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by Brian McNaught
GAY NEWS-August 1978-11
A disturbed peace
Our allies, the sex educators, are now telling their audiences that a Iman who has one sexual encounter after another with women doesn't love women; he hates them, for if you love something, they reason, you don't use it carelessly and then. discard it. They are saying that "machismo" is another word for rape, because one of the apparent trappings of caricatured "masculinity" is dispassionate force. Moreover, they are insisting that the advertisements we see on television, in magazines and on billboards which depict scantily-clad women and men are not sexual; they're anti-sexual.
The basic premise is that sex is not and should never be portrayed as the prepetual pursuit of the multiple, simultaneous orgasm with another "body," but rather, sexuality is one of the wonderful, fun-filled ways we have available to us to express care and concern. Above all, they say, sexual expression demands responsibility.
While gay men and lesbians are certainly going through their own sexual matamorphosis insofar as we are only now beginning to discover from experience and from each other what homosexual love is, we nonetheless share with heterosexuals the same socio-religious and economic roots, and therefore share generally the same attitudes toward sex. Despite our many advances, we also frequently share the same distorted understandings of masculinity and femininity, the same adoration of youth and beauty. Perhaps, then, we ought to consider what we are communicating to each other with our advertisements, our language and our mannerisms. Is our message sexual or anti-sexual?. When I hear heterosexuals decry
the psychological effects of the "lay 'em and leave 'em" syndrome, I think about the stories I hear from friends who have vacationed on Fire Island or in Provincetown and the frustration they felt when the person they met on the beach got up out of bed after reaching orgasm, showered, dressed and began his search for another "close encounter." Although my friends knew that they might never again see the people they had sex with during that time, they nevertheless felt cheap, lonely and used.
When I hear the sex educators decry machismo, I ponder the new growth of leather flight jackets, short hair, mustaches and faded. blue jeans in the gay male community and I worry about what is happening to our self-concept. I see fewer smiles and more pocket handkerchiefs in the bars these days, and I wonder what it's saying about care and concern.
The "I Like the Box" cigarette advertisements of the straight world certainly have their counterparts in gay publications. It is difficult to find a service for rug cleaning or real estate in some magazines and newspapers without staring at Jack Wrangler's pectorals. I like Jack Wrangler's pectorals but I feel some how that someone is attempting to capitalize upon sexual frustrations in order to sell me insurance. Wrangler is presented as a piece of flesh to a buying public which is allegedly only interested in flesh.
faded jeans. I enjoy paging through a magazine and seeing one hunky number after another. That's what scares me and confuses me.
My problem with all of my own examples is that I like to fantasize about one sexual encounter after another with the Colt models. I like machismo and own my own flight jacket, occasional mustache and
Deep down inside I believe that sex is most beautiful when it expresses love, whether it be for the special "other" in one's life or for the many special others in one's life. I know too that being raised in an Irish Catholic environment has done bad things to my concept of sex, self, the world, sin and guilt. Yet, even aware of that, I think that I am being equally manipulated by the "image makers" in the gay community,
The gorgeous bodies which constantly dominate our more popular publications have made 93 per cent of the gay men in this country feel. inadequaté about their own bodies. Now, I made up that statistic, but I would bet my collection of Mandates that I'm right. Even people who have every reason to be proud of their physiques are intimidated by the fantasies of others. What is worse, I would wager that the majority of people who are involved in g gay relationships are dissatisfied with the bodies of their lovers. That's not healthy.
I think we have all been co-opted. Despite our protest that we are unique and that we have something new to say to the world, I think we are responding to heterosexuals like well-trained lab rats. We decry the way they objectify women and put them in the role of sex object, but we turn around and do the same to ourselves. They tell us we are not real men and real women, so we men dress up in all the costumes we have seen in John Wayne movies. They tell us we are human garbage, and we respond by using each other and then throwing each other away.
I think we have something unique to say to heterosexuals about sex and love and mental health, but we seem to be taking more steps backward than we do forward. In honesty I am, at this moment, less concerned about what gifts we have to offer the world than I am about what this whole process is doing to me as a person. Sometimes it really scares
me.
Between the Covers
(Continued from page 8)
Press, $4.95). Mr. Lane has singlehandedly restored my faith in literature and Timothy Leary. And he does not use the word 'darling'at all!
He uses words instead the way that a sculptor uses marble. His prose is lean, sharp, invigorating. He kept a journal while travelling through Guatamala, where he recorded subjects as diverse as Latin-American
boys, the sensuality of the jungle, and what seems to be his main interest, namely, the decline of Western civilization and traditional forms of expression. He does not like language, even though his own flows effortlessly. In reflecting on one of the boys he 'loves,' he writes, "Even if I had words for his expressionless stillness, what could I say about his movements and his smile?"
Voeller nominated
(Continued from page 7)
the ACLU and gay groups to decide where test cases can be beneficially brought."
Such a strategy would take into into consideration the policy of the United States Supreme Court, said Voeller. Since it has been the Supreme Court's policy not to hear. gay-related cases, the favorable decisions reached in the lower courts would remain final.
As examples, Voeller cited the Oklahoma state law authorizing local school boards to refuse to hire homosexuals and the Briggs Propo-
sal in California, which, if passed, would have the same import. He said that repeal of the Oklahoma law is unlikely, while chances for repeal in California look good due to that state's history of liberal court decisions.
Voeller praised the American Civil Liberties Union for its past efforts on behalf of gay rights. "It has done a splendid job in being supportive," he said. Voeller hopes that, if elected to the National Board, he will be able to "bring gay cases up to a level of respectability equal to cases such as free speech and women's rights."
The rest of the work answers that question. Mr. Lane is in love with his emotions and the larger world of feelings. He says that the "(main) thing is to develop the peripheral mind." I disagree. That is why I am fond of big cities and Erskine Lane loves Guatemalan villages. But unlike me, he is talented, even visionary, which just goes to show how decadent urban dwelling has become. Make no mistake: His diary is not a series of random reflections. At times his journal is as electifying as that of the Goncourt brothers, and even more intelligent than this century's two most famous belle-lettrists, Anais Nin and Ned Rorem. It is his vision I have problems with. I cannot accept statements like, "To have no art. Just to do everything well... always more wholly inside the present moment, not drawn out by the memory of past wrongs..."
This is the stuff of the 1960s. Its dreamy nature is just that: hallucinatory. If everyone possessed this Timothy Leary/all-embracing vision, which they can't, and if everyone became rivetted to the moment, which, having just been mentioned, is now part of the past and thus does not. (Continued on page 22)