my life in an Escher drawing, round and round, without much cognitive progress
Sometimes even the most well-intended sex-positive intellectually-minded heterosexuals exasperate me a bit.
Because no amount of mood stabilizer can stop thoughts on this particular subject from circling incessantly through my brain…
There’s this male sex blogger out there whose blog I occasionally drop notes into. Sometimes the guy writes like Dan Savage at his crankiest, which is to say that he often projects his own experiences of human sexuality perhaps a little farther than is reasonable for humanity at large. For example, he seems to find it inconceivable that there are any normative circumstances under which a man would engage in sex with someone in the absence of some base-level rapport (e.g. not even transactional sex with a prostitute), and my thought is that this blogger has clearly never heard about hooker strolls, where perfectly normative men go specifically to do just that with sex workers they may never have laid eyes upon before, or the guy hasn’t even objectively considered the reality of men on Saturday nights at nightclubs, particularly the guys who end up wearing beer goggles at two in the morning (I mean, come on, if Mickey Gilley can go to number one on the charts with “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time,” then surely the zeitgeist was in on the concept at some point prior to 1976).
It follows, perhaps not logically or naturally, but nonetheless sequentially, that this blogger also seems to have difficulty wrapping his mind around the notion that a heterosexually-identified man might, under certain circumstances, choose to avail himself of incidental, and some might say recreational, male-to-male physical intimacy, even, as unsavory as the concept might seem at first blush, venturing into unofficially constructed public sexual spaces to do so.
I say this with full realization that the awareness of these types of nominally covert spaces within our culture is limited within the general populace, and likely emphatically so, given legal and social opprobrium for public sex overall, and male/male contact in particular, and so I can certainly understand why a blogger for whom this type of sexual expression is entirely foreign might have difficulty grasping even the potential for it, much less that fact that it’t exercised with substantial frequency in most reasonably urban areas the world over.
The exasperating part is that, me being a gay man that doesn’t present himself as any sort of sanctioned behavioral authority, he doesn’t really want to take my word for it, empirical/anecdotal as my presumptive evidence might be. I took it upon myself, then, to actually find some published (if only on the web, even) text somewhere that said the things I perhaps don’t have the practical or suitably academic language to phrase sufficiently, unwarranted as undertaking such research might be.
Such behavioral bisexuality - in which a male may find sexual release with another male while still desiring fulfillment with a female - is driven not by identity and inner disposition but rather by thwarted sexual urges that find release through means that the actor finds pleasurable but less than ideal. In a patriarchal environment where homosexual identity is severely censured, the same men who behave in bisexual ways might also condemn their same-sex partners, make homophobic statements, or participate in violence against those seen as homosexual. Such behavioral bisexuals do not perceive themselves to be homosexual even though they participate in acts of “situational homosexuality.”
[…]
Such a behavioral bisexual desires sexual intercourse with women and may marry and procreate even if he indulges in same-sex intercourse before marriage or while married. When this kind of behavioral bisexuality is common (either because intercourse with females is restricted or because active males expect pleasure from whomever allows her- or himself to be penetrated), it obscures “dispositional homosexuality” wherein a man sexually desires another male or a woman desires another female due to inward disposition.
[…]
…[S]ociological research and human rights activists refer to other kinds of behavioral or situational bisexuality as “male-to-male” sex, indicating that such sexual activity is not driven by identity or disposition but rather by other forces.
- Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, pp 10-12
I admit that this quote from text is slightly decontextualized, since the author was looking at sexual behavior in Muslim men living in environments of stringent pre-marital sexual segregation, but the fundamental principles hold true even for non-Muslim men in significantly less gender-isolated situations, especially in my experience.
To be clear, “situational bisexuality” is not a term intended to be interchangeable with the more pejorative “on the down-low,” generally used in reference to a man primarily inclined to homosexuality and closeted, absent obligation to sexually pursue or engage with men due to the general or specific unavailability of women for sex, whether the man in question identifies in the way that this author refers to as “dispositional bisexuality” should he choose to publicly acknowledge his same-sex behavior.
Of course, the aforementioned Mr. Savage has his own particular, perhaps more specifically and contemporaneously applicable read on it in more accessible vernacular, as I’ve referenced before:
In the long, sordid, pre-Stonewall, pre-modern-gay-rights-movement history of homosexuality, there was a long and time-honored tradition of gay men servicing straight-identified and straight men, helping them drain their balls, because access to pussy is restricted, and it’s harder to get women in the sack than men. Gay men used to be like the “fire bucket brigade” for cum, and we would get it out of straight guys’ nutsacks so that they could be sane, and go home to the wife who wasn’t fucking them. For a long time it was called “trade;” we’re sort of a safety-release valve for a lot of straight male spunk.
Then comes the modern gay rights movement and the idea that it’s not just gay to give a blow job but to accept a blow job (or a hand job) from a guy, and everything changed. That seems - as the idea of heteroflexibility takes hold, as the idea that a guy can have an erotic experience with another guy and not necessarily be gay or have to identify as gay, or even bi - you’re seeing a bit more blurring of the lines, particularly among liberal college-educated weirdos. And there are more guys out there [now] who can lay back and throw an arm over their eyes and think of Angelina Jolie while some dude massage therapist ups his tips by draining [their sacks for them].
Of course, I could be unintentionally misconstruing many things written in the guy’s blog, both to me directly as well as more rhetorical commentary, in which case, I may be mildly embarrassed for talking out of turn about things that everyone including this blogger already understands.
Were I inclined to think about it more in-depth at this point (and I probably will until the Lunesta kicks in, whether I want to or not), I would probably find a way to logically and explicitly extrapolate the concept of situational sexuality to a point where it transcends issues of gender, interpersonal, or aesthetic preferences, but for now I think a Billy Preston line suffices in the way of explanation, however semantically/romantically slanted by Stephen Stills: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
Or something like that. I don’t think there’s a musically pleasant way to work the word spooge in there, but it may well go without saying.