Labels

This is, wonderful to relate, the 200th post to this blog.   Well, youse people know I like to natter.  Thanks for listening to my rambles and rants.

Just thought I'd mention it.

This blog post made me think.  Always a dicey activity, no?  He's the bloke who started and now runs the Iomfats website.  (Thanks to Rock for reminding me of it).

A quote from the post:

Confession time.

I don't understand bisexuality. I'm homosexual, 30 years into a heterosexual marriage with a very beautiful woman, and we adore each other. We have a full marriage in all senses of the word, but I am homosexual, not even a smidgen bisexual. My wife is a glorious exception-event.  So I truly do not understand bisexuality.

Interesting.  I used also to describe myself as gay and married to a woman I love. I recently realized that I am probably bi, but at the gay end of the spectrum.  I had a kind of epiphany after reading a story by Neil Plakcy which I found very hot.  Now, you can't fool your cock ("so light, even a thought can lift it")   If you get hard, you're being turned on.  (I'm explaining this to virgins, gay, straight or in between, who somehow haven't realized this.  The rest of you know this already, right?)   So why, if you're gay and you can nevertheless get hard with a woman, do you go on calling yourself gay?

I did it because I was primarily gay. And I thought calling yourself bi was a cop-out, dishonest and in fact cowardly.  I thought that the world considered bi better than gay, and there was no way I was going to bottle out like that.  I was gay as fuck, dammit!  True, for a couple of years in my early twenties I only fucked men.  And then I met my lady, at a time when I was pretty pissed off at the cum-and-go culture.  She was so frigging beautiful, so clever and witty and just plain hot that giving up men was easy.  I hadn't found anyone to love, and I wanted to be more than a piece of meat.  I wanted to be loved.  And she loved me and I loved her, and it was wonderful.

Since then I have (at least to the outside world) been heterosexual.  But I still respond to men, to maleness, to male beauty.  I also respond to women and female beauty, but mostly I incline to the male side.  So what am I?  A gay man who got married to a woman (as Tim Trent describes himself), a straight man who went through a gay phase (a fricking long phase, acushla), or a bisexual?  You know what?  Who gives a flying foo-foo valve?  The labels mislead.

If you read Cross Currents you'll get the perspective of a mostly straight man and his relationships with other mostly straight men.  What are these blokes?  Gay?  Straight?  Bi?  Well, it's unimportant.  They are fond of each other.  They have sex with each other.  They also have sex with women.  Sometimes they're not fond of the women they fuck.  Sometimes they are.  The clichés, the labels, are damaging.  If you're gay you've gotta like musicals?  Be good at house decorating?  Wear coordinated clothes?  What a load of cobblers.  If you're straight you can't be tender and caring?  You can't love your best friend?  You can't like classical music or ballet or literature?   What utter, utter tosh.

This piece was posted a couple of months ago in The DB Files, Don Bellew's group:

It was a real-life "Brokeback Mountain" couple that Courier-Post staff
writer Robert Baxter met--though this was when Baxter was a young boy,
long before Annie Proulx wrote the story that filmmaker Ang Lee would
eventually turn into an affecting story of love between two shepherds
in the wilds of Wyoming and the life-long romance that followed.

In his Aug. 27 Courier-Post article, Baxter described meeting the two
cowboys, Bud and Manuel, at age "5, maybe 6," while at a county fair
with his grandmother. Baxter wrote of how the cowboys "looked like
real men. Lean, muscular, with big, calloused hands and strong faces,
tanned by the sun." Bud was a ranch owner; Manuel was his foreman; and
the two men shared a life, Baxter wrote. Indeed, although nobody in
the small California community where the men lived made an issue of
it, "everyone sensed Bud belonged to Manuel," and the pairing, Baxter
recalls, went over "as comfortably as Charlie and Mary or Harry and
Alice." 

(See more here)

Where do these manly gay blokes fit into the stereotypes?  It's all so much more complicated than the gay-haters believe.  In the end, we're people.  Sometimes we love people of the same gender, sometimes we love people of the other gender.  Sometimes we have sex with our own gender.  Or not.  And it doesn't follow that the love and sex necessarily have anything to do with each other.  It's more complicated than that.  And the labels ("You're so gay", "What a fruit", "He's a homo") are dangerous.  For everybody.  For the gays, who grow to hate themselves, for the straights who grow afraid to show affection to another man.  Some people are 100% gay (whatever that means)  Others 100% straight (define, please!)  And others, many many others, are somewhere on the line between, though we may call ourselves gay or straight or bi.  My invented term is "gay-shaded".  But even that is an unhappy descriptor.  Judge not lest ye be judged, everyone.   Set aside your preconceptions and prejudices.  It's much more nuanced and muddled than you thought.  Than I thought.

This guy's a beauty

But tell me, do you think his eye colour is natural or from contact lenses?

It's exactly the colour of the eyes of  Ben, from my new novel Zing Went the Strings of my Heart.  It's a sort of sequel to I Get no Kick from Champagne.  In fact, he pretty much looks like my mental image of Ben.

Here're the first coupla paragraphs:

It was late when Ben came out of the nightclub. Alone.

It had been a good session. Fluid Exchange had been the lead band, and he liked them. He suspected that the saxophonist was an exotic. He was also not a little puzzled by the lead singer’s energy field—a wizard? A bard? He hadn’t felt one quite like that before. And he was sure he’d seen an elf on the dance floor, and another, younger, talking with the saxophonist and the lead guitarist. If it hadn’t been impossible – a human, an elf and an exotic – he’d have said all three were family, from the way they interacted.

As always, just before he stepped out of the protection afforded by the doorway, he quickly scanned each side of the narrow street, in both directions. There was nothing. Yet a prickling alert made the nape of his neck shiver. He had learnt the hard way not to ignore these warnings.

He turned and sauntered towards brighter illuminations of the main street, deliberately affecting a nonchalance he did not feel. Away from the light spilling from the door of the nightclub, it was dark, and his sense of danger grew. Like all his kind, he could see very well at night. There were no recent infra-red trails, no fading traces of dangerous auras. Yet the prickling was beginning to feel like needles piercing his skin. Out of a side alley, a space only a few yards wide and not much longer, he felt the residue of a wave of malevolence, a dab of filth brushing against his mind and fouling his aura. He reached for the weapon he always kept in his handbag, widened his pupils, tuned his ears to maximum alertness and breathed deep the foetid scents of rubbish, piss, dogshit, and evil. His gun raised, he turned into the alley, and began to walk forward.

I love to go a wandering

I loved this image. Two young blokes, hiking through the mountains, and both of them handsome as.  Well, perhaps not hiking (one of them wears flip-flops) but on holiday.   Reminds me of my many mountain-climbing trips.  There's something special about going into the wilderness with your mates.  Especially when they look like this.