The connection between my eros and my identity has certainly changed over the years. Nowadays pretty well the only thing I like about gay men is that they have sex with one another. The rest of it grows increasingly alien. Mr Donovan's diagnosis was, alas, all too on-point.
But that elemental psycho-physical gravitation between men...I know that 97%+ of the human race finds it odd --at best-- but to me it is as natural as breathing. I cannot really imagine myself otherwise. And having Mr B in my life I am very blessed and grateful to experience it quite regularly. Not just the sex, but the whole range of it. Which, of course, makes the sex exponentially better. I'm quite the lucky old dog.
In The Missing Myth, Gilles Herrada makes one point which is well worth considering, that the monotheistic West has no mythic space for same-sex eros. It can only function as an alien phenomenon. And that does damage to the souls of the homoerotically shaped, which remain homeless and haunted. (Explains a lot of "LGBTQ" culture.)
I forget what his take on gay marriage is but I think he was unenthusiastic for reasons similar to my own: marriage is heterosexual by nature and for gays to try to claim it doesn't change the archetypal fact that it can only ever be hand-me-down and ill-fitting drag for us. The whole "Marriage Equality" campaign struck me as lazy and cheap and, for a group which prides itself on its creativity, staggeringly derivative.
Not only does it erase the specificity of same-sex love, but it makes male-male and female-female partnerships equivalent and indistinct. I have often referred to it as "genderless marriage." IMHO, not only should the ritual form of two men binding themselves together have a different shape from that of a man and a woman, it should also be different from the rites of two women.
2 comments:
You and Mr. B are both lucky. I not only think the union between two men should be its own thing, I also think it should be innately private. It is between the two men in question. With a man and a woman, it is about the union of two families, that is not the case between two men. Furthermore, there is nobody to give either of the men away. If one of them does need to be given away, union is likely not a good idea. I guess there can be parents and friend present but, there is no reason why it cannot be done at will, in private and the ceremony a sexual ritual. Perhaps there are good reasons for there to be certain parallels with marriage in conduct of the ritual but I will leave that up to you to opine on.
-A
We are indeed lucky. Blessed, even. He was not the kind of guy I was looking for, but he's the best I've had...and in part, of course, because he did not fit my pre-conceived goal.
Historically, many bondings between men --blood-brotherhood style-- were private, just between them. And appropriately so. But there have been others where they were public and explicitly related to family. But these were all non-sexual in form.
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