ElvenSword chapter 9

In which Fluin starts his training as a wizard, while his future remains unclear and frightening.

Read it here.

ElvenSword, Chapter 6

Revelations. 

In which our two heroes get to know each other better.  Fluin is attracted to Steppan, but also to the Khedha of Carnia's daughter and heir, while Steppan, who has never loved a man, finds himself bonding deeply to Fluin.

Elvensword

Elvensword was the first novel I wrote and it showed.   But rewriting it proved difficult.  Anyway, I put it aside for a while, and when I went back to it, I could see clearly what had to be done.  I've rewritten the first few chapters and reordered them.  I'm happier with the later chapters and in fact have read some passages where I thought, I wrote that?  Prolly an illusion.  Anyway, my writer's block about it has vanished, and I've been working on it all day.  I've uploaded the rewritten first 5 chapters.  You can read them, starting with the prologue, here.  

Footy

I've just uploaded the last two chapters of my novel Footy to my website.  You can read them here, and you can find out more about Footy here.

The Power of Slash

More than half my readership is female.  And when I tell this to gay men, they are confounded.  Why, they ask, would straight women be interested in romantic and erotic stories about two men?  

To answer, I must mention 'slash'.  Slash began in the seventies.  Women who thought two men from a TV show sexy would write fanfic about them, making them fall in love with each other.  (But why? you wail impatiently.  Patience!)

Starsky & Hutch, best friends

The term itself comes from the slash between two names to indicate a pairing: Spock/Kirk for example, or Starsky/Hutch.  The essence of slash is that two previously heterosexual blokes (who remain resolutely het in the canonical versions of their stories in TV and film) become so close to each other that they fall in love.  They overcome their upbringing and the taboo against same-sex love, because they love each other so much that they wish to express this love physically and sexually.  They are prepared to ignore the opprobrium of society and to move past their own internal homophobia because of love.  Potent stuff.  And slash is written by women for women.  We men who love this style of writing are the interlopers here.

Starsky & Hutch.  Kinda intimate.

It's no accident that this emotional tension, this journey, is also a standard trope of gay fiction:  the hunky straight (he's never a hideous, pock-marked, halitotic fatso) who somehow falls in love with or has sex with our hero, and so turns gay.  For gay-shaded blokes, I suspect this reflects a kind of internalised homophobia:  we are so insecure in our sexuality that having the handsome alpha jock or sexy cop turn gay validates our own gayness.  Or, alternatively, we are only attracted to straight guys (all those personals ads for "straight-acting" men), though come to think of it, this is also perhaps partly about our own negative self image.  Whatever the reason, the stories about straight men tuning gay are a staple of gay fiction.  I've written stories like that myself:  just look at Footy.  I find the emotional dynamic very satisfying to think and write about.  In my own case I would never have known I was gay if I hadn't fallen in love with another bloke, who was (surprise!) a very straight-acting surfer and rugby player.

And make no mistake:  it does happen in "real life".  I know of a couple of relationships where one straight guy has so loved (as friend, but the love deepens) another gay or bisexual man that he has set aside his straightness (if only for his friend) and entered into a profound sexual relationship.  Just thinking about it chokes me up.  But then I'm an old softie.

But why should women like male pairings?  There are a couple of answers.  One is that the women who like men find the emotional journey that straight men make when they start to love another man compelling.  It is conventional that straight men don't show their feelings and of course, like all generalisations, it's flawed.  Yet it is true that our culture, broadly speaking, doesn't encourage men to express their tenderer emotions.  In a heterosexual pairing, this is expected, this is what women have to put up with.  It's the way it is.  Asking a straight man touchy-feely questions is likely to provoke embarrassed shifting and silences.  But in a friendship which deepens to love, the two men involved are forced to come to terms with what's happening to their hearts, and this process means that they open up.  Some women like to read about this -- the kind of women who read and write slash.  It's romantic; it's not what regular guys do; it answers a need within themselves for men who are tough guys on the outside and tender and loving on the inside.  The doyen of gay writers, Victor J Banis, credits female writers and readers with rejuvenating the genre of gay writing:

[Women] came to a genre that was all but dead, and kicked some life into it. Are some of them bad writers? Of course, but they don’t have an exclusive franchise on that either, being a gay male does not automatically make anyone a great writer either. In the end, for me, it’s all about the quality of the writing. And as I’ve said, I am devoted to this genre, and I think the fact that it is now thriving in a way that it hasn’t for 30 or 40 years is largely due to the influx of women writers and readers.

The second reason why women like men who grow to love each other and then get down to the hot and sweaty is simply that women can enjoy two guys together just as some straight men find two women together sexy.  Read this piece about women being turned on by two men having sex.  And think of the relationships in Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series where a straight woman has many lovers, most of whom are bisexual.

Anita Blake with two blokes. Image from Bishonen Works

Slash was created by straight women for other straight women.  The dynamic of love conquering all, of a forbidden love nevertheless flowering between two men, is a powerful and emotive one.  Add hot sex and ...  It certainly pushes my buttons, and I won't hesitate to say that some of the most erotic and moving m2m scenes I have ever read have been written by women.  Wet eyes and wet undies.  A signal achievement.

From Strictly Male, my review of Karin Lowachee's trilogy, I say this:

I remember a western, its name and author lost in the dim shadows of childhood, where two heroes – but they were nevertheless outlaws, for reasons I have forgotten – are escaping from a posse of good and upright citizens.  One is wounded, and dying, his blood soaking into his clothes and onto the saddle.  The other, his loyal and true friend, is riding with him, risking his freedom and his life, for he could make much faster progress by himself.  At eleven or twelve years old, this was the very essence of romance to me—two strong, manly, tough men staying together out of loyalty and friendship.  To me, a lonely, bullied outsider, a friendship like that was worth dying for.

The essence of slash:  tough and gritty exteriors covering warm, romantic, loving interiors.  And utterly male, even if they have sex with other men.

Very powerful.  

[The artwork is from P.L. Nunn's Bishonen Works, with classic examples of P.L. Nunn's slash art and writings.  Read more about her and other gay-shaded artists here]

[There are a whole heap of interesting, insightful and revealing comments from female (and one male) readers and writers of m/m  below.  Be sure to read them too]

[Update:  This article discusses the issue.  M/m is becoming mainstream.]

All Overish*

A coupla months ago I met on the train a guy I've known for 17 years.  When I first met him, he was 17, and I was 42.   He was in a ballet at my daughter's ballet school and he was cute as -- and obviously gay.  But I'm married and I try to be faithful, and anyway, even if I wasn't and didn't, I don't do 17 year olds. It's perfectly legal in Victoria. Nevertheless.  I used to see him on the train from time to time.  He was going to VCA ( Victorian College of the Arts), which has an attached high school for would-be thespians.

Rudolf Nureyev

Then he started as a ballet teacher (by then he was in his mid twenties) , and I went to him for lessons for a while.  Ballet is very intimate.  Your teacher has to show you how to do steps, how to stand, how to hold your body, head, arms, how to turn out your legs, and so on.  So there's this warm hand on you, pressing your back in or out a little, demonstrating how to improve turnout, kneeling in front of you arranging your feet into the correct line.  You are in lycra tights (with a dance thong, called a "dance belt", underneath).  He's in sweats, sometimes, and tights at others.  You are in a muck sweat from exercising, your T-shirt sodden, sweat in your groin and your bum-crack, sweat dripping off your face.  And there's this really, really nice bloke, gay, and frankly with a classic dancer's build (muscled legs, delicious bum, broad back, perfect posture) stroking you.  Well, thank goodness for padded 'dance belts' is all I can say! 

Anyway, he went overseas to pursue his career and I didn't see him for a few years.  Then I see this very handsome bloke on the train, and well, look, LOL.  And it's him.  "Nigel!"  He's genuinely really pleased to see me.  He's still cute, still slim and sexy, still very attractive.  He's even nicer than I remember.  And I get a strong impression that he might be interested in me.  He's broken up with his guy.  He's available.  He gives me his mobile number.  So as we're coming into his station, he stands up and I do too, to say goodbye, and the train lurches over some points, and suddenly I'm in his arms.  Male pectorals, male body, male arms, male stubble, male smell.  His blue eyes smiling at me, amused, accepting.  His hand light on my back.

All overish.

Am I going to phone him?  No.  I've always avoiding getting close to gay-shaded guys.  I'm not so strong-willed I can resist the desire and the need for male closeness.  Not that I would make love, but that I might grow too fond of him and get hurt in the process.  That's happened a couple of times to me in the past.  It makes me lonely, perhaps, to be cautious about friendships, because the truth is straight guys don't get it, and I try not to get too close to gay-shaded guys, but that's the way it is.  Suck it up, sunshine.

So. . .  A memory only.  But I think of him, and that moment, often.

[I talked about the beauty of ballet dancers' bodies before, here]

*"All overish" comes from one of Dorothy Sayers' novels, Clouds of Witness,  where Lord Peter Wimsey encounters a magnificently beautiful woman.

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.

Serendipity

Serendipity. Isn't it a wonderful word! Good old Horace Walpole and the eighteenth century enlightenment.

In this case, I meant that I find wonderful things when I start researching for the posts I write. Mostly -- though not always -- I'm looking for pictures to go with my rants. But as the Wikipedia item on serendipity says, an informed search, that is, one where you can see the usefulness and relevance of pictures or articles even if Google hasn't done the linkages for you, makes for some very satisfying discoveries.

I was looking for an image to go with my May-September Relationships piece, and I came across this website, a collection of images on non-western homosexuality.

A few thoughts popped into my head when I found it. First, it is a common lie from the Christian-Fascists that homosexuality is a western evil, introduced to noble savages by our degenerate culture. The images (and other work) suggest that the opposite is true: homophobia is the evil introduced by us into more primitive societies.


Consider for example the picture of the of the oh-so-Christian conquistadors murdering "sodomites". The brave Spanish soldiers are having a bit of a party, murdering evil gays. Look at their insouciant, even joyful attitudes. What fun it all is, to be sure. In Reay Tannahill's Sex in History, she describes how many pre-Columban cultures were tolerant of homosexuality. In one culture from meso-America, a young man was given a male slave to satisfy his hormonal urges on reaching adolescence. The big no-no wasn't gay sex, it was fathering a child with an inappropriate woman, because that created all kinds of obligations for the family. Better to let him get his rocks off with a young man. One wonders whether the scion of the family and his slave ended up fond of each other.

This familial reason for promoting adolescent homosexuality is probably one of the reasons the Greeks tolerated and even encouraged the pattern of a young man being taken in hand by an older to show him how to be a man -- a bisexual man -- something Mary Renault uses to great effect in her novels set in Ancient Greece. After all, the Greeks also exposed babies to control population.

So we have the thoroughly decent and endearing Spanish conquistadors murdering evil sodomites and then we also have a photograph of a indigenous American vase in the shape of two men fucking. You know, I think I'll just pop down to Target and get an anal sex jug. So much for homosexuality being a western import! (Reay Tannahill also says that the priests of the new imposed religion in Spanish America were always asking their parishioners to tell them during confession whether they'd had sex in the "proper vessel" -- the Indians used heterosexual anal sex as a birth-control device)


The next thought that struck me was one I've often mentioned: that in a world where it doesn't matter whether you have sex with your own or the "opposite" gender, bisexuality would be normal and widespread. Have a look at the charming picture of the Threesome in India, the glorious peacock eyes of all three participants, the one man up the other who is in turn fucking the woman. I love the way they have taken off all their clothes except their headdress. I love also the sublime looks on all their faces. Glorious.








The final thought was that perhaps May-September relationships are historically all too common. Look at the utterly charming painting of the Sheik and his boy enjoying a party in the garden. Maybe I should have chosen this image to illustrate my May-September piece.

Final point: it seems to me that the more you look, the more you dig, the more you find that gay and bisexual is universal, throughout all cultures and all times. And that when Judeo-Christianity is absent, mostly it's tolerated and in some cases even welcomed.

Dieux du Stade

It's French, mes amis. And it means 'Gods of the Stadium'. And they are. Young French rugby players, who seem to be leaner and more beautiful than their British, New Zealand, Ozzie or South African counterparts.

The new Dieux du Stade calendar, magnificently photographed by Tony Duran, is out. Just a few photos to whet your appetite and possibly wet your..... ahem.

One thing which intrigues me: the beaut blokes in these photos must know they're going to be perved at by all us homos. OK, there is prolly a huge female audience too, but the women I know don't much care for muscly guys, even as tastefully muscular as these guys. Does it bother them? One suspects not: ppl I know from Europe say that though they don't make a fuss about it, many, many youngsters these days don't much care whether their partner is male or female. The world is moving on from the either/or culture of 30 years ago. A sporty friend (American football and soccer) reckons that sportsmen (young ones) are comfy with touching other men and being close to them. Maybe. Jason Akermanis doesn't think so, as I've mentioned before. But then he's a nincompoop.

















There are other calendars of beaut sportsmen. But these are to my mind the best. And just imagine how sexy their accents are!

I'm off to take a cold shower.

Guilt, self-hatred and deceit.

Guilt, self-hatred and deceit: a deadly and toxic brew.

From the Blog Bi Like Me:

I had this feeling a while ago, and maybe you've had the same one. I obviously haven't been truthful and forthright to my wife and family about my bisexuality. But am I being punished? I may seem happy, I may act great. You may say, he's handsome, he's got a wonderful family and wife. You see me from the outside..but you don't know my insides are a bubbling cauldron of deceit, lies, and evilness. That's the way I feel sometimes. Sometimes I feel that god is punishing me for my actions. 

and: 

I could refrain from having sexual liaisons outside my marriage: I've tried..and unless I get castrated, not gonna happen. 'Nuff said? As a result of my choice to remain secretive, I am in a constant personality upheaval. Some days, I'm great. Relatively calm, pretty content. Other days, I'm downright nasty, unhappy and resentful. Unfortunately, I take it out on some of the people closest to me

and:

I'm constantly feeling the pull between my family and my desire to be with another man. There is always a conflict within me. The emotional roller coaster is terrible. A long time ago, after I first got married and had my experiments with other men I would be wrought with guilt. I'd swear off not only being with another man, but also everything associated with the action..like looking on the internet, chatting in chat rooms, etc. It doesn't work. The pull and attraction is obviously too great. I am clearly not the person people see me as. Those who know me would be shocked if they knew of my real life - my true feelings. In college, I was quite the lady's man My friends, family and co-workers see me as a stable, smart, honest, hardworking, loyal and loving father. ....don't assume that my sexual encounters are taken lightly. They are not. It is a cross I must bear, and if I wasn't worried about the affect on my kids lives, clearly there would be an easier way out of the constant internal struggle that I go through. I don't go there or do something because of my loyalty to them, and in spite of my unhappiness, I plod on..every day

It seems to me that we are born the way we are. We are born with (or they inexorably and inevitably develop within us) feelings towards men, feelings of love and desire. We try hard to be moral and decent, not just by the standards of society, but by our own perhaps more demanding standards. And we fail, too often. And then we endure guilt and self-hatred, and our lives are poisoned as a result. How much simpler it would be if the world quietly accepted that feeling love or desire for another man is not wrong or evil, but part of the natural continuum of human interaction, that in fact m2m love might even be noble and uplifting, and that in any case, we are what we are. A friend once said that asking someone to be straight if they are gay-shaded is like asking them to be two inches taller. We can't do it. And by trying to contort ourselves into the strict (& strait) paradigms demanded by the Christian-Fascists, we damage ourselves and those round us.

I am not unfaithful to my wife, because I love her and don't want to hurt her. But there is an aching void in me where I lack men: not for sex, but for love.