Teaching boys what it really means to be a man

Benson Saulo (hat) and friend Hunter Johnson. He started a new educational session that reframed what it means to be masculine. Teaching agains violence and macho/ego identities. Pic Simon Schluter 22 May 2015.

An interesting article about teaching teenagers to be better men.  What really disturbed me was the terrifying data about how many young men die via suicide.

Benson Saulo recalls the day his best friend wound up behind bars.

Drunk on a night out in Sydney's CBD, his friend got into a fight with a bouncer. Before long, the towering former rugby player broke the bouncer's neck, rendering him disabled for life.

"I asked him why he did it when he got out, and he said he felt he had no choice. All his life he was never able to back away, he never learnt how to step back and assess a situation," Mr Saulo said.

Many of Mr Saulo's friends from home, a rough part of Tamworth in New South Wales, endured what he described as a damaging cycle. They learnt early their value was measured by toughness. Starved of basic tools to put emotions into words, they resorted to rugby, violence and women, to find expression.

Mr Saulo said a mission to lower the rates of male suicide - the biggest killer of men under 25 - and to end domestic violence, was driving their initiative.

• Men are three and a half times more likely to kill themselves than women.
• Suicide accounts for one fifth of all male deaths between 15 and 34.  And that excludes many single-driver car accidents which experts suspect are hidden suicides
• Some other top five causes of deaths among 15-24 year olds: land transport accidents (i.e., macho driving, hidden suicides) and assault (too macho to back off).

Our hyper-masculine maleness is extraordinarily dangerous and damaging. But we homos always knew that, right?

Dying secrets

A 2010 portrait of Erik Jensen by Cullen

An uncommonly insightful piece about an Australian artist.  About trying to be a "real man", even though you are gay or bi, and how much damage that does to you.

"Handsome" was Adam's greatest term of affection. Paintings were never beautiful, certainly not pretty: they were handsome. He coined the term "hetero-camp" to describe what he liked about the glamour of a bullfight: the traje de luces, the suit of lights. In Barcelona on an artist residency, he had watched six bullfights a day and produced almost no work.

Violence and sex for him were always intertwined. At art school, his aesthetic was forged from the danger of both. He dressed like a skinhead and described as "savage" his relationship with campus feminists. He boasted that he had been a member of the ultra-right National Front and part of a gang that had kicked to death a gay man. "I hung around with the skinheads because I liked the skinheads. I wasn't necessarily a Nazi, but I have always been interested in the existence of the extreme right," he said. "It's just so handsome. I used to love to go and see bands that would attract that crowd."

He claimed to have played trumpet briefly and poorly with the punk band Feedtime, and with another called Lubricated Goat. This was, so far as I could tell, untrue. "I used to love clothes, really nice skinhead clothes," he said. "I could never get hassled by anyone. Nice shoes. Skinny braces, f...ing white ones. Of course, I got called a poof when I studied art. But not regularly."

There is nothing dramatic about Adam's black eye. He fell on the back stairs, shifting pot plants in the rain. But the swelling makes it difficult to cry. The tears pool in the purpled flesh and the bruises make painful his attempts to wipe them away. "You probably know I'm on the border of bisexual," Adam says through the crying. "I think you can smell me a mile away."

We are sitting in the front room of his house. The lights are off. A newly acquired bearskin lies in front of us, the head still attached. An enormous fish trap has arrived since I was last here. His court case for weapons possession ended only a few weeks earlier.

"I prefer the company of men," Adam offers, "as a lot of writers and artists have said." He pushes through the tears, fending off emotion as if giving some urgent instructions. "My father said that the best advice his father gave him was, 'Kevin, be careful: women are queer cattle.' " Adam had used a similar line when we first met: "As my granddaddy said, 'If it's got tits, wheels or fur, you're f...ed.' "

Adam stops trying to wipe away the tears. He cries openly and his speech becomes unvarnished. But he looks away to make his points. I have rarely seen him so uncomfortable. Publicly, he has only ever been straight. "I haven't been openly gay or bi before, but I prefer men because women are f...ing stupid," he says. "Holding men is nice. We people are great specimens. I suppose I should quote Shakespeare: 'What a piece of work is a man.' "

I ask adam why he has hidden from his sexuality, but he doesn't have an answer. I suspect it is because, at heart, he wants badly to be a country boy, to be some copy of his father: charming, funny, good with women. Instead, he has created for himself a character of violent machismo that would have been destroyed by his affection for men.

Suddenly, it is all there: the showers, the nudity, the elegiac emails, the lingering touches, the fantasies about taking hotel rooms together, the pretence of this book with which he has convinced me to stay at his house. I think back to something Adam said early in our interviews: "You're the only man for me." Sitting opposite him, I finally twig: Adam is in love with me.

Read the whole article here.

Bisexuality is not a choice

Sad truths

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves, -- George Santayana

Love, Lust and Twinks

When I was in the traps, donkey’s years ago, I had never heard of the word "twink".  We had “sexy”, and “handsome” and “attractive”, but (such was my innocence or at least ignorance) I knew nothing about bears or leather or daddies or cubs or lycra or twinks.  Nothing about all the different tribes of gay.  Not that I didn’t find, say, blokes in leather jackets on big bikes hot, or a dancer in lycra sexy.  I just didn’t know about the details of the subcultures involved.  I thought in my inexperience that gay was gay.  When I eventually encountered the word “twink”, I had to look it up.  Wikipedia’s definition is  "a gay slang term describing a young or young-looking gay man with a slender, ectomorph build, little or no body hair, and no facial hair" (1)   I knew at once what was being described, because I once was one.

Some people seem to think the word distasteful, judgmental or patronising.  I’m sorry if you are offended by my using it.  Yet I believe we are too precious about the use of some words.  Today I saw a tweet saying that to be called cute is an insult.  Being Twitter, there wasn’t enough room for the grumbler to say why it was offensive.  I mean, honestly, I wish I was cute.  Cute would do me very nicely, thank you.  Far better, frankly, than its antonym, ugly.

OK, then.  Well, not long ago, I was lunching at a favourite vegetarian resto. The waiter who served us (“Simon”) was simply dazzling, and the perfect example of a twink.  I lusted after every inch of him.  This cute stunning bloke was about 20, slim and hairless, and poured into his skin-tight jeans.  He was … gorgeous, sexy, beaut. Utterly desirable.  I wanted to do him right then, to caress the adorable curves of his bum, to slide slowly into him and feel his pleasure as I did.  And to do it all again in half an hour.

This unseemly lust reminded me of “John”, who used to work in another of my favourite veggie restos.   John was also a twink:  slim, slightly muscled, five o’clock shadow on his chin, beaut jacaranda eyes and thick curly black hair.  He wore skin-tight stretch jeans and t-shirts which revealed his flawless waist and belly-button.  Once he served us wearing a pair of shiny white lycra tights sprinkled with multi-coloured polka dots.  I confess to not being altogether fully attentive to my dinner companions, as he passed within a foot or two, his groin at face height.  Some might have dismissed him because he was a little queeny, but I found him incomparably sexy, in truth sexier because of his androgyny.  Cute, hot, beautiful, slim, delicious, fuckable.  And brave too: dressed like that, to wander the streets at night, even Brunswick Street—that’s brave.  But then it has always seemed to me that swishy queens are particularly valiant: to be who they are, and to flaunt their sexuality and gender dysphoria in the face of a deeply hostile world, takes great courage.

The third example is an incongruous one.  But it made me think (who was it who said curiosity is the sign that your brain is still working? Mine still is, I think, even as the rest of me wears out.)  It was the waitress at our staff Christmas dinner.  Slim, short-cut raven-black hair, perfect sky-blue eyes, boyish enough to be extraordinarily attractive to this mostly gay bloke.  She looked like a female version of Elijah Wood, who played Frodo in the Lord of the Rings.  Lovely.  Desirable, perfect, sexy, fuckable.  Which made me wonder how much of my attraction to the two twinks was because of their androgyny.  Because my attraction to her certainly was.  More of that in a minute.

With neither of these exquisite young men nor this gorgeous woman did I wish to be friends.   An embarrassing confession.  Like so many straight men who are very happy to fuck young women but not have a deep friendship with them (2).  I was profoundly attracted to them, but to their bodies, not to their minds.  Not to them as people. And for someone who claims to so value character and intelligence and personality, that was a revealing and rather unpleasant insight.  It was embarrassing and shaming to me to realise that even at this age, my hormonal fires burn strongly enough to make me not as nice a person as I would like to be.

Let me not exaggerate, and let me say at once, were we to have a relationship (which we wouldn’t because I am faithful to my lady), I would try to be kind and attentive and generous.  I would listen to their problems; take them clubbing (shudder) or whatever it might be that they wanted to do with me; admire their person and the clothes they wore; encourage and support and console; endure des ennuis with fortitude and (I trust) a sense of humour; and so on.  And when the relationship inevitably ended, I would kiss them and send them on their way, my heart mostly untouched, and theirs too, I hope.  More than fuck buddies, but less than lovers.

I feel I have to say this, because there are some men—macho, heterosexual men, so called “real men”—who think it’s OK to treat women like pieces of meat, as this recent case exemplifies (3).  And there are some gay men who are no different, except that it’s men they objectify.  Their partner isn’t a person.  It’s just a living plastic blow-up doll.

These cuties of both genders weren’t quite that for me, but they came uncomfortably close, I fear.  Too close.  An eye-opening insight.

So far so good (are you still with me, or have you pronounced an anathema against me and signed off in disgust?)

Now, also quite recently, I had to have dealings with “Darrell”.  Darrell was in charge of doing the concreting in the extension we’ve done to our house.  Darrell is not a twink.  Darrell is an ocker (4), working-class, bogan (5) Ozzie, with a slight tummy, a developing second chin, dust on his Blundstone boots, and shorts which were so loose they were about to fall off.  Dusty shorts.  Worn shorts.  Incredibly fucking sexy shorts.  Unselfconscious: no careful display of his package or his pectorals; no attempt to make himself attractive or desirable.  Because he didn’t need to.  He was quite secure in himself, in his normality and his maleness.  I was the insecure one.  I found myself in half in love with Darrell.  In love?  Quelle blague!

This is where I had another humiliating insight.  I didn’t lust after him as I lusted after the three cuties.  I didn’t really lust after him at all.  What I wanted was for him to care about me, to accept me, to cuddle me, to be my friend.  Even though I knew we would have nothing to talk about (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Would he even know that that was Shakespeare, and written to a man?) and absolutely nothing in common.  Despite knowing this, I wanted his mind, not his body.  Well, not exactly his mind.  His affection, his friendship, his love, his protection, his acceptance.  I wanted him to love me.  It’s true that some part of me was prepared to have sex with him to make him my friend, not because I wanted it but because it was coin I could offer.  A friend once said to me that like a woman with men, I offered sex to men to get them to like me.  I don’t know whether women do that, but his observation struck a chord.  How sad is that, that I try and buy love with my body?  Not least because we all know, of course, that this doesn’t work with straight men.  My rational brain told me not to be a fool, that what I have with my lady and my family is really good and keeps me happy and sane.  That didn’t stop a very primitive chunk of me wanting Darrell’s approval, love, and friendship, and being prepared to fuck to get them.

I was ready to give my heart to Darrell.  Because of a deep manly voice, a pair of dusty shorts, worn Blundstones and an ocker accent.  Darrell didn’t have a perfect body.  Or a slim muscular bum.  He was not beautiful.  He was just a bloke.  A straight bloke.  An ordinary bloke.  A normal bloke.  But he pushed all my buttons.

And here’s a weird thing:  while I was talking to Darrell, after he’d unbent a little, he started to flirt with me.  Quite unconsciously.  In fact, when he became aware of it, he stopped.  In other words, he responded to my … my what? My flirtation?  My attraction?  My longing to be loved by a man like him?  Was I emitting particles which he reacted to?  Setting aside my age and opposite of cuteness, was I the equivalent of a twink to Darrell?

It reminds me of Annie Proulx talking about how she came to write Brokeback Mountain.  She saw an old cowboy in a bar looking with longing at the younger blokes.  Am I as transparent to strangers?  How humiliating!  That my rather pathetic need to be loved should be so obvious even to a straight man.  Being bullied and lonely at school has made some primeval element of my psyche respond to strong “manly” men, the kind who used to beat me up, the kind who so comprehensively rejected me at school.  And would—and do—reject me now.  At the same time, my intellect and my heart make me oppose the type of oppressive manliness they represent and epitomise, where tenderness is unmanly, and caring is a sign of weakness.

How complicated and muddled we are.  Who would have thought that the small boy and teenager bullied mercilessly at school would have grown up to lust after the acceptance and affection of the clones of his tormenters?  How …. bizarre.  How sad.  I thought I understood myself, but what I didn’t realise is how both extremes of my interactions with men are unbalanced.  At one end, lust.  At the other, a sort of grubby and unfulfillable hero-worship.

No wonder I can’t get close to men, straight, gay or whatever.  Because the balanced centre, which combines love with lust; the sacred with the profane (6); soul and body, eludes me.   To most men, I come across as needy and too eager to please.  And they will sense, even if they are not consciously aware of it, the particles I emit, as Darrell did, as Annie Proulx saw with that old cowboy in the bar in Wyoming, and despise me for it.

I am more glad than ever that I have my lady: clever, witty, honourable, sexy.   Who does know where “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” comes from.  Who thinks my gender dysphoria makes me a better not a worse man, and loves me because of it.

A real man

You know, my whole life has been defined by being gay-shaded, by the judgements and hatred of others. As a small boy, a young teen, a young man, a middle-aged man, and now, I have called been "queer", "a homo", " a moffie", "camp", "queeny", "effeminate", "girly", "perverted", "unnatural".  I have been despised and beaten up.  I have been ignored and excluded.  When I came out to straight friends, I suddenly and mysteriously got the cold shoulder.  How bizarre!  All the other things they liked about me weren't enough to tip the scales when they discovered I was gay.  I became persona non grata.  An untermensch.  A nothing.

I have never been good enough for the straights,  Judged always.  Never mind about the rest of me: whether I was kind or not; generous or not; honest; decent; loving; intelligent or stupid; well-read or ignorant.  None of those things mattered.  Only my gayness mattered.  Only that I wasn't "a real man", I wasn't "manly".  Let's judge people by just one of their characteristics, shall we?  Because all the other things don't count, right?  I am what I am.  I was fucking born this way, OK?

I have come to realise that my allergies, my joint aches and pains, my overeating and overdrinking, my depressions, even how much money I have now -- these have all been heavily influenced and driven by others' rancid and judgemental perceptions of me.  I am so fucking BORED with it.  Jesus tap-dancing Christ, why can't I just be me, without all this fucking baggage? My illness, my body, my mind, my soul. Driven to the state I am now in, with dodgy health, depression, poor finances.  By these pieces of dogshit.  By judgemental, obscurantist, narrow-minded, hate-filled bigots.  "Hate the sin not the sinner."  Yeah, right.  "Judge not lest ye be judged."  Oh, but we do it with love.  So that's all right, then.

And their fellow travellers.  As in a racially stratified society, where the less black consider themselves better than the ebony, and the whites look down on all, so bisexual men and straight-acting men, and the macho pretend-straights and those able to "pass" look down on people like me.  They're not "swish".  They're real men. Isn't that nice?  And when they despise us, it's only natural and to be expected.   Of course it is.  Because the "natural order" is that real men and real women are the only worthwhile humans beings around, and even though they take it up the bum, they act straight.  So it's OK.  They're not really gay, are they?  

I know I'm angry.  And bitter.  And resentful.  Tough.  The only healthy way to react to subtle and overt negative cues and discrimination from society and their unquestioned values which make me worthless and a nothing, is to fight back; to expose the ChrisTaliban and their loathsome lies; to call out gay friends who are uncomfortable with queeny men and manly women; to remind people that it's the whole person which matters.  And to tell myself every day:  I'm worthwhile; I'm lovable; I'm good; I'm a real person.  Even if I shall never be a real man.  

Majorca Flats -- 291

Luigi pulled over to the side of the road.

It was Jason. “Are you OK, Lou? Is he?”

“I'm good, Jace. We're just going to see a doctor in the city. I'll be in touch.” Luigi didn't want to talk about Cody while Cody was present. He would need to talk, eventually, he knew. But not now. He'd need to discuss his feelings, with Jason and Keith. Because he had no idea what to do. He still loved Cody, but now he was all too aware of his flaws, of what sort of person he was. Seeing Cody beaten down and lost and damaged after what had happened had made him feel more tender towards Cody, but also slightly contemptuous. And the fact that he could feel contempt for someone raped and almost murdered shamed him. I am a horrible person, he thought.

“You know if you need me, Lou, just let me know, alright?”

“Yes, I know. Thank you. I'll ring you, OK?”

He broke the connection.

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Episodes 1 to 220 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)

Footy -- Chapter 23

To his surprise, he fell asleep, a drugged slumber that brought him no relief from his grief or his lassitude. Sean MacDonald had never been in love before. Losing Will was worse than the loss of a first love, though. With him, Sean had felt that he was part of the broad congregation of humanity. It hadn’t mattered that his mother’d been a druggie and his father a brutal alcoholic failure. It didn’t matter that he had an unimportant job that everyone looked down on. He’d been alive, and the light of love had cast the shadows away. 

After he woke, he once again lay motionless on his bed. His eyes moved from one corner to the next, noting absently that there was a spider web here, and small damp stain there, that the center light threw displeasing shadows in the corners. Yet nothing registered. The flick of his eyes around the room, from one side to the other, had no purpose. 

There seemed to be nothing that would ease the pain. A few months ago, before Jasper and Will, he might have watched Katy Submits, and smoked a few joints. He might have drunk the bottle of vodka that he kept in the cupboard underneath the hotplate and the kettle. But he knew for a certainty that none of these things would make it hurt any less. And he was not going to turn into either of his parents. Whatever happened, he would survive. Inside him, an insistent quiet voice spoke. No, it said. You’ve failed. You’re just like your hopeless loser parents. And you’re a homo. And where the fuck did that get you? Loser. Failure. Spaz.

You can read the rest of the chapter here.

Footy, Chapter 21

 I won’t go to a bar again. Will made this promise to himself every few months. The most recent occasion had been just six weeks before, after his previous visit to the The Peel. Every time he picked up a bloke, he would feel guilty the next day. He knew his inability to keep away showed how weak he was, what a pathetic failure. No matter how much he enjoyed the sex, he had no easy way to deal with the toxic mix of guilt and desire he experienced.

Yet when he had caught sight of Sean, he had immediately forgotten his doubts. He had guessed from the stiff way Sean was standing that he had never been in a gay pub before. The mixture of toughness and vulnerability in Sean’s face intrigued him. The draw wasn’t just physical, though there was no denying that Sean was handsome, slim and muscular.

Will had a weakness for rough trade. Perhaps it was because he felt that what he did was unworthy, that he wasn't a real man. Real men didn't have sex with other men. Real men were heterosexual. But if you weren't a real man, you could compensate by being tough, by showing a macho front to the world. He never felt that he himself did it convincingly. It always felt to him that he was playing a game, that it was some kind of façade, that he was a fake and a fraud, and that everybody knew it or would discover it one day.

He knew that others probably played these rôles too. But with them, the illusion seemed more convincing. Sean looked like a real man. Tough. Manly. Together. Self-sufficient. To Will it seemed that if he could persuade such a paragon to love him, he would enjoy a vicarious sense of manliness, of validation and self-worth. When a masculine man was screwing him, Will could pretend that he was loved, and that his partner’s masculinity validated his own. Taking a dick deep inside him made him feel manlier, more real. He was far too intelligent not to see the irony in this—but it made no difference to how he behaved. It merely made him despise himself the more thoroughly.

He had almost given up with Sean right after he’d started talking to him. Sean had seemed distant and hostile. Even though this was part of the fantasy, part of what turned him on, Sean had seemed so antagonistic that Will had wondered why the other man was even in a gay pub. For a moment, a cold wash of fear had made his hair stand on end. Was Sean the kind of man who would let himself be picked up only to beat you up later? But when Will had looked into Sean’s eyes, he had seen a need and a vulnerability mirroring his own, and his fears had faded. He had sensed at once Sean's attraction to him, an attraction he seemed to feel despite himself. Sean’s latent aggression became a thrilling spice enhancing their rapport. The sexual thirst and restrained belligerence in Sean made him overwhelmingly desirable.

The surprise came only later, after Sean had fucked him and had gotten up to leave, wordlessly, his face sullen. Bitter at yet another heartless encounter, angry at Sean and sickened by his own needs, Will had rebuked him, and had been startled and touched by Sean's response.

Read the rest of the chapter here.

Majorca Flats -- 260

 “I'm fucked, amn't I? If I tell, that's the end of my marriage. If I don't then I'm never going to be safe.” Cody scrubbed his face vigorously.

“I'll come with you to the police,” offered Michael. Luigi wondered why he was doing so much for Cody. He'd done his Good Samaritan impression when he'd picked up Cody and brought him home. What was he bothering for? “It's just that I know the local policeman. He plays with me in the Mt Macedon cricket team and with the Macedon Cats. He's a good bloke. He'll take the report. I'll stay with you. But if you want, I can ask my dad for help.”

“How can he help?”

“He's a lawyer. Company law, but he'll have people in his firm who'll be able to defend you.”

“I can't afford that.” Cody shook his head. “It's my own fault. If I didn't go … whoring … I'd not be in trouble now.” His self-contempt burnt.

[Image from here]

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Episodes 1 to 220 (without pictures, 10 episodes per chapter)