I Want a Boy Just Like the Boy That Married Dear Old Mom

The gay men's discussion group I sometimes attend will be taking up the question "Are Gay Men Different from Straight Men?  Why?"  The trouble with any question like this is that it assumes that all gay men are alike, and all straight men are alike.  But in most groups that aren't defined very narrowly by sameness, the differences within the group are greater than the average differences between it and whatever group is being compared to it.  When a group is stigmatized as gay men have been, it is all the harder to build a representative sample; if you limit your sample to openly gay men, then you're not talking about all gay men, and you can't make any assumptions about the closeted.  Some people would distinguish between men who "identify as" gay and men who are homosexually active (the famous Men Who Have Sex with Men) but even the gay-identified vary widely.

In any case, it depends on what traits you're comparing.  Most gay men have penises, for example, probably the same proportion as straight men.  Most of us want to copulate with other males, and we tend to downplay the extent to which many of us want to copulate with females as well.  (In that respect, of course, we're the mirror image of straight men.)  Many of us construct multiple conceptions of what gay men are: sanitized for dealing with heterosexuals, eroticized when we're in gay environments; gender conformist for heterosexual audiences, gender nonconformist for each other.  I expect that stereotypes will rule at the discussion group, as they so often do.

I'm currently working through another book I happened on at the library: Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy, edited by Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi, published by Beacon Press in 2014.  Some of the contributors are gay, and one of these writes of his first gay friend, who approached him at a gym (page 23):

I certainly wasn't like the other guys there.  I was brown, hairy, and chubby.  I was twice the size of any of the other boys.  Was it my Arabness, my otherness, that intrigued Corey?  Was he fetishizing me, as so many did after 9/11?

September 11, 2001 was several years in the future, so unless he is a prophet I doubt it was on Ramy Eletreby's mind when he met Corey.  But I laughed aloud when I read this passage, because on the previous page he'd written:

Staring at boys at the gym was my treat.  I convinced myself that Allah had provided me with eye candy so I could satisfy my urges without crossing any lines.  The furtive glances I stole at those surfer boys -- white, hairless, perfect -- changing in the locker room was Allah granting me pleasure.  In secret, of course.  I never spoke to anyone.  I felt like a creeper.  And I was.

This is typical of people, including non-white gay men, who complain that they are or might be fetishized by others: they fetishize others quite freely, but you'd better not fetishize them, and they assume that any interest shown in them must be fetishizing, ill-intentioned, oppressive, dehumanizing and degrading.  (A similar common pattern is that you should overlook my lack of conventional hotness and be attracted by my personality, but I have the right to desire you based solely on your surfer/model good looks -- I'm not interested in your personality in the slightest.)  It might be that Eletreby has gotten over himself since then, but nothing in his essay indicates that he has.  I can't even tell whether he is aware of the irony in his complaint.  Self-pity rules his contribution.  Is that what gay men are like?

Incidentally, the editors of Salaam, Love are both female.  Previously they compiled Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women (Soft Skull Press. 2012), and in the introduction to their newer book they write that Love, Inshallah "resonated with readers around the world.  Including men.  They started to ask 'Where are our stories?'  We dismissed the inquiries with a laugh. 'Please!  Guys don't talk about this stuff.'" (vii).  I was annoyed by this stereotype, which ought to be obviously false -- men have written vast amounts of love poetry, and most of literature is about their feelings and love lives.

But then I wondered why the editors didn't make what seems to me a much more pertinent response: "You want a book?  Fine, do it yourself."  Wanting someone else to bell the cat is of course a common human impulse.  But men have as much access to publication as women do (indeed, several of the contributors to Salaam, Love are already published authors), and one of the primary anti-feminist reflexes is men expecting women to do the emotional and other service work that they ought to do themselves.  (When women comply by telling them how they need to change, another popular reflex is to complain that all women do is focus on the negatives.)  It would have been a salutary project if men had taken it on, for their own instruction and edification, but being good women, Mattu and Masnavi took on the burden.  The results are mostly predictable, with several writers falling back on millennial snark and irony to avoid dealing with their feelings.  The main exception to my mind is Ibrahim Al-Marashi's "The Other Iran-Iraq War," which addresses not only emotions but politics on a level that his fellows miss.  Check out Salaam, Love from the library, and read Al-Marashi's piece; the rest, as far as I'm concerned, can be skipped.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Alienation

This weekend I read a book of essay/memoirs, If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter, published by Sarabande Books in 2011.  I think I must originally have learned about it from one of Band of Thebes's annual lists of the best LBGT books, and time got away from me.

Van Meter was born in 1975 and grew up in Missouri, moved to Chicago after college to come out and spent several years there, and as of the date of publication was teaching in San Francisco.  He's had a moderately successful life as a writer, with numerous publications and awards.  I was curious to learn a little about what it's like to grow up gay in the Midwest a quarter-century after I did.  We hear so much about the great changes that have taken place, so how much has really changed?

Not a lot, it seems.  Van Meter, like me, was a sissy, played with girls, hated sports.  (One of the essays describes his poor father's attempts to get him interested in baseball, which resembled my own experience in that area.)  Unlike me, he managed -- most of the time -- to convince himself he wasn't gay until he was out of college, despite ongoing and intense crushes and bursts of lust for other boys.  Although he's a writer, he seems to be a lot less bookish than I am; whatever reading he's done doesn't really make an impression in his memories.  The library seems to have been more of a hiding place for him than a source of information and hope; one important use of reading for me, as for many other bookworms I've heard about, was to reassure myself that there was a world out there more interesting than the one I grew up in, and that in time I'd escape to it.

One important difference between us: Van Meter grew up in the age of AIDS.  He remembers early TV news reports on the epidemic when he was seven or eight years old, which quite reasonably terrified him.  It made it easier for him to persuade himself that he wasn't gay when he chose to let "gay" mean dying, wasted men.  Still, as terrible as that was, my own generation had its own terrors and incitements to denial.  In retrospect I suppose I'm the odd one, because when I learned the word "homosexual" at the age of about twelve, I knew I was homosexual because I was attracted to other boys, and though I hoped those attractions would go away by themselves in time (thanks to other books that assured me homosexuality was often a phase to be outgrown), as long as I had them, I never doubted that the label applied to me.

One sentence jumped out at me, on page 161: "... I didn’t know I was gay, but I knew I was different, and I didn’t want to be that either."  This broke my heart, though it also annoyed me.  I knew I was different too, because I was smarter than most kids, and that was why I didn't fit in.  I now realize this might have been a tactic of denial on my part, displacing my difference from my homosexuality to my intellectuality, but I don't think so.  The fact that I would rather read than watch the Superbowl has little -- maybe nothing -- to do with my homosexuality.  I've known heterosexual males who had the same priorities, and I've also noticed that alienation is much more common among the young than seems to be generally recognized by people who want to see homosexuality as the only difference that counts.  (If you always felt like a misfit, you must have been gay.)

Some of the credit must go to my parents, who probably weren't very happy with my being a sissy but never discouraged my intellectual differences -- and other differences too: it is probably significant that my mother, who was also left-handed, was determined that I would not be forced into right-handedness at school.  So I grew up confident that being different wasn't itself a bad thing.  Several of my teachers were helpful too.  Some, it's true, were determined to force me into conformity, but others encouraged me to be different.  (Little did they know all my differences!)  Van Meter mentions, by the way, that his father was not only a jock but a serious reader himself; he seems to be a more complex person than the son wants to recognize.

I don't condemn Ryan Van Meter for his wish not to be different, but it seems to have made his life harder and more hopeless than it need have been, and I'm not sure he's gotten over it yet.  It may help to explain something else I noticed about his writing: its lack of anger.  Also of humor, which is probably connected when I consider the component of aggression in much humor.  The combination made If You Knew Then What I Know a slog to get through.  A lack of anger in minority writing produces a glum mush, because it accepts that being different is bad, deserved, and punishable.  Anger can be difficult to manage, but for gay men as for straight women it's important to learn to manage it.  Especially for writers.

Luckily, he's had good luck in relationships: he found a boyfriend fairly soon after he came out, and they stayed together, apparently pretty happily, for eight years.  After the first one dumped him, he found another one fairly soon.  Not bad.  In the last essay in the book he asks several of his friends, "So how do we learn to be in love?"  He reports the varying answers of several of them, most of which make good sense.  One doesn't:

Kevin … thinks it pretty ironic that pretty much the only time we get to see two gay men doing anything together is in porn, and those construction crews and corrals of cowboys just aren’t very affectionate [207].

What do you mean "we," girlene?  If Kevin "pretty much" only sees gay men together in porn, that indicates he's watching too much porn and ignoring alternatives.  There have been many non-porn same-sex love stories in cinema and literature.  None of them is the answer to Van Meter's question, but it's to his credit that he admits that there may not be one answer to it.  Kevin exhibits the same willed tunnel vision that watches a Gay Pride Parade and ignores everyone but the leathermen in assless chaps.

Every Man for Himself

Alan Sinfield is pretty prolific: I need to pay more attention to what he publishes.  I hadn't heard of Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (Yale, 1999) until I stumbled on a copy in a used bookstore, and I grabbed it.  It's an interesting survey, mostly of English-language GLB theatre, though it often felt a bit rushed, even at 350 pages of text; I'd have been pleased to see him say more on many of the plays he discusses.  I wouldn't be surprised if he had to trim it down for publication.  In any case, it's worth reading if you're interested in the subject, though I imagine most people who are would already have read it.

At one point in his discussion of drama dealing with AIDS, Sinfield contrasts American work with British, noting that mainstream theater in the UK produced much less original work on the subject, because of the different trajectory of the epidemic there.  (Most of the well-known US plays were staged in London, though.)  But there's another difference he finds:

The fact is, although the characters in the [American] plays discussed here are outlaws in that they are gay, in other respects almost all of them are notably privileged -- white, male, affluent, professional, metropolitan ... These men have no tradition of political dissidence.  They had not expected to need the State, and when they do they cannot quite believe that it is not on their side.  In Love! Valour! Compassion! the men hear a gay demonstration being broken up -- 'They've always hated us.  It never ends, the fucking hatred' (107).  But it is at a safe distance, in Seattle, on the television.  When Mickey in The Normal Heart gives voice to suspicions which challenge US democratic ideology -- suggesting that the virus may have originated as a military experiment -- he is quickly declared to be having a mental breakdown and hustled out of the action (67-68).  In 1995, in an interview with Lisa Power, Kramer says that lately he has been 'accepting and facing ... that all these myths I have swallowed about humanity and American and "one voice can make a difference" -- these things that we're all taught, that democracy works and all -- turn out to be bullshit when you're gay or you have AIDS or are a member of a minority or whatever the reason'.  'That was a surprise?' Power asks [323].

Notice that Kramer gave that interview after years of experience in AIDS activism, mostly with ACT-UP, which he founded.  But then, even though he lived through the Civil Rights Movement and the movement against the US invasion of Vietnam, he'd never had much interest in politics.  According to the Wikipedia page on Kramer:

Initially, while living on Fire Island in the 1970s, Kramer had no intention of getting involved in political activism. There were politically active groups in New York City, but Kramer notes the culture on Fire Island was so different that they would often make fun of political activists: "It was not chic. It was not something you could brag about with your friends... Guys marching down Fifth Avenue was a whole other world. The whole gestalt of Fire Island was about beauty and looks and golden men."

But then AIDS invaded Paradise, and like so many other privileged gay men, Kramer found that money and chic offered no protection against the plague.  Yet even fourteen years after reality came crashing down on his head, Kramer was evidently still struggling with it, and apparently only as it affected him and people like him.  I guess this isn't surprising: of course men (mostly they are men, of course) who thought they were part of the State, or at least part of the classes that run our society, were indignant when their sense of entitlement hit a brick wall because they were queer.  Of course they have no experience with political dissidence; dissidents are the Other, the losers raging ignorantly and impotently outside the Inner Circle of the Cool People.

"Despite its political pitch," Sinfield adds, "The Normal Heart tends always to pose issues as interpersonal dilemmas" (323-4).  On one hand, that's to be expected in drama, which uses people and their interaction to make its points.  On the other hand, it's especially typical of art and entertainment in the US.  One of the reasons Korean cinema was a revelation to me was its ability to situate characters in their society, with much more realistic political awareness than I've ever seen in US product.  Even a melodramatic TV series like Sandglass (1995) was anchored in Korean history in a way that I can't imagine any TV show in the US bothering with.  And right now the top-grossing film in South Korea is The Attorney, about human rights lawyers who defended victims of torture during the dictatorship that ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1987.  (I knew I should have gone to Korea for the holidays; I could probably have seen it, since big films are shown in select theatres with English subtitles during their first run.  But it'll be out on DVD soon enough.)

I've noticed before that Americans are prone to see political conflict as "interpersonal dilemmas."  Kramer, again, fits the pattern well: in the 1980s he largely blamed New York City Mayor Ed Koch and President Reagan for the epidemic, with a personal venom that overlooked structural and systemic factors.  I now understand that this wasn't just political strategy: he genuinely thought they were personally responsible, just like in the movies.  So it's funny when the Obama devotee and journalist (and former ACT-UP activist!) Garance Franke-Ruta laments the "fanfictionalization" of US politics; it has ever been thus.  (Ma! Ma!  Where's my pa?  In the White House, ha ha ha!)   Franke-Ruta admits this, but she can't see that she's part of the problem.  US politics has always been a sports bout, with the respective fans cheering on their team and its star.  The American fantasy of individualism, with its rejection of human interdependence, fits this tendency perfectly, enshrined in entertainment, political philosophy, and the social sciences.

Hey, I Just Met You and I Know This Is Crazy, But Let Me Beat You Up

Early in my gay career I noticed that some people (gay or straight) were more comfortable around gay people who were gender-compliant -- that is, they behaved as men and women were officially supposed to behave.  Others were more comfortable around gay people who weren't gender-compliant, or "stereotypical" -- that is, they behaved the way people of the other sex were supposed to behave.  Each comfort pattern made sense in its own terms.  The former group liked men to 'act like men,' and women to 'act like women.'  I suspect that this made it easier for them not to think about what gay men did sexually with each other, but that's only a guess.  The latter group liked men who desired men to 'act like women.'  Perhaps it made it easier for them to think of sex between men as something a man would never do; if a man who coupled with other men 'acted like a woman,' they could distance the activity from something they, as manly men, would ever do.  Perhaps they were just more comfortable knowing who was gay, based on appearance and mannerism, and who wasn't.  I repeat that in both cases, I'm speculating.  The different expectations of how gay people should gender themselves, however, were clearly there.

Only a few years before I came out, homophile organizations like Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis were instructing gay men and lesbians to behave like 'normal' men and women (out of bed, at least).  Ironically, gender prescriptions for women at least were changing, broadening heterosexual women's options.  Lesbians were pressuring each other to be more femme just as straight women were becoming more butch.  I think it was DOB honchos Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who observed, in their 1972 book Lesbian / Woman, that if you see a stomping butch in jeans, hiking boots, and backpack on the Appalachian trail, she'll probably have a husband and children with her; the lesbians will be tottering along in capri pants and flimsy shoes, trying to look feminine and fit into society.  But then, as they implied, PR-conscious strategies generally imposed more restrictive norms on gay people than heterosexuals imposed on themselves.  If it's not forbidden, it's mandatory; if it's not mandatory, it's forbidden.

To a great extent, the call for gender compliance hid behind the excuse of What the Heterosexuals Will Think.  Often it reflected gender-compliant gays and lesbians' wish to impose their styles of gender and respectability on all gay men and lesbians.  (As I've argued before, PR-conscious gays don't really care that much about what upsets straights: when most heterosexuals were offended by the idea of same-sex marriage or gays in the military, these activists brushed their objections aside with derision. Only the standards they shared with bigots had to be respected.)  But then, gender-noncompliant gays and lesbians were just as willing to universalize their styles as the way to be gay.  The idea that different people express gender and sexuality differently, and that these differences should be allowed and respected, is still too radical for many of us.

This realization led me to conclude that no single gendered style was going to win us acceptance.  If we worked at passing for normal gendered citizens, that would make us acceptable as gay people to many heterosexuals -- but not to all of them.  Many other heterosexuals would prefer that we conform to the gender norms governing the "opposite" sex.  No matter which course we chose, we would win over some heterosexuals and alienate others.  That's not to say that we should ignore what heterosexuals think, only that we shouldn't let it determine how we live our lives.  Whether we try a public-relations approach of marketing ourselves to straights, insisting that we are just like them, or work at education, teaching them about diversity and how to live with it, will depend on what issues we're working on.

There are also different levels of stereotype-breaking.  One, call it first-order, is to defend and protect people who "fit the stereotype."  There's nothing wrong with a boy's being a sissy, a grown man being a drag queen, a girl being a tomboy, a grown woman being a butch truck driver.  But while being allowed to fit the stereotype can be liberating, it can also close off many options.  For Graeme Reid, hairstyling is the quintessential black gay South African occupation, and many ladies exhibit talent with hair and ask for nothing more than their own salon and roster of adoring clients.  But here's where second-order stereotype-breaking comes in.  One of Reid's informants, however, Nathi,

did not see hairstyling as his chosen career ... When he was 23 years old, he said that 'since he has schooling', he would rather be doing something else.  However, two years later he was still in the same job and appeared to have settled into the life of a hairstylist [120-1].

This doesn't mean that hairstyling is in Nathi's genes, however.  It probably has something to do with the widespread poverty that still pervades South African life, especially for blacks.  Most wealth in South Africa is still concentrated in white hands.  As Reid shows, hairstylists work long hours and don't make all that much money, so attending night school, let alone college, requires more determination than most people have.  But it also suggests that while gays may be accepted, even celebrated, as long as they behave as gays are stereotypically expected to behave, they are under considerable pressure, both from straight society and from gay society, not to stray outside the bounds that have been set for them.  Another of Reid's informants, working as an informal apprentice in a hair salon, said that "he would rather do catering or fashion design" (118), both of which are comfortably gendered for feminine gay men.  But what if he wanted to play soccer, or become a doctor or lawyer or astronomer?  Those occupations would be largely closed off to him for class reasons, but I wonder how much encouragement he'd get from his gay friends.  (You can't play football!  You'd muss your hair.  You might break a nail!)  Letting people occupy a gender- (or race- or class- ) defined box is all very well, but those boxes need to be expanded to give them more options.

Reid writes:

Local gender norms are fundamental to the ways in which same-sex sexual identities are expressed and performed in public. Gender norms also provide the framework for acceptable and transgressive forms of gay identity. Yet the deployment of an overtly feminine identity by gay men cannot only be understood in terms of imitating a heterosexual norm or unwittingly perpetuated gender stereotypes. In other words, a feminine gender identity is not simply imposed or adopted in the face of patriarchal pressure, the unrelenting logic of which would render gays effeminate and thus unthreatening to heterosexual masculinity [122].

What I wrote earlier indicates why I think this won't do.  Reid does recognize that there are both "acceptable and transgressive forms of gay identity."  In the South African townships, an "acceptable" form means that a man embraces a feminine style in varying degrees, which determines (while also enabling) his role in sexual expression no less than his social role.  A "transgressive" form in the same locale severs gender from sexual role, so that a man can be normatively masculine but still enjoy being penetrated, or take sexual pleasure in other ways.  But as I indicated, for a man to be a lady is both "acceptable" and "transgressive," in that he abandons normative expectations for males while adopting normative female styles; for a man to embrace what Reid considers an urban, male, activist, Western gay identity is also both "acceptable" and "transgressive," since such a man is normatively masculine except in his sexual activity.  Both styles appease some people while outraging others.  It's not possible to please everyone, so it becomes necessary to think about what one wants personally and how to get it in the face of opposition, which one will encounter no matter what one does.

It seems to me, by the way, that Reid is generalizing the gender norms of poor black people in the South African townships to all of South African society.  I imagine there are gay black men in South Africa who express gender differently; it won't do to accuse them, as Reid does, of conforming to "Western" concepts.  He assumes a much greater degree of uniformity than you'll find in any society -- including the townships, as his own examples show.

As for Reid's assertion that "the deployment of an overtly feminine identity by gay men cannot only be understood in terms of perpetuating a heterosexual norm" and so on (emphasis mine), those terms can't be completely dismissed either.  No one grows up in a vacuum.  A child learns her first language not by freely inventing one, but by observing and imitating the language used by the people around her; she also learns, at roughly the same age as she learns language, that gender matters, and can't simply go her own way in that arena either.  To reject one restrictive gender norm generally results in adopting another restrictive gender norm -- if I'm not going to be a Daddy, then I'll be a Mommy -- and yet no one conforms totally to those norms.  And in any case, there is considerable pressure to conform; if we all resist that pressure to some degree, we also surrender to it in some degree.  The penalties for nonconformity range from reproving, nagging, shunning, and harassment to exclusion, violence, and even death.

As Reid recognizes, adopting an overtly feminine style frees some gay men from the restrictions of masculinity, but it also exposes them to the restrictions and vulnerability of femininity.  Ladies, like heterosexual women, are menaced and victimized by theft, robbery, harassment, rape, and other violence.  Reid tells how, soon after his arrival in Ermano, he had to contend with the attentions of gents who said things like

I love you.  I love you so much.  Let us go and talk where no one can see us.  I know I am a black man and you are white, but just give me a chance to show you how much I love you.  I want you to be my girlfriend [52].

Such come-ons could shift from "flirtatious" to "openly aggressive" in a heartbeat.  Nor was this behavior comfortable for the black ladies: "Tsepo, who was with me in the car at the time, said, 'I hate it when people say "I love you" when they don't even know you" (53).  Some of this is directly tied to their being gay; some of it follows from being feminine, and even adopting the most respectable feminine image, that of the church lady and matron, doesn't immunize women or gay men against these dangers.

It appears that gents don't necessarily require their male paramours to be ladies who embody "a feminine gender identity."  The guys above could pursue Reid although he (whatever his personal style) was not a lady.  His lady informants, when he moved to Ermano, had trouble reading him: was he a gent or a lady?  Despite his failure to meet full feminine standards, they quickly classified and adopted him as one of them.

Reid continues to reify "performance" and confuse it with performativity, though he does finally recognize that "After all, women, like ladies, also engage in the daily performances that constitute femininity" (137).  As with all role theory, there are serious problems with seeing daily behavior as a role or performance, but confusing it with performativity just distorts Reid's intellectual framework.

I concede that this confusion has become normative in gender studies, but I'm not a big fan of normativity.  (Normativity is a pervasive social fact, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized.)  When I pointed out this problem to one gay academic, he dismissed it by acknowledging that although it began as a misunderstanding of performative speech, the scholars involved were entitled to redefine the term to mean whatever they wanted it to mean.  Well, no they aren't: not if they continue to cite J. L. Austin as authority for the concept, and besides, in serious discourse, you are not entitled to play Humpty Dumpty -- especially if you're unaware you're doing it.  I found this example in an academic book on "making schools and communities welcoming to LGBT youth" by three concerned teachers.

Language is a tool. As such, we believe that speech is performative – it does things. Words invite or exclude, recognize or erases, empower or intimidate. Far from what the children’s chant would have us believe, words are sticks and stones.*

As authority for these assertions, they cite J. L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words, which introduced and popularized the concept of performative speech acts.  But Austin didn't, as far as I can tell, say that all speech is performative, as the authors above claim.  He argued that certain types of speech are performative, as distinct from other ways in which language can be used.  Saying flatly that "we believe that speech is performative" and citing Austin is like saying that "everything is relative" and citing Einstein's paper on Special Relativity.

*Vaccaro, Annemarie; August, Gerri; Kennedy, Megan S.. Safe Spaces: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming to LGBT Youth (Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 2012), p. 95.

The Ancient, Glittering Eye of the Beholder

Sherman Alexie, the great American Indian poet and novelist, has an entertaining meditation on gay men in athletics at The Stranger, inspired of course by Jason Collins's coming-out.  One of the many things I like about Alexie is the ongoing presence of male-to-male desire and sexual expression in his work, alongside heterosexuality.  (His venture into filmmaking, The Business of Fancydancing, features a gay American Indian poet as protagonist.)  But something is a bit off in this piece.

Alexie begins:

As a straight-boy jock, I have been showering with large groups of naked men for decades. And these showers have not taken place in bathrooms where we straight men yell at one another from modest private stalls. No, we athletes clean ourselves in large, communal Roman gladiator bathhouses. My high-school locker room's showerheads were placed so that we boys soaped up while facing one another. And we did this soaping while standing two feet apart.

In other words, I, Sherman, a heterosexual lifelong basketball player, have seen a lot more cock and man-ass than many gay men.

This may well be true, though I'm not sure it has much to do with being a jock.  Gay non-jocks have taken PE classes all along, and as a group we've probably seen as much naked male flesh in communal showers as straight men have.  That may be changing as communal showers have given way to "modest private stalls," but that will also cut down the numbers for straight men, including athletes.  Have I mentioned before the time, around 1990, I was told by some college-age youths, former high-school swimmers, that they'd never seen each other naked -- they always showered in their swimsuits?  They were shocked, shocked! to learn that I and the other gay man on the panel grew up with communal showers for Phys. Ed. and the requirement that everybody shower naked.  American males seem to have become even shyer in the decades since then.

Alexie goes on to describe his sagging charms (he's in his late forties now), comparing them to the even more decrepit charms he still sees in the locker rooms: "mountainous guts that make my chubby belly look like a foothill. I see butt cheeks that look like two Sasquatches playing tennis. I recoil from feet so gnarled, hirsute, and abused that a hobbit would suggest a pedicure."

Then he raises the perennial question:

So why do certain homely straight men worry that gay men are even remotely interested in sexually harassing their concave asses? If strange women don't amass in large numbers to jump your bones, then why would packs of gay men hunger for you?

A commenter on the article took it further, remarking "the irony of the most ass-ugly, fat-greasy, Jabba the Hut looking guys thinking that Gay men are just lining up around the block to touch their booty."  Darling, hush your mouth!  Those ass-ugly, fat-greasy, Jabba the Hut looking guys are known in the gay community as Bears.  They have their own fan club, and they oppose resolutely the idea that only models and twinks are erotically desirable.

Anyway: first, this is irrelevant to the main theme of the article, namely Jason Collins and the NBA.  "If he does play in the NBA next year," Alexie opines, "I'm sure certain teammates might feel threatened by his presence in the locker room."  But those "certain teammates" are highly unlikely to be "homely," to have "concave asses" or "butt cheeks that look like two Sasquatches playing tennis."  On this logic it would be a reasonable inference that they have reason to feel threatened by a gay man in the locker room.  I don't think they do, but Alexie seems to think otherwise.

Second, the dismissal of other people's concerns about sexual assault on the grounds that they are too ugly to have anything to worry about has been challenged by feminism.  Many female rape victims have been told by police and prosecutors that they couldn't possibly have been raped because they're too old or fat or ugly or deformed for any man to bother with -- hell, they should thank the guy or gang who took pity on them and gave them some dick.

This is not to say that being eyed in the shower is equivalent to being raped, though traditional patriarchal notions of honor hold otherwise -- hence the veil, hence the chador, hence generations of Catholic schoolgirls (and -boys) being required to wear a covering in the bath so they won't be aroused by their own flesh.  It's only to say that dismissing another person as too repulsive to be desired by anybody says more about you than it does about the other person, and it doesn't speak well for you.

It seems to me that a better answer to the fear of the Homo in the shower is to point out that you can't know which men in any given group are gay or, more to the point, bisexual.  The openly gay jock may well find your chubby butt unappealing; the closeted married guy around whom you feel safe may be contemplating it with lust, and considering how you might best be seduced.  Or not.  That's the trouble, I suspect: the invisibility of other people's thoughts and desires.  I can tell you from my own experience that just because a man doesn't have an erection at the moment, it doesn't mean he couldn't muster one in the right circumstances, or that he wouldn't like to.

The fear of the Homo in the shower is the fear of men who don't want to know, don't want to be told, and don't want to think about it.  I'm reminded of the presumably straight online movie reviewer who lamented that, because of Brokeback Mountain, he could no longer watch the friendship of two young male animals in an animated film and consider their antics "completely innocent." Homosexuality, like so many things, is invisible until you know about it -- and then it's everywhere.

Like most people, I probably overgeneralize from my own experience.  I got over feeling exposed by nakedness in the locker room almost as soon as I first had to do it, in seventh grade.  I certainly noticed that some other boys were beautiful in my eyes, but I never felt compelled to jump any of them.  Only once, in more than twenty years, did my body betray me with an unwanted erection in front of others -- but I'd also noticed that straight guys got wood in the showers too, and joked about it, so I didn't worry about it; it didn't have to mean anything.  Later, when when I was running regularly in my late twenties, and had a locker at the university gym, it occurred to me that if every male who looked at other males in the showers was gay, there were no straight men.  Comparing oneself to others is probably unavoidable, and in areas where such comparison leads to feelings of inadequacy and shame, the comparison will often be done furtively rather than frankly.

No matter what you look like, there can be no guarantee that no one will ever admire your body in the locker room.  So you have to get over it.  This doesn't mean that gay men are entitled to treat their/our objects of desire rudely, but if we are just like straight guys, then some of us probably will.  As Alexie continues, on the subject of being hit on by other men: 

My first thought is "Men are boundaryless animals." My second thought is "Women have to deal with this shit all the time." My third thought is "How flattering." My fourth thought is "I wish this dude hitting on me was cuter."

Not bad, I guess, but "boundaryless animals"?  Why shouldn't people of either sex indicate their interest in those they're attracted to?  What boundaries does Alexie think we should have?  I think our boundaries should be consideration for others and trying to leave them lots of room to say No, or to say Yes.  I know this isn't all that easy in practice, but I'm not holding my breath until sex education includes sessions on the negotiation of erotic encounters.  Something like that would surely help, but some people of all sexes and all sexual orientations do have the rapist's mentality, a refusal to take No for an answer, so there are always going to be abuses.  What we need to focus on, I believe, is to find ways to minimize the abuses and treat each other well.  I must say I'm always amazed by those people (they usually seem to be men) who think that overt hostility and denigration is the way to get into someone's pants.  Maybe it works for them?  This is what makes it hard to generalize about unwanted sexual advances: they aren't always compliments, it isn't an honor to be desired by someone who thinks of copulation as a way of abasing and degrading his partner.  (Which is, let me stress, an unfortunately ancient and respectable view of copulation in Western culture at least.  But that's another post.)  But often such advances are compliments and should be received as such; and it's always permissible to turn them down.

The fear of the Homo in the shower, then, is more complicated than Alexie and many others believe.  One of the solutions is to teach people how to treat each other better where sex is concerned, but that's not acceptable to enough people to make it feasible.  A pity.

Ou Sont Les Bonnes d'Antan?

I just finished reading My Husband and My Wives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by Charles Rowan Beye.  Beye is a classicist who's taught at various distinguished universities, but this book is a memoir of his life as a gay man from Iowa, born in 1930.  That was what led me to check it out from the library when I happened on it.  Beye is technically old enough to be my father, and we're both from the Midwest, so I was curious to see what his experiences were like.

Beye came from a middle-class family in Iowa City.  His father, who died when he was quite young, was a surgeon in the University hospital there.  Beye started having sex with other boys when he was about twelve. He found plenty of eager male partners at school and elsewhere, and his availability was an open secret.  When scandal erupted, he was incredibly lucky that the therapist his mother sent him to wasn't interested in trying to "cure" him; instead he listened to him and helped him sort himself out.  After a brief flurry of hysteria, his schoolmates (many of whom had been sex partners) calmed down and he got through high school with minimal fuss.  From there he went to college, discovered an interest in (primarily Greek) classics, and embarked on an academic career.

I find myself comparing Beye to Merle Miller, also gay, also from Iowa, born a decade before Beye.  Miller's family was lower-middle-class.  Miller escaped to journalism (he was a war correspondent during World War II) and the writing of fiction.  In 1970, infuriated by a bigoted article on gays published in Harper's Magazine, he wrote a long essay for the New York Times Magazine, published in book form as On Being Different. The Times softened his anger during editing, but it was still a breakthrough for the time and for the Times: a homosexual writing as a homosexual under his own name, expressing his anger at a heterosexual writer's bigotry. 

I share Beye's discomfort with the gay scene, though not as strongly, and I have a different explanation for it.  Try a thought experiment: Suppose that gay men all acted exactly like straight men, so that when you entered a gay bar you wouldn't know from the customers' mannerisms and speech patterns that they were homosexual.  I don't know about Beye, but I would still not be very comfortable among gay men, just as I'm not comfortable among most straight men.  Or among most people of any type or class or background.  I depend on the fact that all straight men are not exactly alike, any more than all gay men are alike. The behavior of people in groups is very different from the behavior of people as individuals, however, and what surprises me is when I encounter a large (more than half a dozen people at a time, say) social group where I don't feel uncomfortable.

The most interesting part of Beye's story for me is his two heterosexual marriages, which produced four children.  Merle Miller married once, but only as a desperate attempt to be normal, and he had no children.  I have no idea whose experience was more common, but Beye's is a good example of the kind of erotic "fluidity" so often touted nowadays.  He seems to have had no difficulty functioning sexually with female partners, but he never lost interest in "male companionship" either.  Eventually he settled down with a male partner, whom he married after Massachusetts ratified civil same-sex marriage.  This comes out of nowhere, because though he mentions several times that he wishes for more from sex than quickies, and recounts several "affairs," usually with men who didn't think of themselves of gay, he frequently discounts the possibility of long-term committed relationships between men.  He never resolves this contradiction, simply states it.

Beye's viewpoint reminds me how easy it is to mistake one's own experience of gay life for its totality.  That's why I've always been interested in reading other gay people's life stories, to learn about other perspectives.  So when Beye claims that gay men are really only interested in one-night stands and not relationships -- "the truth of male-male relationships," he calls this (79), the result of (his interpretation of) male biology -- I wonder if he really hasn't met gay men who wanted to be in couples, or if he just didn't see them.  Certainly just about every gay man I met in Bloomington wanted to find a lover.  But you could look at older gay literature, from Walt Whitman to Ralph Meeker's Better Angel to Christopher Isherwood's fiction, memoirs, and diaries, and see that many gay men routinely coupled.  Isherwood was a quarter century older than Beye, and he seems to have been in relationships most of his life.  So Beye's view isn't a product of his pre-Stonewall generation; maybe, though I find this hard to believe, he just never encountered more than the one or two male couples he mentions.

Still, My Husband and My Wives is a good read.  I'm always glad to hear people's stories (I just began reading the oral autobiography of an African "bar girl," Hustling Is Not Stealing [Chicago, 2003], compiled by the anthropologist John M. Chernoff, and it looks good), and Charles Beye told his story engagingly.

Stopping Bravely At The Surface

Lamenting gay men's shallow obsession with looks is always good for livening up a slow session in a chat room or for taking a break while guy-watching at the bar. Of course, the complaint is almost always about other gay men's shallowness. I can't recall ever having heard someone moan, "I'm so shallow -- all I care about is looks. Personality doesn't matter to me at all." Very often the underlying complaint turns out to be that some hot guy has judged the complainer by his looks, not by his personality. That the complainer might pursue someone else's inner beauty doesn't seem to be an option.

Case in point: some time ago, five HIV-positive men wrote on gay.com about the adjustments they were having to make because of the effects of the virus and their medications on their formerly hot, buff, toned bodies. All of them wrote in terms of maintaining their own self-esteem, and argued that other men should appreciate them for their personalities, not for their deteriorating flesh. None of them spoke of rethinking their own attitudes to other men's looks; all of them took for granted that the gym-toned body of a porn star or an advertising model was the only desirable body possible -- but now, with their bodies failing them, they demanded that other men lose this obsession with "the perfect body", and look at their inner beauty. I can't say I sympathize with them much. Men like these think of being gay as a competitive sport, a view they're welcome to. But in every athlete's life a time comes when he can't cut it any more, for whatever reason. I am more interested in other ways of being gay. I want to suggest another possibility, one which I think all of us know on some level, but I don't often (if ever) see put into words.

We already desire men who don't resemble the porn video ideal, and we should indulge and celebrate that liking. Look around you: lots of guys who will never appear in a Tom Bianchi coffee-table book have boyfriends, often of long standing. I was never a hot hunky stud even when I was young; yet I've been able to find boyfriends, lovers, and a fair number of non-committed sexual partners. These boyfriends, lovers, and sexual partners weren't coffee-table book material either, but I didn't feel I was making do with second-best. There are many kinds of beauty and sexiness in the world. There are different kinds of "perfect" looks, if we understand that word to mean "perfect" for pushing my erotic buttons, or yours.

The trouble isn't gay men's fixation on looks in general, but their schoolyard determination to police each other's tastes, to narrow the range of acceptable desire to a junior high school level. In the early 1970s, when I was freshly out and socializing in groups of gay men, we would often compare notes on passersby in the Commons of the student union building. This was partly a way of bonding against the straight world, and of validating our desire for other men; partly, as with straight men, an erotic sharing of the people we rated. But it was also a way of ruling some men out of bounds as objects of desire. Some men you must want; others you must not want.

I soon learned that many of the men I wanted were out of bounds. I tended to like younger, boyish-looking men; but since we and the passing scenery were almost all college undergraduates, this didn't involve much of an age gap. (Need I mention that visibly older men were also out of bounds? Or non-white men?) Mostly, though, I think the men I singled out were just the wrong men. They didn't look remotely like porn stars, actors, or clones, and lacked the calculated, ironic masculinity that gay objects of desire were supposed to have. They didn't have gym-toned bodies; they were too thin or too chunky -- in short, they were just Average Guys, the kind of men who wouldn't stand out in the crowd. But they stood out for me. My media crushes in those days were Bud Cort in Harold and Maude and more esoterically, Hakan Hagegard, the Papageno in Ingmar Bergman's film version of The Magic Flute. Having already decided by coming out that I could resist pressure from the heterosexual majority, I brushed aside the same kind of pressure from my gay peers. It was years before I fully recognized it as pressure.

I think I was about thirty when an old friend told me that when some mutual acquaintances commented negatively on my taste in men, he told them cheerfully: "Someone has to love people like that; let's be glad it's Duncan, and not us!" Notice that even in my absence I could be the object of gossip and censure for failing to fit in. How much could it matter to them if I was attracted to men they didn't want, or if I didn't want men they wanted? A fair amount, evidently.

I don't know exactly who my critics were, but knowing my local community, I doubt that any of them came up to the community standards they were trying to enforce. (Someone has to love people like that -- I'm glad it's their boyfriends, and not me!) I wonder now how much of my outsider status among local gay men comes not just from my outdated, liberationist politics, or from my personal combativeness, or from having been prematurely openly gay (though all of these are surely factors) -- and how much comes from my liking the wrong men. I suspect too that I could get away with dating the Wrong men, if only I would pay lip service to the superiority of the Right ones. (This resembles the way that political right wingers consider it okay to dodge military service, as long as you vocally support whichever war you'd presently rather not fight in.)

The remedy is not to substitute another single look. The Bear movement valorizes a look the exact opposite of the Bianchi Boys', but too often bears can't affirm their own type without putting down others. I've heard a lot of sneering among bears at "twinks" and other undesirables. Not all bears do this, of course: when one guy in a bears' newsgroup went into hysterics over a rumor that some famous leather daddy had shaved off his famous moustache, several others tried to cajole him into a more sensible attitude. But "woof" and "eeuuww" among bears serve the same boundary-drawing function they do among other gays, or among straights: to police each other's desires. I'm in with the In Crowd, both because I would do Mr. X in a New York minute, and because I wouldn't touch Mr. Y with a ten-foot pole.

This policing assumes that sexual desire is a natural -- indeed, genetically programmed! -- response to very specific and fairly rare physical traits, a gift of the genes or the fruit of long intense labor in the gym. Talk of gay men's obsession with "looks" usually means only one look: the kind of men whose photographs appear in photography books aimed at a gay male market, with just enough variation permitted to include some chest hair or a tasteful sprinkling of salt and pepper in the severely trimmed beard. That, and only that, is beauty; it can be objectively determined and scientifically measured. No one else has any looks to be attracted to. Either you've got it, and may commune with the other members of the inner circle; or you are condemned to the outer darkness, jerking off to photos of the elite, wishing that others could see your inner Ryan Philippe, buried beneath the flab and acne.

I suppose there must be some gay men who genuinely can't get it up for anyone but a Tom Bianchi model, but I don't believe they are a majority. (Personally, I'm not sure I could get it up for a Bianchi muscle queen; they look grotesque to me. But to each his own.) After 35 years in and around gay men's communities, I know that most gay men can and do take genuine delight in men who don't fit the porn star ideal. Some may feel that they are settling for second-best, just as many gay men feel that being gay is second-best to being straight; but not all do.

The models and celebrities who are promoted as ideals for all the world actually represent the lowest common denominator of beauty: the faces and bodies which large numbers of people can agree are desirable. Because they are comparatively rare, access to their images can be controlled and parcelled out, as posters or magazine photos, or the vast peep show of movies and television. But the media couldn't do this if people didn't already have a tendency they could exploit.

Now, please bear in mind: I'm not saying that these lowest common denominators are unattractive. What I'm saying is that they aren't the only people who are attractive. Go ahead and fantasize about Ben Affleck or Matt Damon or whoever is the current Hollywood flavor of the month. And if Ben or Matt comes knocking at your door to tell you he must have you or he'll die, accept him with my blessings. (I'm burning a light in my window for Eric Tsang myself.) But if you're so busy fantasizing about starlets and models that you can't see the guy across the street who will never get closer to Hollywood than a studio tour on his vacation, but who for some reason stirs your deeper feelings anyway -- well, it's your loss.

People who like competition can dream of winning the love of one of these lowest common denominators, and being envied by millions; which means that only one person in millions can get what he or she wants. The rarity of these ideal objects of desire is assumed to be part of their appeal: being desired by millions supposedly makes them special. Oddly, being one of the millions who desire them doesn't stigmatize you as one of the ignorant, debased masses. Since polls show that about 75 to 80 percent of Americans consider themselves above average, I suppose each of the drooling millions sees himself (or herself) as standing out among the crowd, the One who will win the lottery for the heart of the Homecoming King.

Let me try to make this as clear as possible: I am not telling gay men (or anyone else) to have sex with people they're not attracted to. I am not arguing that gay men should change their sexual tastes, trying through sheer will-power to crave non-buff non-hunks; if anything, it's most critics of gay male looksism who talk as if they believed that. (Close your eyes, think of England and fuck his personality. It's an odd notion to encounter in individuals who believe that we are born with our sexual desires genetically programmed into us, and that they are absolutely impossible to change.) I'm not even saying that my taste in men is superior to that of most gay men. What I am saying is that our tastes are already broader than we admit.

Why don't we admit it, then? Damned if I know. As I said at the beginning, (other) gay men's shallowness and obsession with superficial beauty is virtually a cliché, and has been for a long time. It's widely, almost universally believed. Everybody knows that gay men are, like, totally obsessed with looks. But what everybody knows is often false, and this case is no exception. (A related case where what "everybody knows" is false is the belief that nobody desires gay men over a certain age -- 30? 25? -- the "nobody loves you when you're old and gay" line.) Again, the complainers are usually the ones who are obsessed, though they project it onto others: for example, the aging men who aren't interested in other aging men, but who complain that younger men won't look at them. It's always the other guy who is supposed to compromise his sexual integrity.

Aren't people's personalities important, then? Of course. But, having neither X-ray vision nor telepathy, I can't look inside a person and see his personality. The thing is, bodies matter too. If personality were everything, we could just find ourselves nice women for lovers and save ourselves a lot of grief. If gay men (and not only gay men) will simply acknowledge the desires we already have in their full range -- not just the narrow range peddled by our peers -- we'll find a lot of beauty and sexiness around us.

It's a common gripe in the chat rooms that guys who claim to be "VGL" (Very Good Looking) very often are not. I think, though, that someone who labels himself Very Good Looking is telling me something about his personality. I'm just as skeptical of guys who bill themselves as "nice," "friendly," or "great personality." Unlike physical traits, personality can be evaluated over the Net. Not perfectly -- cyberspace discriminates against people who can't express themselves fluently through a keyboard -- but over time you get a sense of who you're talking to. If you are a nice guy, others will figure that out for themselves.

It's true off the net, too. Even in a one-night stand, interpersonal chemistry and compatibility help make the difference between good and bad sex. If you go on seeing the same guy awhile, you will increasingly deal with his personality whether you want to or not. Does he show up when he says he will? Does he notice whether what he's doing in bed feels good to you? These things matter even in the most fleeting sexual encounter, and they are expressions of his personality -- as how you treat him is an expression of yours. You can't photograph a personality. It exists in time, and only through time do you get to know someone else, no matter what he looks like.

What I'm saying here will probably mean little to those American gay men (both of them?) who are fully satisfied with their sexual and emotional lives. That's fine. I'm addressing those who are dissatisfied, but not to tell them what they can do to change other gay men -- those other gay men are you yourselves. (As for me, I already like the Wrong Men, remember?) Here are some ideas for changing ourselves. They're not final or set in stone. Other people will have other suggestions. We need to hear them too.

First, don't say derogatory things about other people's appearance, or about the kind of people they find attractive. You're not obligated to have sex with people you find unappealing, but you're not entitled to insult them either. Try not to be one of those people who take the existence of people they consider unattractive as a personal affront. The fat woman next door, the old man (he must be, like, at least twenty-five!) who smiles at you at the bar, the gross guy at the gym with hair on his back -- they aren't living just to ruin your day.

Second, turn off your TV for a while, and pass up the next two or three (or more) Hollywood films. Buy some non-glossy magazines, magazines without undraped models pimping for clothes, underwear, toiletries -- and read the articles. Box up the porn collection and put it out of convenient reach for a month. Looking at commercial media images tends to make me dissatisfied with the real people around me. I find myself wanting one of those guys in the catalog, who may be for rent but they aren't for sale. I suppose there's no reason why commercial media shouldn't capitalize on the human tendency to flock like sheep and go bleating after someone else's goal, but we don't have to give them our money -- especially for a "commodity" that's in abundant supply all around us.

Third, look at the real people around you. If your local bar is too dark and smoky for you to see them, find a better-lit alternative. If you are lucky enough to have alternatives in your city, use them. I've had a lot of good experience in gay discussion groups, as a way of making friends and even for finding boyfriends. Talking in a group takes the pressure off each individual, giving you time to see someone's face, to see what happens to it when he talks, and to hear what he has to say.

If you live in a city large enough that its gym queens can fill a club, so you can pretend that no other gay men exist, then you also live in a city with alternatives to that scene. If you spend all your gay social time in such clubs, don't blame the "media" or even "the gay community" for pressuring you into it.

If you don't live in a city that large, then you will see gay men who aren't gym queens whenever you go out. Stop pretending that they're second-class trash who shouldn't be let in (that's you, dummy), and start looking at them. Ask yourself if you have a personality, though, before you deign to approach; you might not be, indeed probably are not, good enough for them.

Finally, if you're bored all the time -- and "bored" turns up with disturbing regularity in chat profiles, sometimes as a mere code word for "horny" but often as simple truth -- then you're boring. No matter where you live, there are things to do, people to meet, interests to cultivate. If there really aren't, then find something that interests you and do it yourself. I'm a big believer in DIY (Do It Yourself), so I urge people to start gay book groups, gay baseball teams, discussion groups, choruses, antique shopping outings -- whatever -- where they don't exist already. (Contrary to one gay man's indignant reaction when I mentioned these ideas to him, this is not "Balkanization." Putting everyone together into one big Nuremberg rally is, however, fascist. People need to learn to live in and enjoy a world of difference, not try to eliminate it.)

A crucial requirement is that whenever it's possible, these activities and events should be public, announced in local community calendars or their equivalent, not just restricted to your clique and their boyfriends. Otherwise you're shutting out the people you need to include. It doesn't matter if everyone in the group is cute, or "straight-acting," let alone "hot." There will be pressure to be more selective, lest people think that the group is nothing but queens; this pressure must be resisted, and jeered at. It's okay to have purely social friendship circles, even cliques, but we also need public group-based activities that are open to anyone who's interested in them. Newbies should be welcomed by at least one established member of the group, whether they're cute or not.

So, join me at the (rather ample) margins of gay male life: those of us who like non-buff non-hunks, and don't feel we're making do with second best. Let those who just have to date gym queens segregate themselves in the circuit parties and the exclusive clubs; it'll keep them out of our hair. Though I suspect, to be honest, that some of the gym queens will eventually notice that life is richer, more interesting, more humane at the margins. Some of them already harbor guilty longings for the nerd next door. There's plenty of room, even for the lowest common denominator of looks. Join the conversation, guys, and explore the rest of your selves.