in the early 60's I was raped by a man familiar to me, and that incident was never acknowledged. Somewhere along the line of my life I learned that spending dignity could buy a lot. In 1966, I purchased a sense of security and a feeling of control (I needed both desperately) by enticing my older brother's friends to have sex with me. I was eight, and they were twelve. They certainly had their own unmet needs, and our reciprocal exchange might be seen as mutually beneficial. But the commerce of dignity is never benign.
My childhood was corrupted by cynical manipulations that usually begin—if at all—much later in a person's life. Now I am forty-two and I have squandered far more than my life's quota of dignity—in the bushes, in men's rooms, and in bedrooms forgotten. To retire this accumulated debt will require actions of extraordinary profit. With this mandate I begin.
we have sold our souls to the sex-police; close the baths, fear bodily fluids, and pledge your allegiance to the tyrrany of a renewed Puritanism: Permit passion only on cue, for sex is bad and AIDS is proof. Being gay is no longer a vocation—as it was once—to challenge intellectual repression, and promote sexual liberation. Gay in 2001 is increasingly defined by an excess of disposable income, and an indistinguishability from the mainstream of society. We have taken refuge in the mainstream in denial of our own fears, and in so doing, we have tended to confirm suspicions—both within our community, and in society at large—that something is wrong with us.
Confrontational queerness has been assassinated by sharp strategists of political correctness. The New Gayness tells us to be vocal, but ONLY correctly so. While in line at the supermarket checkout, don't stare at your boyfriend's ass while imagining your shaft disappearing there-in. No French kissing anyplace in public. In general, do everything you can to de-sexualize the gay stereotype. Couples can do this by tastefully suggesting they might be gay—never by any expression of sexual desire, untame passion, or lust, but rather by a subtle, creepy synchrony of thought and motion, bland and non-threatening—all the while emphasizing their social compliance and palatablilty. Correctly executed, the New Gayness can supplant 'Silence' in the equation Silence = Death.
Individuals in the New Gayness can acceptably be vocal by advocating only for those rights that we obviously deserve but have been ridiculously denied. Even though the debate surrounding such rights has been joined (and ennobled) by heroes like Dr. Grethe Cammermeyer (the US Army Colonel discharged for being a lesbian) and Sharon Smith (whose spouse, Diane Whipple, was recently slaughtered by a white-supremicist's attack dog, and who is seeking to set a legal precedant which would afford same-sex life-partners some of the same rights as married couples), nonetheless the debate has also become a kind of ceremonial stage for people—both gay and straight—who are afraid to fight a real fight; a proxy battlefield wherein both they and we can safely encamp and appear engaged in our respective struggles while avoiding everything that really scares us or challenges us to change and grow.
For example, should we, alongside our fight to obtain marriage rights, also fight to change social prohibitions against intergenerational sex? You need not envy Queer as Folk's Brian in one extreme, nor hate NAMBLA in the other extreme in order to care about that; indeed a society is judged by the trueness with which it respects the rights of those who are least favored within it. Should queers, not by virtue of our minority status but by virtue of our citizenship, fight against draconian abuses of due process? Of course we should, but will we oppose those particular abuses which are keeping so-called sexual predators locked up well beyond the limits of their lawfully imposed sentences? Will we defend our right to free speech, even when that means defending Fred Phelps' right to express contempt for us? In the arena of public debate, will we be brave? Will we raise the issues that threaten the status quo—even within our own community? Will we raise our queerness—our different-ness—as a sacramental monstrance before all the world in celebration of all our uniquenesses and diversity?
Some among us seem to think that we should make who and what we are less threatening, and imitate the dysfunctions and pseudo-intimacy of conventional relationships in order to be accepted. I say if we must forfeit our individual truths to gain acceptance, then I don't want acceptance. Give me Stonewall back again. It was a time when those who hated us knew it wasn't right, but murdered us anyway, and didn't pretend to care. And it was a time when we lived lives full of lust and vigor, and a time when we suffered and died at the hands of bigots who were proud of their fear and bigotry. Now, it seems to me, we live our lives less, and we die of our own fears.
I like a big stiff cock up my ass, and if keeping such things a secret is how the New Gayness wants us to parlay social acceptance, then I am a liability. I also like the park on warm summer nights, after midnight, and there to plant myself between the smooth globes of a tight ass, and deeply into a horny boi who doesn't want it safe.
straight people have sex. Gay people have sex. That's not what they hate us for. They hate us because the way we do it rocks the boat, the way we love rattles their cob-webby cages, and blows wind up their multitudinous petticoats. For this they want us to die—or at least to stop being gay. They don't care if I plow a cock-hole, or take a man up my ass. It's my refusal to deny that I do these things, my refusal to fear them and my refusal to keep it all a secret that challenges their structure of social order, and their own concept of sexuality within themselves. It is not us they fear, but themselves. And that is the greatest fear of all. If we back-off from our fight for liberation—not only the liberation of ourselves, but the liberation of this whole society—then we will have disserved ourselves, disserved our world, and disserved our own lives. As gay men and women, if we back off from our fight for liberation, then we deserve our self-contempt—and we might as well be straight.
I refuse to back off.
These views will reduce my invitations to parties among my remaining straight friends, and make me persona non grata within my own community—among gays, lesbians, bi-sexual and transgendered women and men, and within each of the threatened minorities who have set aside integrity and made a pact with the majority to maintain harmonious relations. The bull-dykes on motorcycles and the drag-queens in fab attire are barely tolerated within the confines of 'gay pride day', while complaints rise up from the New Gayness of, "They make us look bad," and "That's not who we are." Beyond the parade, the New Gayness approves of outrageousness (like drag) only as a purely commercial form of performance art; they can let it go as long as they can tell themselves that the outrageousness is an act for the money, that you are not actually outrageous yourself.
the New Gayness means being queer without integrity; it encourages us to heavily drape our outrageous queerness with layers of political salability and acceptance-seeking social behavior. The New Gayness seeks to present a powerful and unified political front by creating only the appearance of unity, which is useful briefly, but tends over time to suffocate diversity and defeats true unification within. The foundation of our unity lies within each one of us as we discover and live-out our truth.
Getting in touch with, and celebrating our true selves—especially if we are different and do not fit-in—gives others the opportunity and the courage to acknowledge, accept, and celebrate in themselves a truer self. To get in touch with and celebrate who I truly am is a vocation I accept with tears and trembling; for if it were not so obviously the right thing to do, I would run the other way and never stop running.
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