This topic was spurred by some thoughts about
Milk, which
I reviewed/discussed yesterday.
One aspect of Milk that caught my attention was the depiction of Harvey's love life. Throughout the movie, which covered about 9 years of his life, Harvey had sex with two guys, both of them relatively long term relationships. (The personal details as presented in the film don't mesh with
Harvey's biography on wikipedia, but that's another issue.) Harvey met Scott, a younger white guy in NYC, and they moved to SF together and stayed together (without any signs of cheating or serious discord) for 6 or 7 years. They eventually broke up when Scott couldn't take Harvey's endless political campaigning and the fact that he was putting the gay movement first. Harvey was then alone for about a year (hard to precisely judge the time flow in the film) until he met Jack, a somewhat nutty but seductive and free spirited Latino guy. Harvey and Jack were together for a year of drama (from Jack) while Harvey's career finally took off, until Jack eventually killed himself because he was unbalanced and very needy. Harvey got over that in like, a day, and devoted himself to his work.
Leaving aside the issue of how true to life this is (not very), it's a remarkably non-sexual life for any single, powerful, prominent man to lead, especially an openly gay man living the pre-AIDS era in San Francisco.
Scott, the first boyfriend, remained a character in the movie, and he and Harvey stayed friends and looked to be heading towards a possible reconciliation at the end, just before Harvey's death. One thing Scott said during a meeting while Harvey's crazy second BF was still alive spurred this post. They'd brought their dates to the same party; Harvey with the crazy Latino guy, Scott with his new BF, and during a moment of private conversation Harvey said to Scott, "You can do better." Scott shrugged and said, "He keeps me away from the bars."
I noticed that at the time, and thinking it over later, it's an interesting way to view a relationship. Almost as a necessary evil; a way to stave off the cravings or opportunity to do worse things.
A slight digression: while researching video games and addiction and other issues for my senior project last year, I read a number of scholarly papers in which mental health practitioners and patients praised
World of Warcraft and other such games for the good they did for people with addictive personalities. Yes, WoW will suck your life away, but better a computer game than truly dangerous, expensive, life-destroying addictions like booze or drugs. It's bizarre to think about, but a non-negligible number of those crazy people with multiple level 80 alts are actually using their 8+ hours a day of WoW as a form of self-medication.
Back on the topic at hand, I found myself thinking about
Milk last night while procrastinating other projects and working up to writing my irrelevant review of the film. Specifically, the gay lifestyles as shown in the movie. They were largely desexualized; probably to give the film more appeal to straight mainstream audiences. Harvey has 2 long term boyfriends, only 2 other guys in the movie are ever shown engaging in sex (during a victory celebration), and there isn't any public nudity or sexual deviancy (other than some campy drag queens), no orgies, or anonymous hook ups, or cottaging, etc.
I'm not complaining about this; the film focused on Harvey's political efforts, with his personal life important only as it related to larger public events. The movie wasn't about life in the Castro, or the gay bathhouse scene, etc. It made me think about how so many gay men actually do behave though, and how wildly different it was from what we saw in the film, and from the lives of most heterosexual men. It's quite possible for your average (or below average) gay men to go out to a bar or a park or some other cruise spot, and get laid (well, at least a blow job) just about any night they wish. Consensually! I'm not talking about hiring a whore, though that's sometimes necessary. (Heterosexual guys can do that too.) Most of the time no money need change hands, and true, you might not get the hottest guy in the bar, but you'll likely meet interested in quick sex, happy to reciprocate whatever you do to them, and not interested in giving a thought to dating or even trading phone numbers or names. If you're a straight guy, try to imagine that? Three or four or six nights a week you could go to a bar, hang out for an hour or two, and be almost guaranteed to get laid, without needing to be all dressed up, to have a great convincing rap, having to lie, to make promises of love and commitment, etc. I think that, for most straight guys, is inconceivable. Pun intended.
Sure, there are straight men in that situation, but they're exceptional. Rock stars, tycoons, pro athletes, etc. Some .001% of the male population with enough "eligible" in their "bachelor" (or not; lots of them are married) to create a situation where attractive women will relax all of their usual rules and requirements and will indulge in sex without a relationship or any long term promises or agreements. The key difference is
not that only that tiny 0.001% of straight men want easy, eager, anonymous sex. It's that they are the only type of straight men who can get it! Women just aren't interested in that, except in rare instances (some women like it, lots more women like it at one time in their lives with very special men).
Also, let's be clear that not all gay men are into cruising and anonymous sex of that type, and even those who are at some point aren't into it forever. That's what Scott's comment in
Milk reminded me of. He liked his post-Harvey boyfriend since it kept him out of bars.
As Chef said, "Meaningless sex is fun for 20 or 30 years, but after that it starts to get old."
I'm not going to debate the pros or cons of this practice; I'm more interested in contemplating it as a reality. I can't imagine it, personally. I've never had sex with a woman I didn't know fairly well, either as friends for at least weeks, or from dating a number of times. I have had (
usually realizing it in retrospect) that I've had a few opportunities for hook ups with female strangers, but they weren't interesting to me at the time, for various reasons. Admittedly, I never go to bars or clubs or other places to hang out where slutty women might be found. But even if I did, the vast majority of men who try that go home alone, or require welder's thickness beer googles to get aroused by their catch.
A slight digression: Years ago, when I lived in San Diego, I was friends with most of the guys who worked at a video game arcade near SDSU. I would hang out there several nights a week, and through skillful application of social engineering skills and various minor favors and gifts, I eventually enticed most of them into hanging around after closing time and sucking my cock. Wait... what? No I mean we'd stay there after closing and put the games on free play for an hour or three. This was in the days before computer games or console games were up to the technological snuff of arcade games, especially in terms of multiplayer components, and it was great to get hours of head to head battles or even just solitary practice time on Street Fighter Alpha or some other game that usually had a crowd waiting to play. And since being the best at video games was important to me at that time, I valued the experience highly. But even then I often got bored and just hung out there out of habit, or because it was free and I was getting something other people wanted and couldn't have. I'd tell myself to stay home and write that night, but I'd been in all day, or I was tired after RL work and wanted to be out and unwind a bit, etc. And since it was free, and easy, I often did.
In that light, I can kind of understand the lingering attraction and addiction of cottaging or gay bar/bathhouse action. Even if you're growing sick of doing something, just the fact that you can do it, for free, makes it hard to stop doing. It becomes a habit, you get some ego boost out of it, you know other people would love to do it if they were allowed to, etc. And I was just playing arcade games for free; imagine how much more compelling it must be to get sex; the single strongest drive afflicting the male of our (and most other) species?
And that's why I can't imagine what it would be like to know I could just go to some bar a block from my apartment and get sex. Well, I mean with someone I want to have sex with. I live 20 miles from the setting of Milk and I'm not hideously disfigured; if I wanted to visit a gay bar and see what all that sex was like first hand (so to speak) there's nothing stopping me. But since I'm attracted to women, and since women are not wired to want sex the way men do, it seems almost like science fiction to contemplate it.
The funny thing is that I don't want that. Or at least I don't
think I want that. Possibly I'm just telling myself I don't want it since I can't have it? It's easy for me (and most other "nice guys") to say I don't want "meaningless" sex of the type
Chef talks about, but since I've never had it, and will likely never have easy access to it, how do I know? The straight guys who can nail groupies seem to enjoy them to the best of their ability, though eventually most straight men get tired of those sorts of games and settle down (while still indulging in some "strange" when the occasional presents itself).
Sure, sex is a drive for me, and as I've met various women in real life and through online dating, I see how sexual urges and attraction work. I feel far more interested in spending time with and getting to know the women I find sexually attractive than the ones I'm just so-so about. But I sublimate the interest in sex into a larger interest, since I don't just want them for their bodies. Having been in love with someone I got to sleep with, I know how much better sex is when there's a strong emotional aspect to it. Like virtually every other man (and quite a few women) alive, I'm horny enough that I'm not putting love as a prerequisite for sex, but I am holding to a standard that I have to at least really like her before I will have sex with her. However again, since that's the standard almost all women hold men to... am I really making that choice, or just finding a way to rationalize and agree with one that's been forced on me?
In a weird way, I think that the psychology of most gay men is closest to the psychology of straight men at a younger age. When a lot of straight guys are in their teens or maybe college years, quite a few of them see relationships and talking and interaction with women largely as a means to an end. They don't want to talk or romance or date; they just want pussy. They (at least the more successful of them, a fraternity that did not include me at that age) have just learned that those other things are required in order to get said pussy.
Between men and women who are starting to date, there is a usually unspoken but widely understood arrangement; the man wants sex, and the woman might be willing to give it to him, if he proves himself worthy to her. That proving takes a different form from man to man and for each woman, but most of the participants are well aware of the game going in. That dynamic is radically altered when gay men are involved, since they both want the same thing and they both know what the other one wants. That's one element of gay courtship that was fairly accurate in Harvey. Despite the fact that he was with an absurdly low number of partners; both of his boyfriends were total strangers when they met, and yet they were kissing within seconds, and fucking within minutes.
Straight men (homophobic ones especially) often rail against this sort of promiscuity, but I think a lot of their whining and condemning is born of jealousy. Not that they want gay sex themselves (
though that's
not uncommon either), but they resent that other people get to have all the sex they want while they can't themselves. Speeches moralistically condemning homosexuality very often include comments about promiscuity, so it's not just that they're fags, it's that they're successful fags!
Ironically, when the subject turns to bastard babies on welfare, the condemnation usually falls on the mothers. They're sluts and whores for giving it up and getting pregnant, while the men who fuck 'em and leave 'em are not much blamed for their behavior. They might be blamed for not "taking care of they kids" but there's hardly ever any criticism of their sexual behavior. It's women our society holds responsible for moderating and controlling sex; men are supposed to fuck any woman who will let them. Unless they're gay men, in which case society says they're wrong in general, and doubly wrong for doing it so often.
Funny how that works.
Labels: dating, gay, gender issues, sex
