"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth."
Song of SongsOpening line
Song of SongsOpening line
A friend gave me one of the Mary Renault novels this past year.
A lot of male-male erotics, but all within a societal assumption
about male honor and dishonor.
A classical notion liberal society finds laughable,
living now only in the military, I suspect.
I provoked a lot of on-line yelling this week
by going to an "independent" gay site
and asking rather combatively
why transgenderism is now included canonically
in the LGBT community.
What has same-sex desire got to do
with wanting to be chemically and surgically
altered into your contra-corporal gender?
The least hysterical and non-tactical answer
was that LGBTs all transgress normative
gender behavior expectations. By sexual object
choice or gender identity, LGBTs break the
norms of male/female gender rules.
When I asked if hetero males who get a
thrill from cross-dressing should be included,
I got a loud Yes.
So it appears that the larger ideology is about
gender, not about sexual desire.
And the underlying Evil Dominator was,
of course, masculinity, aka, patriarchy.
Surprise!
More than ever I cannot identify anymore
with LGBT thing.
Although I am aware of the challenge involved,
and the prima facie unlikelihood of cocksucking
and buttfucking as vehicles for this,
it seems to me that my experience of male-male
eros has mostly always been a celebration precisely of
masculinity.
And symbolically dense as those two
items on the erotic menu may be,
my own sense of where the center of gravity
lies in male-male eros is
the kiss.
To me, everything else is already there
there.
This is the alchemical gesture.
Once the mutual recognition,
Once the mutual recognition,
invitation, exploration,
challenge, intimacy
challenge, intimacy
is established there,
then all the apparently more
explosive symbolic sex acts
and the whole rhythm of
physical and emotional power exchange
between two males
between two males
is set in its right archetypal context,
be it the love of the older man and younger man,
or the love of comrade brothers.
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1 comment:
Hear, hear! In a million years I could not have expressed this better myself, and yet I find myself having similar disagreements with friends over this same subject. (Usually attached to the conversation where I state that we cannot overcome homophobia until we address the pervasive underlying misogyny in the culture. But that's another rant entirely.)
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