Your Future Ex-Husband

The gay community isn’t known for its yentas. Sure, we have a certain fondness for Dolly Levi—but that’s mostly about the music. (“Take my wrap, fellas; find me an empty lap, fellas…”) What I have noticed, however, is a smugness among some partnered guys who, after years of casual dating or careless cruising, suddenly get all high-and-mighty about their coupledom. These are the ones who have a tendency to either look down upon their still single friends or try to “fix” them—i.e., welcome them into the fold of the happily married.

That noblesse oblige was clearly what was motivating Tom when he invited me out for drinks with him and his partner, Cole. They had been together for a year or so—albeit not entirely in the flesh. Their relationship had started virtually, in an ethery chat room, the kind of place where romance can flourish undeterred by the realities of high-pitched voices, bloated bellies, and errant nose hairs. In cyberspace, anyone can look good. In cyberspace, anyone can be good: it isn’t just their appearance that they lie about, but potentially every personal characteristic. People are kinder in chat rooms (if they’re not “flaming” someone, that is, but that’s a special circumstance), more flexible, hotter, more romantic. But I digress….

After a few weeks of virtual dating, Tom came to San Francisco for a visit, and that was it. He claimed it was love at first sight. Tom moves quickly.

Literally. The U-Haul was parked outside Cole’s door within a month. Tom was eager to leave the East Coast, anyway; Cole was the perfect motivation.

I met them through mutual friends, once they were comfortably ensconced in their antique-laden, granite-countertopped home in one of the trendier neighborhoods in town. And within weeks, I became Tom’s special project.

The three of us were having drinks in a cozy bar on the outskirts of the Castro when Tom started grilling me about the type of man I liked. In those days, I didn’t have a type per se. I suppose I didn’t think I could afford a type; it limited the pool too much.

So, based on scant information from me—I claimed to want someone “nice,” “smart,” about my build—Tom pondered for a moment and turned to Cole.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

Clearly, Cole was not. He stared cluelessly at Tom over the salted rim of his margarita.

“George,” Tom said dramatically, impatient with the obvious—as if he had actually asked for the name of the president of the United States.

Cole’s blank stare continued, aided now by a slightly scrunched chin that he quickly hid behind the glass for another long sip.

And before I could ask a word about the famous George, Tom was dialing his cell phone. Cole kept drinking. We looked at each other like two guards in a lunatic asylum, wondering how we were going to get the patient to bed before he hurt himself.

“George?” Tom said into the phone, his lips curled into a grin that would make the Cheshire Cat envious. “Guess who I’m sitting here with.”

He shook his head for a few seconds, as George apparently ran through the list of the usual suspects—mutual friends, movie stars, Stephen Hawking.

“Your future husband,” he said finally, eyes glittering.

The yenta had spoken. I didn’t even have to pick up the phone before our first date was planned. George and I would meet for coffee the following evening, and Tom would start picking out bridesmaids’ dresses.

There’s a reason they call them blind dates. But sometimes, deaf and dumb would be more appropriate adjectives. I could see Tom’s attraction to George as a friend—the overgrown mustache that matched his own, albeit a tad blonder; the party grin that never seemed to go away; and the fondness for small talk—a strange obsession with celebrity gossip, and brand names.

Despite his loquaciousness, I can barely remember a word. That in itself tells you how much we had in common. Suffice it to say, there was no second date. And there would be no U-Haul in our future.

Tom never tried to fix me up again. Within a few months, he had a more important task on his hands, when his relationship with Cole started to deteriorate. While Tom was busy playing matchmaker for me, Cole was busy falling in love with someone else: George.

Yenta, heal thyself!

Love Hangover

According to a study I recently read about, women who are on the Pill have different taste in men from women who aren’t.  Apparently, when they’re ovulating women get hot for the macho, highly sexual type.  Since the Pill evens out their hormones over time, women taking it don’t go into heat, so to speak, and therefore are less likely to obsess over Hugh Jackman and more likely to settle for the softer features of a Donny Osmond, say.  Not coincidentally, the study found that such men are more likely to stick around to make attentive husbands and fathers—unlike their macho counterparts, who will be onto the next conquest before the sheets have been cleaned.

I have to admit, I’m of two minds on this one.  If the whole point of the Pill was to liberate women’s sexuality from the threat of pregnancy, I’m not sure it’s been such a success.  This study makes the Pill sound a bit like Lithium:  Yes, you’re more functional in the midrange of emotion it creates, but where’s the aliveness of the extremes?  Is boring sex an appropriate compromise?  Not to mention the evolutionary implications.  If women all settle down with milquetoasts before getting reproductive, aren’t we setting up the extinction of macho men from the species?  Do we really want future generations devoid of George Clooney and bears?  O brave new world, that hath no chest hair in it.

On the other hand, given my own dating history, I can certainly appreciate the attraction of a drug that would steer one toward more sensitive lovers.  Macho men might be great in bed, but they can be a little slippery when it comes to intimacy and commitment.  If only the sensitive ones weren’t so often … well, dull.

Truth be told, I’ve never been able to settle with a conventional nice guy.  Several years ago, I dated someone whom most would label Mr. Right:  he was kind and generous, and he thought I was the bee’s knees.  Everything was fine until he came in for a kiss.  Then, seeing the intensity on his face—the almost pained look of passion that creased his cheeks above those yearningly puckered lips—I found myself having to stifle a laugh.  There was nothing funny in the look:  Glenn was a handsome man, and his expression in those moments was nothing if not serious.  But still it went straight to my funny bone.  And once I’d noticed it, even closing my eyes wasn’t enough to solve the problem. 

My reaction, I see now, was simply the result of nervousness:  I was uncomfortable being so important to him, being desired that much.  I had recently come off the worst relationship of my life, a year and a half (god help me) with a superficial narcissist whose emotional range went all the way from A to A.  Being with Glenn, someone who actually loved me, was like being plopped into a foreign country, where I didn’t speak the language and had no idea what the currency looked like.  I had a hard enough time believing that nice guys like Glenn existed, let alone that little old me could inspire such deep feelings in one of them.

Bad boys are sexy—no news there.  Maybe one of the things that make them sexy is that macho indifference they affect.  They act like they don’t need anyone, and that makes you need them all the more.  And when they do let you get close, and you see what’s really going on under the surface—that they’re little boys inside, just like the rest of us—they ironically become even more attractive.  Now they’re not just playmates, but projects:  you start to think that, with proper guidance and tender loving care, you can fix them, mold them into the ideal combination:  sexy and sweet.  They can become Clark Kent, sensitive on the outside and a superhero underneath. 

Only they’re really the reverse:  the Spandex outfit and cape are on top of the nerdy suit, not under it.  They’re not hiding Superman; they’re flaunting him.  It’s the Clark side of their personalities they try to keep under wraps.

In my weaker moments, I fall into thinking in terms of binary opposites:  men are either sensitive or unemotional, tops or bottoms, conservatives or liberals.  But I’ve been learning lately that that just isn’t the case. While it may be the rare man who can be both emotionally available and sexually uninhibited, they do exist.  People are complicated.  And men, despite what some feminists might think, are people; they’re not just big brainless penises.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

And one of them, I’m happy to say—one of those complicated, multidimensional human beings—happens to love me.  I could write a whole book about my lover’s complexity—and I suspect that one day I will—but for now, I’m just reveling in the lessons he teaches me.  Whenever I’m tempted to see him as clueless—he doesn’t say just the right thing at just the right time, he refuses to follow my script for life—he comes back and surprises me with insight worthy of Deepak Chopra, or a romantic gesture that makes my heart bounce in my chest like a basketball.  And I realize that men aren’t the problem:  my expectations are the problem, my impatience.  And I remember that I’m a man, too, and I’m probably driving him bananas. 

As Diana Ross used to sing, “If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it.”  They didn’t call her Supreme for nothing.

What Price Glory?

According to urban legend, one of San Francisco’s preeminent authors was visiting a sex club when he discovered that fame can be a mood killer.  He was approaching the spot I like to call the milking station—a double-decker construction where the men on the top level are serviced by the ones below.  As he sidled up to the glory hole, the man on the other side looked up and said, “I loved your last book.”

“Thanks,” said the novelist, smiling patiently, “but that’s not what I just stuck through the hole.”

 You never know what you’re going to find in a glory hole.  My friend Jack learned that lesson the hard way the other night.

Jack has no patience for bars.  “It’s not as if I’m going to meet Mr. Right under the go-go platform swilling a Miller Lite,” he once told me.  “And if it’s just sex I’m after, then why bother wasting twenty bucks on booze only to run the risk of going home alone?”

Jack would make a great executive for GM or Chrysler.  With him, it’s all about efficiency.  “Even the most gorgeous guy will admit that the success rate at bars is pretty pathetic,” he says.  Jack should know; he may not be Brad Pitt, but he’s no Dennis Kucinich, either.

In fact, if Jack were the CEO of Gay Bars, Inc., I’d be right behind him as he implemented a Six Sigma project aimed at increasing their efficiency.  Just how much time and money—not to mention liver damage—should you risk for the sake of a roll in the hay? 

That, Jack says, is why God invented sex clubs.  If you’re going to spend money anyway, spend it on a sure thing.  No one, he says, ever strikes out at a sex club. And while technically, I’m sure that’s not true (I’ve seen with my own eyes a number of unfortunate souls wandering aimlessly around those darkened corridors, furtively reaching out toward some sweet young thing only to have their hand slapped away) even those guys—older, fatter, or just socially hopeless—get the pleasure of watching.  For some people, that’s enough.

But I digress.  Sex can do that to you.  Sex can do a lot of things to you.  Hence, this blog.

So anyway, Jack has become a regular at Blow Buddies.  For those of you who don’t know, Blow Buddies is a club in the South of Market section of San Francisco—home of leather bars, dance clubs, and incongruous yuppie lofts—that caters to men who enjoy … well, the name says it all. 

The first thing you need to understand is that there’s a whole ritual to sex clubs.  You have to be in the right mood—horny but not desperate, and absolutely, under no circumstances can you afford to be lonely, depressed, or bored.  You don’t go to sex clubs for a pick-me-up.  You don’t even go to sex clubs to get picked up.  You go to sex clubs to have fun for a couple of hours, exchange no phone numbers and as few words as possible (“thank you” is nice), and leave alone at a respectably disreputable hour. 

Sex clubs are like twelve-step groups, or Las Vegas, or the confessional.  What happens there stays there.  That’s why they’re so dark—to keep you from recognizing anyone.  Of course, there are those horrifying moments when you see some hot guy on the subway, and you know you know him from somewhere.  You want to smile or make conversation, ask if you met at your Aunt Gertrude’s birthday party or a fundraiser for Hillary, but you’re afraid that he’s just someone you’ve fantasized about and never even exchanged a word with.  And then you get the visual—him with his legs in the air, eyes practically crossed as you hovered above him on a slippery rubber mattress with dozens of other guys staring.  Oops.  And you turn away, convincing yourself he won’t recognize you in the glaring light of day.

Jack has the etiquette of sex clubs down pat.  Or he did until last Saturday night, when everything went topsy-turvy on him.

He was just minding his own business—or, more precisely, everyone else’s business, but the two get kind of confused in a place like this—scoping out the activity throughout the club.  It was early, and he hadn’t yet seen anyone who struck his fancy, so he was casually strolling around, peeking into cubicles.  The cubes at Blow Buddies come in various sizes, all with strategically placed holes—and often, for extra support, little handles bolted to the top of the wall for people to hang onto while they’re being serviced.

But that night there wasn’t much going on, at least nothing Jack was particularly inclined to watch.  So he decided to take a little break and wait for things to pick up.  He ducked into an empty cube and leaned against the wall, keeping an eye out for anything interesting that might stroll by. 

And then, out the corner of his eye, he spotted something moving on the other side of the glory hole.  Just a little flicker of movement, but enough to catch his attention.  He looked down and finally was able to make out a pair of jeans, and a fly being slowly unzipped. 

Jack has a rule about glory holes.  “No matter how beautiful the dick,” he says, “you have to know what it’s attached to.” 

And so he crouched down and, before the guy was fully unzipped, peered through the hole—up, beyond he crotch. 

The belly was pretty flat—that was good.  And the chest was lovely—nicely sculpted, just a fine coating of hair.  And the face—

Jack jerked back to his feet and stood tight against the wall—the way he’d seen cops pose in the movies when they’re trying not to be seen.  The guy wasn’t ugly.  He wasn’t old or scary. 

He was Jack’s boss.

And that was when Jack wished he’d just stayed home with a good book.

Tone Deaf: Hedonism and Hypocrisy, Part 3

Let the record show that I gave up on American Idol weeks ago.  Unlike last season, when there was some real competition, this time around I lost interest when the final 12 emerged and turned out to be a single great talent surrounded by 11 mediocre wannabes.  I didn’t tune in again until the two-part season finale, when I saw Adam Lambert predictably leave Kris Allen in the musical dust on Tuesday night.  Of course, when the dust settled the next evening, it was—appallingly—Kris who was left standing.

I want to believe this absurd decision is simply another example of bad taste in a country where Lindsay Lohan is a big star and nobody’s ever heard of Patricia Clarkson, where Dan Brown’s pablum sells millions of copies while Philip Roth languishes on the top shelf.  But this time I think there may be more going on.

Much has been made of Adam Lambert’s ambiguous sexuality—the eyeliner, the flamboyant costumes that make him part Gene Simmons, part Elton John, and a whole lot of Freddie Mercury.  So I suppose, in this age of Carrie Prejeans whose fake breasts are bigger than their brains, we should consider it a breakthrough that someone so probably gay made it even this far on today’s ultimate homage to conformist Americana.

But in the end, America in its infinite wisdom decided it was willing to go only so far in its political correctness, and musical taste once again lost out to intransigent homophobia.  And so Adam Lambert becomes the bridesmaid instead of the bride—and in a state where the likes of Miss Prejean have decreed that he shall never marry at all.  Runner-up status is, one could argue, the reality-show equivalent of domestic partnership:  Adam is equal, but separate.

Or perhaps it’s a lot simpler than that.  Perhaps the tween girls who make up the supposed majority of American Idol voters just wanted to vote for someone they could imagine kissing who might actually kiss them back.  One hearkens back to the 2000 election, when many people preferred to vote for the guy they’d want to have a beer with (even though he was a recovered alcoholic) rather then the one who might actually do something.

I have nothing against Kris Allen per se.  He’s certainly talented, easy on the ears and the eyes.  But the gap between his talent and Adam’s is huge.  Picture Halle Berry competing in the Miss America pageant against Janeane Garofalo—pretty, but hardly a beauty queen:  who would you vote for?

Will Young, the very first winner of Britain’s Pop Idol, all the way back in 2002, was gay.  Now, seven years later, America still can’t catch up—even when the truth is glaringly obvious.

Drop Your Drawers

My friend Kevin was in a business meeting the other day when a member of the sales team strayed a bit into the corporate red zone.

“We have to know what we’re dealing with before we walk into that negotiation,” he said.  “Otherwise, you might as well just drop your drawers.”

Most people in the room just smiled through it, as they would any business cliché—if Mr. Sales Guy had insisted they “think outside the box” or “get the view from 30,000 feet” or “hit one out of the park.”

But Kevin was dumfounded.  He wanted to give Sales Guy the benefit of the doubt.  He even did a Google search later, just in case his interpretation of the phrase didn’t match what Sales Guy had meant.  But pretty much everywhere he looked, the definition was the same:  “drop your drawers” means “get fucked.”

It wasn’t the sexual connotation per se that disturbed Kevin.  The PC police’s attempt to completely de-sex the American workplace is about as successful as George W. Bush’s attempt to de-Osama the Afghan hills.

What bothered Kevin was the subliminal message behind the expression:  it suggests that getting fucked is somehow a bad thing, that the top is the one with all the power and the pleasure.  (Something only a straight man could be naïve enough—or deep enough in denial—to believe.)

Kevin’s story got me thinking about the all-too-typical view of sex as a power struggle, the belief that bottoming is somehow humiliating—whether you’re a man or a woman.  It’s the same way of thinking that leads people to use cocksucker as an insult.  From what I hear, the vagina has become quite the delicacy of late, with more and more men welcoming the chance to boldly go head-on where they once let only their dicks explore.  And yet, those very dicks—which, ironically, are attached to their own bodies—are the ultimate source of repulsion.  It’s a wonder they can bear to touch the vile things to pee.

I think it’s time to acknowledge the elephant trunk in the room.  For years, we’ve heard about body dysmorphia in women, the fact that the way many women see themselves is not the way they actually are.  This phenomenon accounts for a number of disturbing trends—anorexia, bulimia, and capri pants chief among them.

But it’s high time to admit that women are not alone.  Men, it seems to me, are just as disgusted by their own bodies.  But in their case, the bloated bellies and man-boobs and nose hair aren’t really the problem (or else they’d do something about them).  No, the dirty little secret is that man’s best friend—his constant companion, the little head that tells the big head what to do—can be a source of absolute horror. 

I can certainly accept that straight men are driven by an attraction to women, but does that attraction necessitate distaste for their own gender?  Lord knows, I have no interest in going to bed with a woman, but I wouldn’t say I find their bodies threatening.  (No vagina dentata fears over here, thank you very much.)  Of course, even if I did feel a twinge at the thought of labia, at least it could be understand as fear of the unfamiliar.  On the other hand, while I might be turned off by the shape of someone’s nose or the size of his ass, I would be considered insane were I to express an open disdain for noses and asses in general, seeing as I have one of each myself.

The natural question then (so to speak) is this:  when straight men masturbate, do they close their eyes and concentrate on the feeling alone, imagining only vaginas and breasts, because the sight of their own phallus is just too much to bear?

Or is it more complicated than that?  Does every man think his own dick is beautiful—it’s just all the rest of them that are repugnant?  Kind of like how he knows how to comb his own hair and how big to grow his biceps, but claims to be completely blind to how other men look.  The hypocrisy at the heart of bravado.

With his kneejerk remark, Kevin’s Sales Guy seemed to be channeling every straight man’s nightmare:  being at the mercy of someone else’s dick.

Of course, the gay world is also full of men with their own issues about bottoming, but that’s the subject for a whole other discussion.  Their problem is also primarily about masculine power, but at least it isn’t based on any disgust with the dick itself:  we might not all put our legs in the air, but rare is the gay man unwilling to get down on his knees.

My boyfriend posits that straight men aren’t repulsed by penises so much as indifferent to them.  Or at least, he says, they aspire to indifference.  Given the role of the penis in our culture, it’s hard to believe any man can walk through a locker room and not notice them, not be constantly on the lookout for comparisons and judgment.  But that, too, is the topic for another column. 

For years women have complained of sexual objectification.  As a gay man, that’s a concept I’ve never been able to relate to.  Objectification presupposes an other.  When people of the same gender have sex, object and subject tend to blur.  Whatever I do to my lover’s body, I can imagine him doing to mine:  I know how it feels, and that knowledge actually helps me to please him. 

I suppose heterosexuals have to rely more on imagination than experience:  no straight man can really know how a woman feels, and god knows they’re not famous for their empathic skills to begin with.  For a straight man, the idea of being penetrated is perhaps so foreign that it can’t be perceived as anything but an invasion, a dangerous threat—which is pretty much the way I feel about football. 

Maybe we’re not so different, after all.

 

Blow Me

On last week’s episode of Nip/Tuck—one of my favorite guilty pleasures—the patient du jour (de la semaine?) was a young man with a unique and enviable problem.  Thanks to the flexibility he’d developed through intensive yoga practice, and the fact that he was unusually well endowed, he had become addicted to autofellatio.  It was wreaking havoc with his life—he could seldom leave the house, preferring to spend every waking moment with his legs over his head and his dick in his mouth.  His solution was not to deal with the addiction, but to forestall it by getting penis reduction surgery. 

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Of course, while this guy is making mincemeat of his manhood, every other male character on the show (and probably half the audience at home) is contorting his body into pretzels trying to do what our patient has so frivolously denied himself.  If youth is wasted on the young, I guess elasticity can be wasted on the hung.

At first I thought the premise was absurd:  If I had this guy’s talent, would I ever consider getting rid of it?  Did Picasso ever say, “You know what, I’m wasting too much time in the studio because I’m addicted to my talent—maybe I should scoop out an eye”?  Did Caruso rip his tongue out so he could spend more time with the kids?

In fact, I think the more appropriate parallel is Beethoven, who continued to compose music despite the fact that he couldn’t hear a note of it.  I’m sure that, in real life, the guy with the cocksucking obsession would be in serious withdrawal after the surgery:  instead of spending his life with his dick in his mouth, he’d spend his life trying to get his dick in his mouth.  And what’s more pathetic, really?

But I’m not here to pick on people for self-mutilation or even to point out the absurdities of commercial television.  What really struck me as I watched that episode was its truth as metaphor.

Forget all those ads for restless leg syndrome and fibromyalgia medication:  the real plague of our times is narcissism.  The truth is that most people in this culture would kill to suck their own dicks; it would be the physical culmination of how they live their lives already.

Take my friend Keith, for example.  Keith is a pretty good-looking guy, except for a little crookedness in his nose and somewhat scrawny arms.  But Keith likes to think of himself as the love child of Brad Pitt and George Clooney.  He spends a fortune on grooming and knows the benefits and price tag of every skincare product known to man.  He gets his shirts hand-made and has a closet full of outfits he’s worn only once.  When Keith goes out on the town, he’s a stunner.  He lives for the looks of strangers who do double-takes as he passes.  He thrives through flirtation, kvelling as other men eye him at parties and strike up conversations about nothing just to be in his presence.

Keith loves to have other people look at him, but he has only one mirror in his house, and it’s a small one—just enough for a quick view to make sure he doesn’t have a booger hanging from his nose when he leaves the house.  Keith doesn’t like to look at himself for long, because he knows he’ll inevitably find a flaw, and he’ll then spend the next hour trying to fix it, only to find another one and spend more time fixing that.  I dread the day when Keith finally gives in to the temptation to have plastic surgery.  He might come out looking like Faye Dunaway.  And even she doesn’t look like Faye Dunaway anymore.

When Keith finally gets out the door and on the prowl, he has a particular prey in mind.  Of course, he goes for the pretty boys.  If a pretty boy likes him, then it means that Keith himself is pretty, and that’s what it’s all about.  The truth is that Keith is one of the smartest people I know, but he’s confident about his intelligence, so he doesn’t have to have it validated by having an interesting conversation with a man.  What he wants validated is his looks, so a gorgeous airhead will do just fine.

If a model could walk out of one of those oversized photos at Abercrombie & Fitch and snuggle up to Keith—like Jeff Daniels stepping off the screen to fall in love with Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo—he’d be in seventh heaven.  The airbrushed perfection is what he’s going for—the precise little nose, the smooth skin, the shaved chest made of marble and silicone.  There are real-life equivalents, of course; that degree of beauty lasts about five minutes, but it does exist.  Half of its power, actually, lies in the fact that it’s so fleeting.

Keith never has any problem getting laid, but it may not always be with Mr. Abercrombie.  Scanning the crowd at a bar one night as the clock ticked on and the pickings grew slimmer, he said to me flippantly, “A two at ten, you know, becomes a ten at two.”  Pour a little liquor into the bargain, and anything can happen.  And even if the guy is unattractive, validation is validation, and when he’s desperate, Keith will take it any way he can get it.

There have been occasions when he’s gotten precisely what he wants, of course—when he’s gone home with a blond Adonis with abs of steel and a heart to match.  They kiss for a while, Keith keeping his eyes open the whole time, since it’s one of those rare moments when reality actually trumps fantasy.  They kiss and he feels completely empowered, his narcissistic hole filled by divine acceptance.

And then Adonis places a hand on top of Keith’s head and pushes it down.  His legs buckle under the pressure and he drops to his knees to taste the ambrosia being offered.  Ten minutes of adoration turn to twenty, thirty, each time he tries to rise back up the hand pushing back onto his head, sometimes pulling him forward or just holding him still while Adonis pumps.  And Keith understands what he’s really there for:  he’s there to stroke this guy’s ego along with his dick. 

Even Adonis needs validation from time to time.  Sometimes, even if we could all blow ourselves, it wouldn’t be enough.

Who Is John Gay? An Immodest Proposal

In my teenage years I fell under the spell of Ayn Rand.  It wasn’t so much her politics—which have since come to scare the bejeesus out of me—but the melodrama.  At the time I was into Margaret Mitchell and Sidney Sheldon, too; Ayn Rand followed more or less the same bodice-ripping formula—her characters just talked more.

I long ago put her politics and her books on a dusty shelf, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Atlas Shrugged—as the flap copy says, “the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world—and did.”  In the movie I kept imagining (but that never got made) he would have been played by Robert Redford—blond, gorgeous, and unprecedentedly confident.  Also underappreciated, exploited.  John Galt is the greatest genius of his time, but when he is denied fair compensation for his own inventions (when “social good” trumps what he perceives as his individual rights), he simply runs away.  He runs into legend.  In fact, for the first two-thirds of the book, before he appears in the flesh, he lives only in a popular refrain (the Ayn Rand equivalent of “Where’s the beef?”):  “Who is John Galt?”

At its core, Ayn Rand’s philosophy isn’t too far off the mark; it’s how she applied it that’s the problem.  Rand believed in meritocracy, that the world should essentially be run by those who know what they’re doing and are better at it.  John Galt, her supreme hero, should by rights be king of the world—but the petty powers that be, threatened by his obvious superiority, and the ignorant masses, by virtue of their sheer number, stand in his way.  So he goes on strike.  He leaves.  He and a few others—the accomplished, the brilliant, everyone who should be in power—go off to a hiding place deep in the Rocky Mountains (“Galt’s Gulch”), where they form their own perfect society and watch the rest of the world collapse around them.

In the wake of California’s Proposition 8 debacle, I can’t help thinking of San Francisco as the gay version of Galt’s Gulch.  Here, on the edge of the continent, is a community that knows what’s right and does it, despite what the rest of the state—or the country—says.  In 2004, while our president-select was petulantly stamping his feet and vowing to amend the U.S. Constitution to legalize discrimination, gay San Franciscans lined up in the rain for hours outside City Hall to get marriage licenses and publicly declare their love and commitment.  San Franciscans live by a curious philosophy that basically goes like this:  there’s the United States, and then there’s California; there’s California, and then there’s San Francisco.  We’re not like anyone else, and we don’t waste a lot of time looking over our shoulders to see what everyone else is doing.  We just do what we think is right—drag queens traipsing down the street seldom get a second look; lesbian moms push strollers through Macy’s; people walk around naked at street fairs.  It’s Utopia.

Proposition 8 was an ugly reminder that utopias aren’t necessarily safe from the encroachment of philistines.  Thanks to unprecedented funding from organizations like the Mormon Church and the Knights of Columbus, the majority of California voters were persuaded to strip away the established rights of a minority.  And let there be no dissimulation on that point:  the Supreme Court did not grant the right of marriage to same-sex couples; it simply found that the right already existed in the State Constitution. 

The overall vote was admittedly fairly close—and there are signs of hope in that fact—but nearly all the California counties that voted to reject Prop 8 were in the San Francisco Bay Area.  We are still a bubble. 

But the bubble is only a geographic phenomenon.  In truth, we are everywhere; the strength of San Francisco lies in our concentration of power.  By coming here in such large numbers, we have educated the straight community about who we really are, and they have learned to appreciate us, to see themselves in us and us in them.  Straight people in San Francisco can look upon the GLBT community and see our common humanity.  They are marching in the streets with us—heterosexual married couples, marching with their children to demand equal rights for their gay brothers and sisters.

Outside of this bubble, where our numbers are fewer, the story is clearly not the same.  Outside of the bubble, the majority culture doesn’t quite get it.  They see us as other, an other defined by our sexuality.  And they think of sex as an act, not an identity.  Having been raised in a society where their sexuality was never criticized or marginalized, they haven’t had to expand that view.  They don’t have to identify as heterosexuals, because they barely perceive anything to distinguish themselves from; they might as well be asked to identify as humans—it’s just a given, not something to be proud of or ashamed of, not something to question at all.

They’ve been raised in a world where the word marriage conjures up images of a man and a woman kissing in a church, raising children together, putting up a white picket fence.  To them, that’s what marriage is:  an apple is red, the sun rises in the east, and marriage is heterosexual.  To an earlier generation, marriage was even more specific:  white men marrying white women, black men marrying black women.  That was just the way it was, so that was what was right.

There’s an ironic twist to the story, this year of all years.  On November 4, when the Bush nightmare finally ended, when the Democrats increased their hold on both houses of Congress and the United States elected a progressive man to the White House—the first African-American ever to hold that office, forever changing the face of America—we were reminded that discrimination is alive and well in the land of the free.

Americans—and Californians in particular, by 62%—embraced Barack Obama.  But they did not embrace all that he stands for.  They voted for a man who rejects discrimination and fights for justice, but at the same time they refused to see the limits of their own vision of justice. 

The question is simple:  does the majority have the right to strip rights away from a minority?  If the desires of the majority were the only criterion—as opposed to justice or common decency—I venture to say that slavery would still exist in certain pockets of America, and it would be legal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and any number of other categories.  Justice demands another way of determining human rights. 

Most people, it seems, have trouble seeing that point.  They don’t believe that they are taking away our rights.  They don’t believe we’re entitled to rights that they have never had to fight for.  Not having fought, they don’t understand why we’re fighting.  A lack of empathy is the problem, a lack of vision.  They don’t understand our situation.  They don’t understand who we are. 

So let’s show them who we are.  Let’s make it crystal clear how many of us there are, and how much we contribute to the society that they take for granted.

What if we took a page from Ayn Rand’s book?  What if all of gay America were to create one big Gay Gulch—sail off to some tropical island and put up signs saying “No Heteros or Republicans Allowed”?  (It would have to be some place warm and sunny, of course; the Rockies just don’t seem terribly gay to me.)  What if we decided to stop the motor of the world?  While the vilest of politicians harrumph about taking away our rights—codifying our status as second-class citizens—what if we simply took a breather?  What if we actually gave them what they claim to want—our absence?

At last, the rest of the country would understand just how much we actually contribute.  Right now they see only our numbers—and even that they argue about, wanting to believe we’re 3% of the population when we’re probably closer to 10% or even 15%.  But wouldn’t it be interesting to show them how disproportionate our contributions are?  If we all were to run off to Gay Gulch, what would happen to this country?  Just imagine the hordes of women walking around with bad hair, ugly outfits, and flats.  Imagine the lights on Broadway dimmed to a single theater showing yet another revival of Death of a Salesman, sans set design.  Imagine millions of TV sets that can tune in only to sports and reruns of “This Old House.”  Imagine conservative politicians with no aides to do their research and betray their own people in the process. 

John Galt was a petulant little boy.  He took his ball and went home.  But the world fell apart without him, and eventually he was welcomed back as a savior.  And he was only one man.  How much greater is the power of 30 million pissed-off homosexuals?  

Gentry First: Hedonism and Hypocrisy, Part 2

For John McCain so loved the country that he left it in the capable hands of the governor of Alaska….

–the Gospel According to Palin

 

It’s all about spin these days.  Pick the right slogan and people will follow, whether you have substance behind you or not.  John McCain’s key slogan—when he’s not appropriating Barack Obama’s “change” theme—is “Country First.”

But, from John McCain’s mouth, “Country First” is as much a lie as “thanks but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere” or “Obama will raise your taxes.”  A more appropriate campaign slogan would be “Ego First”—or, more specifically, “John McCain’s Ego First.”

I am reminded of a quote from my favorite writer, E.M. Forster:  “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

For that, ironically, is precisely what John McCain has done.  He has already proven that he will say anything to get elected, that he has no loyalty to truth.  But most disturbingly, this self-professed hero has—through a single act—called into question his loyalty to the United States.  If he is willing to leave the presidency in Sarah Palin’s hands should he die in office, how can we possibly believe that he gives a damn about what happens to this country when he’s gone? 

But wait, you’re saying about now, this blog is supposed to be about gay sex.  When are we going to get to the gay sex?  Well, hold on, my friends, I’ll get to that.  I always get to that.

Even people in McCain’s camp get to it, apparently.  His chief of staff, Mark Buse, was recently outed:  see Michelangelo Signorile’s blog for all the juicy details. 

I can’t fathom the depths of self-hatred that motivate a Mark Buse or a Mary Cheney—or, for that matter, the cabal of traitors known as the Log Cabin Republicans.  I suppose it’s hardly surprising that in America there are people who love money more than their own souls.  These are the homosexuals who claim that they’re “just the same” as heterosexuals outside of the bedroom—or the airport men’s room.  Well bully for them.

John McCain has consistently voted against hate crimes bills and ENDA, as well as expressing firm support for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  He is no friend to gay people, despite what Mark Buse might tell himself when he picks up his paycheck.

And the positions of McCain’s running mate—who actually believes the crackpot Christian line that McCain adopted only recently, when he sold his soul for the nomination—are even more offensive.  One of these two boneheads could be responsible for appointing the next Supreme Court Justice—or the next two, or the next three.

At a time like this, when the Supreme Court is teetering on the brink of fascism, there is no more important issue in a presidential election.  The fate of our nation depends on the preservation of liberty, the nurturing of the U.S. Constitution as a living, breathing document.  One more Scalito and we might as well forget about civil liberties and get ready for a Christian theocracy not unlike the Muslim theocracy of Iran.

But as long as those tax shelters for the rich are maintained, all is well in the Republican world.  And what does it matter, anyway?  Armageddon and the rapture are coming soon.  Their warmongering will see to that.

French Resistance

Okay, I’ll admit it:  when I call in sick, I usually end up watching Oprah.  Sometimes the reminder that other people are worse off than me is the best medicine.

One day the big O was kneeling at the feet of Maya Angelou, who sagely said, “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”  It sounded good at first, but ultimately all I could think was:  it must be a long time since this chick’s been on a date.

In my humble (and extensive) experience, first dates are like job interviews—except that the evaluation is happening on both sides of the table, and so are the lies.  In the conference room, “I’m ready for a new challenge” really means “I hate my boss.”  And across the table at Starbucks, “I’m looking for a serious relationship” translates to “I wonder what you look like naked.”

In Greg’s case, I started wondering long before the first date.  I first spotted him at the Alliance Française—passing in the hall as he was on the way to his intro course and I to the advanced.  We locked eyes for a second and my body shivered a bit as I took it all in—the square jaw, the thick dark hair, the shoulders that went from here to Burgundy.  I momentarily regretted having studied French for the past 10 years, wishing instead that I could be sitting beside him, just learning to conjugate.

It took weeks for the cruisey looks to give way to “hello,” weeks more for “hello” to generate a conversation and, finally, coffee after class.

We each put on our best “first date” face, trying to impress with our charm and seriousness.  He told me he was a flight attendant, and we discussed our mutual love of travel.  We shared our motivations for studying French—my desire to read Proust in the original and one day move to Provence; his more practical goal, to be bilingual enough to work international flights, which paid more.  When I told him I was a writer, he professed his admiration for wordsmiths and rattled off a list of the books he’d read lately. 

And we talked about relationships—all those failed attempts at intimacy that littered both of our pasts, our determination to find someone next time around who was really capable of opening his heart.  Greg was serious about love (French, after all, is the language of l’amour); he wanted the real thing, and he was willing to work at it, he said, as I fell into his baby blue eyes.

And, naively heeding the words of Maya Angelou, I believed him.  Greg was the whole package—smart, funny, ambitious, gorgeous.  As I marked off his qualities on my mental checklist, I flirted shamelessly—and thrillingly added modesty to the list when he seemed flattered.  The ideal man, and he was impressed that I wanted him! 

We kissed goodbye outside the coffee shop.  And kissed again.  And again, finally admitting what had been dancing around us for weeks already.  “I want to go home with you,” Greg said, “but I’m afraid you won’t take me seriously if I do.  Not on the first date.”  So we agreed to meet for lunch the next day.  Sex on the second date is so much more mature.

Needless to say, I hardly slept.  I rambled on and on to a friend on a late-night phone call about how perfect Greg was, how this guy had the potential to be the one.  (Is that the most overused and ridiculous phrase in the vocabulary of dating?)

He was still hot the next day, his dark eyes coyly peering at me from beneath a backwards beret, a tuft of hair curling over the collar of his pale blue sweater.  And he was still charming.  But somehow, last night’s modesty had become today’s dogged insecurity.  Last night’s cleverness had morphed into all-too-revealing self-deprecation.  Greg was still nursing a broken heart, he said; he wasn’t ready to date seriously.  He wasn’t sure he was even capable of it anymore.

“Who said anything about serious?” I asked.  “We just met!”

But that’s how the neurotic mind works:  just a taste of happiness, and Greg’s head had started doing somersaults of fear.  “If I liked you less,” he said—trying to let me down easy, “I’d probably just sleep with you right now.”

So like me less, I thought, hypnotized by the dark hairs that fluttered beneath his Adam’s apple as he spoke.  I had seen enough French films to know that sex could change everything.  Sex was enough to free his heart.  And if it wasn’t, at least we would have had some fun.  There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

But the openness of the day before was gone.  Greg looked at me now as if through a scrim—holding himself back.  And suddenly I thought the real truth was yesterday’s.  Today was the lie.  Today, If I liked you less really meant I like you too much; I’m terrified.

That’s what I told myself, at least, as we parted outside the restaurant and hugged out a half-hearted au revoir.  And then, watching him saunter away under that jaunty beret, I realized that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference.  Maya Angelou was right:  The truth isn’t always what matters.  Sometimes it really is what they tell you that counts.  Underneath it all, maybe Greg did really want me.  But what he was telling me—verbally or not—was that he was unable to go there.  What his heart wanted was irrelevant if the rest of him wasn’t ready to listen.

 

Hedonism and Hypocrisy, Part 1

The absurdity of this culture’s attitudes toward sex never ceases to amaze me (or to provide fodder for this blog).  Most recent example:  I was in a bar last week where the TV was tuned to a cable series called The Girl Next Door, which apparently follows the misadventures of a trio of bimbos and their octogenarian playboy-in-chief, Hugh Hefner.  In several scenes, the girls were topless—the skin-covered bags of silicone that pass for breasts bouncing around for all the world to see.  Except for one oddity:  their breasts had huge pink smudges where the nipples should have been, pixilated for mass consumption.  Apparently, the FCC has no problem with funbags per se; it’s just nipples that scare them.  Nipples—the one thing that female breasts (real or not) have in common with men’s.  If exposed nipples are really so offensive, then how on earth does Matthew McConaughey sustain his movie career?

It’s the arbitrariness that gets me:  You can show every square inch of a breast, but ooh, watch out for that nipple—it might shoot milk at you!  (I guess men’s nipples are safe because they’re not loaded.) 

You can show an entire ass, but make sure the crack is covered by the butt floss that passes for a bikini. 

And let’s not forget that the complete outline of a penis, head and all, is perfectly acceptable in an underwear ad—but the thing itself, in the flesh (so to speak), that’s the ultimate taboo. 

Whom, exactly, do these uptight idiots at W’s FCC think they’re kidding?