Being Gay

[meridannight]

You said you see being gay as a more masculine thing, I see it that way, and I know @meridannight does as well.

I'm posting too much tonight, but I have a theory on this particular subject.

Yes, male homosexuality is a more masculine state, in my opinion.

As for the feminization of gay men by the culture/straight community: I think this is at least partially due to the fact that men with male partners were historically forced to refer to their partners as 'she' in public or in the company they didn't trust. When they talked about a man they loved they felt necessary for one reason or another to refer to him as 'my woman', 'my girl' and equivalent in such company.

My theory is, that it is from this background that the feminization came by in the first place. (Someone -- maybe myself when I get the time -- should run the comparisons between the Western civilization and China/Japan in this respect, to see if it has any plausibility). As far as I know, I am the only one who has suggested this. I think this can explain it at least in parts. If you imagine a society where homosexuality has always existed and been visible and acceptable alongside heterosexuality, I do think such a society would not suffer from de-masculinization of gay men, or suffer from it to a significantly reduced and less serious degree.

Also, in the past, men who wanted to accompany their male partner in public sometimes (rarely, but it happened) dressed up as a female to be able to do so. There are historical cases of this. I'm not so sure on the influence of this one, but it would be interesting to know how it links to the practice of drag.

[LJay]

Meridannight, you have some very intersting things to say and reading them makes me want to say a couple of things, not in aargument, but just as a different viewpoint.

I see Michelangelo's David as being very alive. The elongated arm shows potential action and the cherubic face casts eternal youth over the figure. That's just what I see and, being a piece of art, the work can just as easily say that to me as it can say what you see to you.

And then there is this:

"If you imagine a society where homosexuality has always existed and been visible and acceptable alongside heterosexuality, I do think such a society would not suffer from de-masculinization of gay men, or suffer from it to a significantly reduced and less serious degree."

Is not Late Roman culture an example of this? No one that I know considers the men of that era as anything but "masculine" though homosexuality was open and familiar in society.

[TwisttheLeaf]

Did you ever have to go into the place. Well I got drug in there and my nose nearly bled.

Try being drug in there by your twin sister to "critique".

[InbetweenDreams]

Try being drug in there by your twin sister to "critique".

How? I couldn't figure out how anyone could tell the difference between the things they were smelling lol

I don't even really care for cologne for that matter... I'll wear it every once in a while but the stuff I have now will probably be around when I'm 40 -- I don't think it will be any good by then but I don't know how the stuff keeps.

[mrex]

if i were str8, ithink i would be quite the same as now but smelling like a fish desk in a store sometimes at nights...

[Emiliano]

Try the thought exercise I provided in my last post. I just edited it into that post, not sure if it shows for you.

For me, knowing a back story can influence how I feel about something/someone. With people more so, I try to limit the way I treat them by my own experiences with them. I tend to be a forgiving person.

I get what your saying, and its a valid and interesting point. But it also detracts from the bigger point I was making. Thats why I said you were being too literal. David was just an example I pulled because its often been considered the ideal male form, or at least an example of one. Not the ideal whole package or perfect partner. Just in terms of male physical beauty. Outside of Botero or Giacometti, it is often the physical strength that is being celebrated about the male form.

I mean, its not a point that I expected anyone to argue against - whether we are talking about historic artistic depictions or modern day ones in pop culture - ideal men are generally portrayed as muscular, strong and women as thin and delicate. At least physically. That's changing some in the modern era I think, but its not yet so different as to be a radical departure from male and female depictions of hundreds of years ago.

Thats all I was getting at with the inclusion of David, and the joke that no one looks at him and says "what a nice personality". Though now after talking to you, I'll always associate him with beating women and dogs. And that certainly does decrease his beauty in my mind. But to be honest, he's not my type anyway.

[meridannight]

I see Michelangelo's David as being very alive. The elongated arm shows potential action and the cherubic face casts eternal youth over the figure. That's just what I see and, being a piece of art, the work can just as easily say that to me as it can say what you see to you.

Of course. Different people have different interpretations. We all have a different background, after all. We are not blank slates gazing upon a work of art. We bring our past, upbringing, education/culture, and our very core essence into it.

"If you imagine a society where homosexuality has always existed and been visible and acceptable alongside heterosexuality, I do think such a society would not suffer from de-masculinization of gay men, or suffer from it to a significantly reduced and less serious degree."

Is not Late Roman culture an example of this? No one that I know considers the men of that era as anything but "masculine" though homosexuality was open and familiar in society.

I am not so sure about the Romans. They had their issues with the passive partners, and considered the latter a different (lesser) kind of male than the penetrating partner (although they couldn't have mostly known which one was which, so they must have done a lot of assuming along the way. And the process of assuming follows prejudice of its own).

What the contemporary people think of Romans is largely irrelevant, because they were not there to witness anything either way, and most people can imagine things to have been the way they want them to have been. So it is that Caesar's homosexual affairs were ''just rumors'', and even for relatively later figures such as Michelangelo their homosexuality was/is just ''malicious gossip''. People believe what they want to believe.

Even those historical figures whose homosexuality cannot be cast aside through such arguments, suffer from character deformation and their sexuality gets associated with decadence and immorality (Philip II of Macedon, for example). So homosexuality is portrayed as either feminine or decadent. It's a bias characteristic to the Western cultural sphere. Ancient China and Japan did not suffer from it.

China and Japan are the only examples (except for, maybe, some micro-cultural spaces in Europe at different times) I know where male relationships were seen as fully natural and just as authentic alongside the heterosexual relationships.

Greece, of course, could also be an example. But Greece, too, is rather problematic, because most of the homosexual relationships that are documented were between adults and prepubescent boys, or boys a few years (2-5) older than the prepubescent boys they were with (which doesn't exactly make it an adult-child relationship, but it was a temporary thing not expected to survive the growth of the younger's facial hair). (Note that in Greece, puberty started later than in our time!! Altogether four years later than it starts now, it is thought). That's not an adequate reflection on homosexuality. There were exceptions, but by far the man-child dynamic dominates the picture.

[LJay]

[COLOR="Red"]"For you personally, is being gay something that is strictly an attraction to your own gender, or do you think it influences other aspects of who you are as well? Like if you suddenly met a straight version of yourself, how different or similar would you two be?

What does gay mean in terms of an identity? Your personal identity or a broader social/cultural one. " [/COLOR]

Well, I am sober as I begin to reply to this though I am about to have a bit of Irish to free me. God knows what it will do to the 18 lovely things I take each day for various ailments. This however is a serious enough question for a dour Scot to seek help from the neighbors.

No, being gay is not merely a matter of going for the guys. It sways all of me and has since I was a boy. It holds my mind. It tells me I like what I like and not just guys for sex. No sissy here. No raging macho with sporty muscles and engine grease all over, either. Just me. My interests run from cooking to serious prose to woodworking and poetry and pottery and, most of all, classical music or at least they used to until I receded into the land of no friends and no confidence in myself. My mind is eager to consume large helpings of fantasy and color and living texture and more than a little dick and ass and foot and hair and all the rest of what sex is, close in and far out of the body, or at least it did until I receded into the land of no friends and no confidence in myself.

I talked it over with my roomie as to what I would be like if I were straight. Keep in mind that he is straight. His first reaction was, "Well, you wouldn't suck dick!" He can be frank, that one. Then after a bit of embarrassed back and forth to get used to the question he said that I probably would not be any different at all. He said that folks who do not know I am gay do not grasp it quickly, or even at all, that I am. He mentioned one of his friends who has known me for a long time and said he probably has no idea. So much for the acting gay stuff. And I guess that has something to do with not attracting guys, though I would really, really like to. So a straight me would be just me. Sorry that is not more exciting.

Not coming across as gay may be a couple of things in my case. As far as cases go, I am a lifelong closet case. A while ago, I decided not to be but I didn't tell anyone else. It was just that I got to be in my late fifties and decided to me a Nobody Asks Because Nobody Cares sort of out gay guy. [second drink] A number of you have mentioned that being in the closet can lead to a life of loneliness. Yup, it happens and that is how, in at least one way, being gay influences "other parts" of who I am. It isn't just going after dick, it is a life of having nearly no close friends. I have had a few. Very few. And for the most part they have not been aware of me being gay. Thus there was an unbreachable gap in our closeness. There was an aching that governed relationships. It wasn't that I wanted them sexually, though some I did. It was that we could not know each other fully and honestly. Inevitably, there were a few girls. Along with knowing them there was the pain of not saying why I could not be closer. After 40 years one still haunts me more deeply than others. So being gay to me is not merely about loneliness, it is about pain and seeing unanswered questions in the faces of others. It is about not having relationships when others did.

"Hey, you over there. Why are you different, alone, shy, off putting, so stiff and intellectual when you should be free, so unwilling to know me?"

Well, it is because it is 1959, or 1967 or even 1998 and you wouldn't understand, worse yet, you might even hurt me with words or fists, but certainly with rejection. That is what I have been taught.

Cultural identity, until very recently, and even now, for gay people, means being something quite "other." Now that is changing. There are young guys who are able to be out, but, being older, the closet is and always will be a formative part of my identity. Culturally, I will always be on the edge. I will often think that it was only the greatest of poets and painters and musicians and artists who could be out of that closet because the rest of their lives overshadowed their gay selves. And there will be the "others' who knew who they were but had better not say or be themselves. They had better not say that fellow walking by was... Does that count as a cultural identity? I think so. Though, as the song many of you have never heard goes, "The times they are a-changin." The cultural identity of gay men, you and me, is a matter of change. We simply view it from different angles. [third drink]

Being gay is all of this and many, many unresolved questions. How about that? And I am, by the way still sober. [fourth drink}