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? 

 

The Rice Queen Cometh

An acquaintance of mine recently returned from a trip to Thailand.  He was there to visit religious shrines, but the natives didn’t seem to understand that.  Everywhere he went, he was accosted by young men offering him sex for money.  Apparently, a whole industry has sprung up around catering to American men who have a thing for Asian boys.  My friend—tall, fiftyish, very white—fit the profile perfectly.  Except for his complete lack of interest in what these boys were selling.

But that didn’t stop them.  In certain enclaves, it seems, the gay tourist is as much prey as predator.  “My backside is wanting you too much,” one boy told my friend in broken English.  “I have condom.”  How romantic.

As I listened to the story, it occurred to me that my friend Clay would have had a much better time on that trip.  Clay freely admits that he’s a rice queen.  “They’re so much prettier,” he says of Asian men, in the same tone he would use to pick out a Pekingese at the SPCA.  Something about the shape of the eyes, he says, or the dark straight hair.

That used to be his story, at least.  Time after time, I’d watch him at the bar, scoping out his next conquest.  He was an equal opportunity sexual imperialist:  any Asian would do—Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino.  I’m not sure Clay could even tell the difference, despite having lived in the Bay Area for close to a decade. 

One evening, he set his sights on Daniel, a handsome man of Korean descent—shortish but somewhat lanky, with a charming smile.  Clay’s typical m.o. was to sidle up to the object of interest and try to engage him in whatever conversation we were having.  I was the wingman:  my job was to get a threeway conversation started and then quietly withdraw.  We nabbed Daniel with a comment on the lame videos playing on the oversized screens at the bar.  The three of us chatted for a while, Daniel revealing himself to be rather intriguing (a business student with an interest in opera) but Clay kept turning the conversation back to the mundane—where he lived, whether he had roommates—regularly punctuating his remarks by dropping a hand against Daniel’s arm.  Eventually, I played my part, heading to the bar for another beer.  By the time I returned to our corner, they were both gone.  Another successful evening at the Midnight Sun!  My work there was through.

But Clay’s was just beginning.  As I learned in a frantic phone call the next morning, things did not go as planned.

“He’s a top!” Clay hissed into the phone. 

I was still half asleep.  “So?”

“Well, I didn’t expect him to be a top.  I’m a top!  You know that.”

I knew it all too well.  Clay was fond of working it into every conversation, the way lawyers never fail to mention that they’re lawyers. 

Apparently, they had spent the first fifteen minutes in bed wrestling.  Clay has often claimed not to care (or always notice) how well endowed his dates are, since they’re usually face-down on the mattress for the duration.  When Daniel failed to give in so easily, Clay was at a loss. 

“I didn’t expect him to be a top,” he said now.  I was waking up.

“Why not?”

“Well. …”  The syllable dissolved into the wire.

“No, you didn’t,” I said.

“Look,” he said after a pause, “if I were into being a bottom, I’d date black guys.”

“No, you didn’t,” I repeated.

I shouldn’t have been surprised.  No, to be honest, I wasn’t surprised; I just pretended to be to avoid embarrassing him further. 

Clearly, Clay’s obsession with Asian men had more to do with stereotypes than aesthetics.  Long ago, the image of the submissive Asian female had worked its way into the gay world, as well, with the notion that Asian men were somehow less threatening than their white counterparts.  I remember first becoming aware of this phenomenon with the play M Butterfly.  Immediately, I was struck by the absurdity of the story:  that this white man could live with his lover for so long and not realize that she was really a he.  (If you’ve ever had sex with a woman, it’s not likely that you’ll ever mistake the anus for a vagina, but maybe I’m splitting hairs.)  To me, it was obvious that he was in denial, a state of willful ignorance:  because his lover was Asian, he subconsciously reasoned, he wasn’t quite fully male.  And if his lover wasn’t male, then the white guy didn’t have to confront his own homosexuality.

Not that Clay is in denial about his sexuality.  His ass, maybe, but not his sexuality.

I’ve always felt that one of the great things about being gay is that it makes it hard to look upon your lover as an other.  I’ve never shared the average woman’s aversion to being treated as a sex object—because in a same-sex context, both people are objects, and both are subjects.  It’s when we look upon our sex partner as an other that we get into trouble—the same trouble that the straight world has promulgated for centuries.

The rent boys of Thailand certainly seem to have caught on.  Clay would have had no surprises there, no need to look upon his partner as an equal. 

If there is a sin in prostitution, it’s that:  the tendency to look upon the payee as less than the payer.  But haven’t men looked down on their wives similarly since the dawn of time?  Isn’t that what the straight man’s fear of penetration is really all about?  At least the prostitute gets paid for the privilege. 

Man’s Best Friend

My friend Simon is the domestic type—a homebody, you might say.  His house is impeccable—all the comforts of home, except one:  the husband.

He met the most recent candidate at the dog park near his house.  Dog parks are the new gay bars, especially for the domesticated male.  Owning a dog, Simon says, is like practice for a boyfriend.  If it doesn’t drop dead under your care or piss all over the furniture, you’re ready to move on to human pets.  Simon tells me that men with dogs are sexy.  There’s something about their playfulness that gets to him.  A man can’t be uptight when he’s playing catch with a retriever, or picking up shit with a plastic bag.

Anyway, that day at the park, Simon fell in love with an energetic, dangerously white cocker spaniel who came running at him on his way to catch the ball just thrown by its owner.  The owner, an adorably nerdy guy named Harold, came up to apologize, offered to pay Simon’s dry-cleaning bill, and before you know it, they had a date for Friday night.  Dog men work fast.

In our neighborhood, dogs are man magnets, portable conversation starters.  I’ve seen it in action.  A handsome guy walking down the street alone is intimidating, but if he’s got a leash on his arm, other guys will talk to him.  They can pretend they’re really talking to the dog.  “Oh, how cute are you!” they’ll say, their eyes straying from the snappy little Bichon Frisé up to the clutched biceps holding it in place.

Dogs are the new hankies.  You can tell everything you need to know about a man from what kind of dog he has, and how he behaves with it.  A guy with a toy poodle is a whole different type from the one who’s being dragged around the block by a Doberman. 

Ginger, the cocker spaniel, was spoiled rotten, but Simon didn’t discover that until the second date.  On the first date, over dinner, he learned all about Harold.  And there was a lot to learn.  Harold, it turned out, was a lawyer, so the conversation was entirely about him.

By the time it was Simon’s turn to share, Harold began anxiously looking at his watch.  “Ginger’s probably dying to go out right about now,” he said, squishing his features painfully.  “I really should go.”  He promised to make it up to Simon by inviting him over for dinner.  He liked to cook, he said, and didn’t often get the chance.

Simon’s not great at recognizing red flags.  When it comes to men, he’s color-blind:  he only sees the green ones.  So at this point, he was thrilled:  a man who loved dogs and cooked:  There is a god after all! 

He arrived for their next date on time, but Harold hadn’t started cooking yet.  He placed Simon at a table in the corner of the kitchen with a glass of wine and they chatted as Harold got dinner together.

Meanwhile, Ginger made no bones about letting her needs be known.  She scampered about Master Harold’s feet as he moved from fridge to counter to stove, barking and jumping onto her hind legs as each aromatic ingredient passed above her frosty head.  Simon watched the show from his corner perch, awkwardly trying to make conversation over the barking and get the dog’s attention away from the food.

A white square of fabric was laid out on the far side of the kitchen floor.  Simon peeked his head around the counter.  “What’s that?” he asked, gesturing with his wine glass.

Harold blushed.  “I don’t always get home in time to walk her,” he admitted.  “That’s insurance.”

“A diaper?”

Harold nodded, dipping a limp chicken breast filet in flour.

“But you’re here now,” Simon said.

Harold shrugged sheepishly.  “It’s become a habit,” he said.

“She routinely pisses on the kitchen floor?”

Harold rolled his eyes—aren’t pets adorable?—and bent down to pat the dog’s head.  Ginger turned up her nose to sniff his fingers for poultry.

When Simon went to the bathroom a little later, he discovered that the kitchen was hardly unique.  There were diapers all over the house, one of them stained a pale ocher.  He stepped daintily around it and, back at the table, poured himself another glass of wine.

They walked the dog together after dinner, Simon watching as Harold did the dirty work.  He wore the plastic bag like a glove, scooped up the shit as if it were the most natural gesture in the world, and tossed it in a trash can on the edge of the park.  He would be great with children, Simon thought.

Harold was a pretty good kisser, too, and after he’d washed his hands, he escorted Simon to the bedroom.  Things were going fine until they heard a whining at the foot of the bed.  Suddenly, as Simon lay pinned on the mattress, he was aware of someone licking his toes.  As Harold was kissing his lips at the time, there was only one possible explanation.

“Ginger!” Harold called, for the first time expressing the slightest annoyance with her behavior.

Ginger chose to interpret her name as a call to action rather than a cry of frustration.  She hopped from the foot of the bed and into flagrante delicto, sniffing Simon’s sweaty chest like a pig hunting for truffles.  Harold swatted her away matter-of-factly and continued what he was doing.  He seemed used to Ginger’s insistence.  Each time he pushed her off the bed, she jumped back up—as if it were a game.

Simon, on the other hand, was finding it hard to focus.  “Why don’t you lock her outside?” he asked as his erection threatened to plummet.

“She’ll just scratch at the door and annoy us all the more.”

I’ll wear earplugs, Simon thought.  But by this point, he was so worked up he became somewhat desperate.  He bunched the covers up around them, like the barricade in Les Miz, and got back to business.  He wasn’t thinking anymore, at least not with his big head.  After all the anticipation, Simon’s dick had taken over, and it wasn’t about to let a cocker spaniel win the contest for Harold’s attention.

Of course, it was only a priapic victory.  The battle brought out the worst in him.  As he thrashed atop Harold, he felt that coarse tongue on his foot once more, and—instinctively; he would forever after say it was purely instinctive—he kicked his leg out.  There was a startled whimper and a sudden crash as Ginger skidded across the hardwood floor and knocked over a pile of books in the corner.  And then the room was filled with the sound of her sharp claws scampering against the floor outside and a whimper that quickly diminished as she ran down the hall.

Harold jumped out of bed to tend to her, and that was the end of that—the evening and the relationship.  A few minutes later, as he undertook the walk of shame through the dog park, Simon found himself rethinking his theory.  Dogs might be a great way to attract men, but also a perfect excuse to keep them at bay.  They didn’t prove that their owners were domestic, so much as domesticated.

Suddenly, Simon felt something squish underfoot.  That’s how it is with relationships, he thought, checking his sole:  you’re always dealing with somebody else’s shit.

Prince Albert in the Can

As a rule, after a breakup, you never again see your boyfriend’s penis.  So when John dragged me into the bathroom that night, I was a little taken aback. 

It was only a couple of weeks after the breakup, and as soon as I walked into church (don’t worry; our church is as pagan as it is Christian; we’re good, free-thinking homosexuals), he took my arm and said, “Come here, I want to show you something.”

Now, the last time a man brought me into a public restroom … well, that’s another story.  The point is, I didn’t know what to expect—especially when he started undoing his pants.

And suddenly, there it was—glittering under the fluorescent light, a shiny silver hoop emerging from the head of his dick.  The hoop itself was rather thin, but it loomed large—and painful—in my imagination.  It seemed the final barrier between me and this part of John that I had loved for so long—like a “no trespassing” sign, a reminder that what I had once tenderly caressed was irrevocably off limits.

John had wanted a P.A. for a long time, but I had always pooh-poohed the idea.  I’d had experience with them before, and I knew that they could be kind of fun—as a novelty, a momentary diversion—but the idea of facing it each night, my beautiful boyfriend’s beautiful member forever foreshadowed by this formidable, glinting piece of steel, was hardly appetizing. 

But my opinions no longer mattered.  That was the point, I realized, standing in the bathroom, eye to eye with John’s defiant penis and the bossy piece of metal that had taken possession of it.  The piercing was his declaration of independence, a way of demarcating his life with and without me.

(No one seems certain of the association between Prince Albert and the piercing named after him.  Whether Victoria’s dear husband had such a piercing himself remains a mystery, as far as I can determine.  Legend has it that he had the piercing done because his dick was so big it needed to be secured in his trousers to avoid an obvious bulge.  If true, this could explain why Victoria so dramatically mourned his passing for forty years.  It would indeed be ironic if the queen whose name is synonymous with sexual repression had had such a kinky husband.  But, as Ted Haggard and Larry Craig among others have taught us, it’s the uptight ones you most have to watch out for.)

The human race has a long tradition of commemorating internal change on the body.  And in that season of breakups, when several of our friends—some even longer-established couples than us—separated over the course of a few months, there was a lot of change going around.  One of our female friends bleached her hair after her breakup and now styled it in dramatic spikes that screamed defiance.  A male friend grew a devilish goatee.  (Why, I wondered, does everyone choose the dramatic, slightly risqué path?  Why doesn’t anyone start wearing Laura Ashley sundresses or get their hair permed into Pre-Raphaelite ringlets?)

According to Hollywood gossip, Roseanne and Tom Arnold wore tattoos of each other’s names, and had to have them removed after their divorce.  Not quite as easy for Roseanne as changing her legal name back to Barr, but perhaps more meaningful.  Of course, the fact that he had chosen to stamp “Rosey” on his ass should have been a sign from the beginning, but I won’t speculate.

You could say that my relationship with John was framed by piercings.  We’d been dating only a month when I casually mentioned that I’d always fantasized about getting a nipple ring.  That was all John needed to hear.  Within minutes, I found myself at the piercing parlor down the street, lying shirtless on a table in a walled-off area of the shop. 

I’d had both ears pierced long ago and had barely felt it.  But, as I soon discovered, there’s a lot more sensation in the nipple.  John held my hand and tried to make me laugh as the piercer leaned over my chest with his shockingly large needle.  I tried to get all Zen—focusing on my breath, convincing myself the process would be over very quickly.

But Buddha wasn’t with me that day. You know those moments in life when time stands still?  Well, that needle was in my nipple for all of two seconds, but those two seconds compressed the pain of two hours.  And I screamed bloody murder.

The space we were in was a glorified cubicle, its walls a few feet lower than the ceiling.  Everyone throughout the shop could hear me, and suddenly there were titters of laughter everywhere.  “Sorry!” I called out when the pain had passed and I was able to laugh at myself.  I imagined my scream frightening someone in a distant corner who had a needle poised over another victim:  one slip of the wrist and a testicle could be history.

My nipple is a constant reminder of John, who held my hand and gave me the courage to go through with it.  He gave me the courage to do a lot of things, and the nipple ring has become a symbol of that.  Love changes you.  It leaves its mark. 

So when I was confronted with his piercing—which marked the end of our relationship, not its beginning—I had to wonder what it—and I—meant. 

The wound was still fresh, the skin around the hole disturbingly red.  And while a nipple ring doesn’t take up that much room on a chest, a P.A. is hard to miss:  no matter how big your dick, that piece of metal becomes its dominant characteristic. 

Is this what our breakup had done to him—a mutilation?  Or, worse yet, was this his way of commemorating the relationship itself?  Was our time together that painful that he needed to mark it through violence? 

Penises are sacred.  The thought of harm to my own causes as visceral a reaction as similar thoughts about my eyes.  You could say that I am my penis.  At some primal level, I think most men would agree.  We identify with our penises in a way that other parts of our bodies will never know.  We even give them names.  (For a long time, mine was known as Brad.) 

Decades before (I won’t say how many), my foreskin had been sacrificed to honor someone else’s belief system.  And now I look enviously upon the few that I see.  Sure, they’re not particularly attractive, but it’s a question of function over form in this case.  Because someone else made an arbitrary decision on my behalf when I was completely helpless, I will never know how much sensitivity I’ve lost in my most sensitive place.

An old friend of mine used to say:  the first breakup never takes.  John and I had broken up twice before.  I think that piercing was his way of saying:  enough already!  It was like cutting an umbilical cord.  At some level, I think he thought it would make him less attractive to me, put the kibosh on any chance of getting back together.  I hope I’m not that superficial.  Even when it comes to penises, beauty is only skin-deep.