The polite version is that while the culminating heterosexual act of intercourse produces children and is thus natural and lifegiving, the lack of this particular act makes the others which two men may enact, un-natural and barren or selfish.
The impolite version is that oral or anal sex, especially between two men, is disgusting, dirty and/or humiliating.
I note in passing, not by way of argument, that hetero sex has often been considered disgusting and dirty by many of it practitioners. Consider the manifold uses and meanings of the word "fuck" just in English. The vast majority of them are not pastel. And if I remember my theological history correctly, it was a breakthrough by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century to assert that sexual intercourse between married couples was not only not a sin --as Augustine had maintained for a millennium-- but a virtuous act, since it was the achievement of a natural God-given goal.
One of the practically inescapeable issues when reflecting on male-male sex is the threat of feminization. Humiliation and feminization are connected. Males are archetypally defined as penetrators, females as receptors. So it is not a far leap to read a receptor male as a female. This was the reason that Justinian gave in his code for executing homosexuals, because they were "traitors to the male race". And Leviticus chose to words its prohibition and sanction against "lying with a man as with a woman."
Outside the rare initiatory types of male-male sex, in ancient Greece or some South Sea island tribes, where the maleness of both participants is essential to the meaning of the ritual act, you have situational homosexuality, which ranges from comradely alliance to serial rape, in all-male worlds such as schools, military, prisons. This is not about sexual orientation but sexual frustration and most men return to sex with women outside those environments.
And in places like prisons or for much of history, after a defeat in battle, there is no clearer way to establish the clear and painful difference between the dominator and the loser than sexual penetration. Part of the rituals and rules of initiatory sex is precisely to preserve the male dignity of the initiate, so that his temporarily receptive role eventuates in his taking his place among the men.
And then you have the most common type of male-male sex, the transvestic, where there is indeed a sharp distinction between tops and bottoms, the masculine penetrator and the effeminate receptor. Men who fuck and men who get fucked. The rough trade and the queens, the machos and the locas, etc. Roles that are often incompatible; you are one or the other. In these societies, the bottoming male loses his right to male status, trading his honor for the shameful pleasure of being fucked like a woman.
Reading male-male sex through the lens of male-female sex seems almost inescapeable.
- One of the reasons I suspect my mother decided a few years ago that I was not really gay is that I am not effeminate and that the great majority of gay men she has known are. And my own sense of the un-integrated feminine in many gay men has been posted about before.
- Reminds me of years ago in the monastery. Our community was bilingual, so there was both English and French in the house. There was another monk living there, with the same name as me. He was a lover of musical theatre and costuming, very dramatic and fabulous, shall we say. A visiting French monk spent some time with us and then in conversation with another monk in our house, a friend of his, asked how X was, X being the name that I shared with this other fella. The monk asked which X did he mean and was told, "Mon Dieu, pas la danceuse, mais le butch!" In English, something like, "Good Lord, man, not the ballerina, the guy."
Mike Adams, a terrifically smart and funny and wholly unapologetically conservative writer, who cares not a whit for anyone's sensitive feelings, is quite unusually blunt. He thinks that any man who lets himself be penetrated, and thus humiliated, by another man must loathe himself and the man who does it must hate him. And further, the penetrator in anal intercourse must also hate himself to immerse his penis in a dirty anus.
Aw, Mike, tell us what you really think.
But Mike speaks a truth, a truth about why many people react so powerfully against the idea...well, really, against the image...of male-male sex.
For the sake of meaning, philosophical or theological, heterosexual intercourse, the penile-vaginal kind, has a definite advantage: a clear biological purpose. All you need do is establish a certain juridical status for the partipants (husband, wife) and, as it were, the act speaks for itself: penetration, ejaculation, fertilization, procreation.
But what kind of meaning, other than discomfort or transgression or dirt or humiliation, flows from the penetration of mouth by penis or anus by penis? The question might be asked of a male-female couple engaging in this, but the issue here is two men. Obviously, there is physicial pleasure involved or no one would be doing it. But the baggage of dirt and humiliation and feminization remains in the room.
Yet I am certainly not the only man who has experience of sex with another man and finds it, well, wonderful. Everything from heart-movingly tender to heartily rambunctious. And thoroughly masculine throughout, for both parties. Mike Adams and I are not talking about the same thing.
I have to do some other things now, but the word I have in mind for the next part of my rambling is alchemy. Alchemy was about a magical and hidden process that supposedly transmuted lead into gold. Is there an alchemy possible which transmutes the dangerous risk of the dirt and humiliation of male-male sex, oral and anal, into something honorable or more?
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