a loving friendship, where you are not in love but nevertheless are fond of your sparring partner.  After all, how often does one fall in love?  Yet one may be attracted to someone, and what makes them attractive isn't just their bodies but their smile, their sense of fun, their integrity--those thousand things that draw us to other people, whether sexually or not.  In a world where male-to-male sex is no more noteworthy than male-to-female sex, it will be very likely that there will be buddies who do find each other in some sense attractive, and act on that perception.  And I try and show that in my writing.

I loves ya

My kink

I'm a peculiar kind of gay man.  My kink is .... I'm more interested in the affection than the sex.  For lots of men that's a no-no.  For them the sex is paramount.  For me, it's the love/affection/friendship/connection which is the most important.  Don't get me wrong--I love making love.  But the feelings I have for my partner will always be more important than the physical pleasure.

Ah well.  Always an outsider!

Dark House

Tennyson wrote In Memoriam to his very dear friend Arthur Hallam who died suddenly.  Modern readers might see their deep friendship as 'gay',  but it seems clear enough that it was a 'romantic friendship'  Whatever.  It was love.  This poem below is just one from In Memoriam.


DARK house, by which once more I stand
    Here in the long unlovely street,
    Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more—      
    Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
    And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,      
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

*        *        *        *        *

O days and hours, your work is this,
    To hold me from my proper place,
    A little while from his embrace,      
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue
    Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
    And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,      

For every grain of sand that runs,
    And every span of shade that steals,
    And every kiss of toothèd wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.

Drives

We humans have lots of drives and needs: shelter, food, warmth, among others.  But for the most part, in Western countries, these needs are satisfied, and we are left with our unsatisfied needs/drives: love, companionship, and sex.   Oddly enough, though Western capitalism feeds and clothes and warms us, providing (again, for the most part) for our physical needs, it's not very good at filling our emotional needs.

 We are lonely and alone.  We are, most of us, atomistic nothings in giant cities, so big we can never know them fully, so populous we can never get to know everybody.  24% of households have just one person in them.   No wonder so many people have pets!

Suicide in Oz killed 2,272 people in 2011.  And that's those acknowledged as suicide.  Many "single vehicle" accidents, especially in the bush, are disguised suicides.  Interestingly, only 1,277 ppl died in motor vehicle accidents in 2011, only half the official toll from suicide. Drug-related deaths totalled 1388.  Some of these are surely slow-burning suicides.  Note, as an aside, how many resources are deployed to combat road deaths and how few to stop the more numerous suicides and drug deaths.

Ironically, the biggest killer by far is the different forms of heart disease: 26,613 in 2011.  Another 32, 525 die from strokes, prostate cancer, dementia etc, all of which are primarily environment-related.  The excessive prosperity of our system leads to overeating and especially overeating easily prepared and readily available food ("junk food").   Two thirds of Ozzies are obese, double the ratio of 20 years ago.

Just to put it all into perspective, only a little over 200 people a years are murdered.

Our civilisation, then, overfeeds us.  And it's killing us.

How much eating is "comfort food"?

A huge amount of mine is, I know.  We hunger for love and affection; for sexual love, not random encounters; for meaning.  And meaning comes from loving and being loved.

Yet, in a way, the need for sex and the need for love are sometimes opposed.  A man may dearly love his current partner, yet lust after others.  If he satisfies that lust he may destroy the relationship with the person he really loves.  But the need for sex, for "hotness" is very powerful.  We humans like sex, we want more of it, at some deep level within us it fulfills our needs.  But we also deeply want to be loved and to love.

Our culture struggles with these often irreconcilable needs.  We deplore it when famous or wealthy or powerful men break their marriage vows.  Yet so many keep on doing it.  Why?



What we need is less food, less consumption, and more friendship, love and sex.

[ Some previous thoughts on all this:

Our Cheatin' Hearts
Normal Plus
Friends
Friends and Enemas ]



Sources:

All deaths
Road deaths
Drug deaths
Obesity in Australia
Sex at Dawn

Love or friendship?

Or both? Why not, after all?

Guys cuddling

Why not, after all?

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,

And in a little while our lips are dumb.

Let us alone. What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us

[Tennyson, The Lotos Eaters]

Love while you can. You won't get a second chance!

Pic (I think!) from this lovely assemblage of guys cuddling images.

Lament

This is the 1000th post to this blog.  The first post was in March 2006, almost exactly 6 years ago.

I started writing gay-shaded stories because I wanted to change the world (and maybe make some money too!)  I had such a miserable experience when I found out about myself that I wanted to  try and help other youngsters going through the same thing.  I thought I was the only queer in the world.  It was very lonely.  By writing stories which treated gay-shadedness as ordinary and normal, I thought I could help.  But the gay world had moved on from when I was going through my own hell.  In many places, being gay has gone from being worse than murder or rape or treason to being pretty much accepted.  One by one, countries have accepted gay marriage and gay adoption.  Yeah, you still can't kiss another bloke in public except in a few small endroits, but in 30 short years so much else has changed.  Hugely.  And for the better.






But I had a secondary goal in my writing too.  I wanted to show that sex is just part of a spectrum of love, running from the casual pick-up through to profound emotional and sexual intimacy.  It seemed to me that too many gay men were stuck at the lust end of the spectrum and not enough along the middle (friends with benefits) or the end (deep love).  And the more I looked at it, the more it became obvious that straight men needed to be liberated too.  The proscriptions of the church and the psychiatrists which so poisoned our lives, also stopped straight men from expressing their love for each other.  I don't for one minute think that all straight men are closet homos.  I think profound love can be felt without needing to fuck.  But I think fear of being seen as "gay" stopped and stops many straight men from loving other men even in the way what is misleadingly described as "platonic", let alone sexually.  That hasn't changed much in 30 years.  And perhaps it never will.  I am just tilting at windmills.


It became clear to me too that bisexuals were being shabbily treated by both sides of the great divide.  Gays maintained that bi's were hypocrites at worst and "in transition" to homo happiness at best.  Straights just thought bi's were really gays, if they thought at all.  I used to think along these lines too.  And I don't any more. I think bisexuality is programmed into our genes, because it helped bind otherwise competitive men within a hunter-gatherer group together, and that even with guys who in almost every respect might be labelled "straight", it is possible that they can grow to love another man, without necessarily finding men other than their best friend/lover desirable.  And this reluctance to acknowledge our innate bisexuality isn't going to change,  essentially because you run into the whole concept of fidelity.  Wives do not on the whole welcome their husband's male lover.  So bisexual guys become (to outside observers) het, just as I, married for more than 32 years, appear to others.  Other sub groups (Jews, Blacks, Muslims) have obvious membership.  But I, and other bi-ish blokes like me, don't know who out there is bi.  We're all "passing" as het.  And that isn't going to change either.  And it's ... lonely.

I feel weary and worn.  My prime motivation for writing gay-shaded stories has become irrelevant.  Gayness is accepted more and more by young ppl.  The trogs are mostly old and bitter. ( Funny, that.  A bit like me, really.  Just on different ice floes.)  And trying to make gay and straight men understand that love is what matters, and that sex is secondary, is a tedious struggle.  It's become clear to me that my conception of male friendship doesn't have much in common with the way other men see friendship.  I am like Jude Fawley, seeing Christminster's towers rising over the hill, living in hope but ultimately coming to realise that those golden towers are forever unreachable.

I am a natural optimist, and someone who innately likes other people.  But I don't believe I will change the world, and I've gone off gay and straight men.  It's made it hard for me to write.  Will I keep on writing?  I don't know.  I used to love writing, when I thought it was important.  Now, it's obvious to me that I am irrelevant, and also inept and useless.

A dreary post.  You will be rightly put off by my melancholy and depression.  Alas, sometimes I get sick of Mr Jolly, and lock him away in a cupboard.

I remember

Three years ago today, a dear friend died too young, much too young, after a year-long illness.  I haven't forgotten him nor ever will I, I suspect.  I miss ya, my dear.

Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή

Not that that brings any comfort.

Footy, the story

Stefan Martin and Sam Fisher

OK, I know, it's been months.  I've been saying and saying that I was going to upload Footy, my novel about a straight footy player whose new best friend is a gay bloke.

Anyway (heaves huge sigh) I've started.  Here are the first 4 chapters:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

The other chapters will be loaded over the next few weeks.

[The usual disclaimer applies:  just 'cos these guys appear in the blog doesn't mean they're gay or bi]

Women's wicked thoughts

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald and its stablemate The Age about why straight women like male to male (m/m or m2m) films, videos and stories.  Interesting.  As you all know, more than half my readership is female. 

I've written before about The Power of Slash

Women like gay male erotica.  Especially if it's romantic.

[Picture from The Age]

Happy together

Two guys who view sex as fun, something to be shared.  The French call it une amitié amoureuse, an "amorous friendship", or perhaps better translated as  "friends with benefits".

And why not?  Sex is pleasurable, and it helps strengthen friendships and relationships.  It's natural to want to express your love physically by touching and caressing, and maybe also by making love.  Only the troglodytes would oppose that.

Majorca Flats -- 127

He went back to the other two.

“Jase mustn't be alone tonight,” he said to Luigi. “Wherdya live, mate?”

“Ten minutes from here. We could take a taxi.”

“Nah. At this time of night we'd have to call one. That'd take too long, and they often don't turn up at all. I'm just round the corner. We can take him there.”

“Well,” said Luigi, hesitating. “I mean … Wouldn't he … aren't you his friend? I mean, should I come too?”

“Yeah, sure. Of course. He told his story to both of us. We both need to be with him. The bed's big enough.” When Luigi still hesitated, Keith added impatiently, “Not for sex. He just needs someone to cuddle, someone to be with him when he wakes up. He mustn't be alone.”

Luigi nodded. “Right. Can we go? Don't you have stuff you have to do to close up?”

“No. I cleared it with Tom. C'mon Jase, let's go home.”

First Majorca Flats post       Previous MF post (#126)       Next MF post(#128)


Majorca Flats Episodes 1 to 10           Majorca Flats Episodes 61 to 70
Majorca Flats Episodes 11 to 20         Majorca Flats Episodes 71 to 80
Majorca Flats Episodes 21 to 30         Majorca Flats Episodes 81 to 90
Majorca Flats Episodes 31 to 40         Majorca Flats Episodes 91 to 100
Majorca Flats Episodes 41 to 50         Majorca Flats Episodes 101 to 110   
Majorca Flats Episodes 51 to 60         Majorca Flats Episodes 111 to 120  

Love, Sex and Friendship

I often talk about how these three things intersect.  Then I found this very clever Venn diagram on The Slab.  (Dunno where he got it from!)

It sums it up, doesn't it?   We can't always get into the 'perfect match' centre of the diagram, but maybe any one of the overlapping segments might work quite well.  Second-best isn't always a bad thing.  And it's certainly much better than nothing.

By the way, I think they're talking about romantic love rather than the broader meanings of love when they label one circle "love".

Majorca Flats -- 100

The next night was the night that Graeme was supposed to come to The Lord Grey to meet Jason.

It was ten o'clock when Jason, who'd been watching the door all evening, saw Graeme standing at the door, looking a little shy and peering short-sightedly into the dimness of the bar. Jason went over, and when Graeme smiled at him he couldn't help grinning back.

Back at the bar counter, as he was pulling a pint of draft Victoria Bitter for a customer, Keith, who was next to him mixing a cocktail, said “Who's he?”

“I met him at the beach.”

“Yeah?” Keith's tone was aggressive and angry.

“He's just someone I met, Keith. Not a trick.”

Keith wouldn't look at him.

“Jeez, Keith! C'mon, then, come and meet him. Maybe he'll fancy you!”

He dragged a reluctant Keith over to where Graeme was sitting.

“Hey, Graeme, this is my friend Keith. He works here too.”

“G'day,” mumbled Keith, red with embarrassment, unable to meet either Graeme's or Jason's eyes. Jason grinned to himself.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Graeme.

“We finish tonight at about eleven, maybe eleven thirty,” said Jason. “Would you like to join us for a coffee afterwards?”

Every so often, he would pop by Graeme's table and chat for a moment or two. He was conscious that every time he did this, Keith's gaze would fix upon them.

First Majorca Flats post      Previous MF post (#99)       Next MF post(#101)

Majorca Flats Episodes 1 to 500

Deep Secrets

It's a staple of all the conversations we have, gay men and straight women, that straight men are emotional pygmies, that they don't want intimate friendships, that they can't express their feelings, that they don't love other men.

It's worse than that, actually.  They do, when they're young.  It's only as they grow up that they deliberately step away from intimacy into emotional indifference.  This newly released book , Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, makes the the point that intense intimacy among boys in early and middle adolescence is very common, but it is replaced by competition, mistrust and loneliness as they grow into men.

As the publisher's puff says:

“Boys are emotionally illiterate and don’t want intimate friendships.” In this empirically grounded challenge to our stereotypes about boys and men, Niobe Way reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys especially during early and middle adolescence. Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go “wacko.” Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.

Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, Deep Secrets reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature. Boys’ descriptions of their male friendships sound more like “something out of Love Story than Lord of the Flies.” Yet in late adolescence, boys feel they have to “man up” by becoming stoic and independent. Vulnerable emotions and intimate friendships are for girls and gay men. “No homo” becomes their mantra.

These findings are alarming, given what we know about links between friendships and health, and even longevity. Rather than a “boy crisis,” Way argues that boys are experiencing a “crisis of connection” because they live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither. Way argues that the solution lies with exposing the inaccuracies of our gender stereotypes and fostering these critical relationships and fundamental human skills.

At sixteen, my best friend and I loved each other completely.  It had nothing whatever to do with sex and everything with intense friendship.  It was entirely innocent.  It never struck me that perhaps we grew apart because we were both "manning up" -- though we were an unusual pair, neither of us sporty, both of us fascinated by ideas.  I always thought that the reason we grew apart was because he found girlfriends and I, well, I didn't, not really, not like him.  After all, it is the expected path of our society that the intense friendships of 12 or 14 or 16 are replaced with the intense emotion of marriage.  You are expected to love your best friend less than you love your wife.  Because loving another man  -- even non-sexually -- is simply not kosher.  It's something you might indulge when you're sixteen, but real men end up loving their woman more than their man.  That's the way it is.

I never had a problem being intimate with my friends.  But the men I tried to befriend did.  They were uncomfortable with intimacy, even when they didn't know my sexuality.  They found it hard to talk about their fears and weaknesses, their loneliness, their need for love and empathy.  I'm told by blokes who have navigated the rapids of male friendship more successfully than I have that sportsmen (o happy breed!) can bond, and ultimately can talk about those things which are dear to their heart.  For me this is an alien world.

Men are afraid to be intimate, to show their pain, to discuss their lives because, as the blurb above says, "human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither".  

In this context there is no more sinister phrase than "you have to man up" or "making a man of you."  The users of these baggage-loaded horrors have someone like John Wayne in mind, taciturn, noble, violent, suffering in silence, a loner who doesn't even connect to his women.   Real men are strong, of course they are.  And noble.  And brave.   But they're also empathetic, caring, compassionate, loving, supportive, generous, and friendly.  Straight or gay.  And our culture takes sensitive teenage boys and turns them into lonely, unconnected automata.  As my elder son says:  so much of the sex obsession men have is really about trying to connect in the only way they know.   And that is desperately sad.

In Memoriam

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote In Memoriam A.H.H. for his very dear friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and a student at Trinity College. who died suddenly from a cerebral haemorrhage.   It is hard for us now to see their love as anything but homosexual, yet at the time, these intense, non-sexual friendships between two men were regarded as quite normal and perfectly "wholesome".   We hadn't yet had the psychiatrists and hate-mongers destroy any chance of non-sexual male2male love prospering.  Love doesn't have to be about fucking. But most straight men are too afraid of being thought 'mos to be really close to another man.  The saddest consequence of the long, vicious and futile crusade against homosexuality:  the tragic collateral damage -- straight male intimacy

The poem is very long, and very moving.  And whether Tennyson was having sex with Hallam or not is irrelevant.  This was the deepest and sincerest love.  Read the poem for yourself, and see.  For my friend who died, whom I loved, this canto, canto V, seems perfectly apposite.

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

A use in measured language lies;

The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

 

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,

Like coarsest clothes against the cold:

But that large grief which these enfold

Is given in outline and no more.

I miss him so much.