The Language of Love

by Arthur Bradbury

In the west we communicate largely through words, where in the east men speak to one another in ways which suggest the rich variety of life and that there is no one uniform language of love; men speak to one another with music, dance, and through elaborate gestures, and varied forms of sexual intercourse. In the west we also speak to one another through sexual intercourse, but in more stilted, rigid and superficial ways. The language of love, the whole idea of communication, is lost when sex is seen merely as procreation, or as a quest for genital pleasure. Increasingly, in marriage, men and women in our day are discovering some of what has long been known in the east, that sexual gestures may express and communicate a variety of emotions. To say this is not to minimize genital pleasure, but to point out that such pleasure is deepened, enhanced, enriched in exciting ways by the varied emotions which are communicated from one person to another.

Sex may, for example, communicate compassion or sympathy or grief. E. Quinterly has a story about a prisoner in a death cell who has gone to pieces as he faces execution. As the hour draws near the prisoner can no longer talk or control himself, and the prison guard comes to have great compassion for his prisoner in this terrible hour.

The guard wishes to sympathize and help in these last moments, but the prisoner's fear and torment have led him beyond the point where words can help. So as an expression of human compassion, the guard kneels between his prisoner's legs to give him succor. The guard was not homosexual, and had never performed the act before, but instinctively he found a way in depth beyond words to communicate the sympathy he really felt for another human being.

One may contrast this experience with the emotions felt and expressed through sexual intercourse by the young sailor, Querelle, in the novel of Jean Genet. Querelle commits a murder and knows himself now as murderer. He feels a terrible need to communicate his new feeling about himself, and yet he cannot tell anyone about the crime lest he betray himself. So he goes to a brothel to "execute himself" in a sort of sacrificial rite. He knew that sailors often gambled with the brute who ran the brothel, throwing dice to see who submitted to anal intercourse. But when he threw the dice Querelle cheated to lose, and openly, so that the patron would have no pity, but would "execute" him brutally. Later the patron of the brothel reported the incident to the policeman who was seeking the murderer, and the drama

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