SEXUAL SOPHISTRY
When I was in high school, maybe 9th or 10th grade (there was no middle school), a girl in my social studies class who was very popular and athletic, well-liked by our peers, called me a f*gg*t in front of the whole class. I turned to the social studies teacher, Mr. Long, who was right there, because I was hurt and confused and I thought he would defend me or yell at her or something. Or restore order to the laughing classroom. He grinned at me and said in front of the whole class: âJesse, you can fool some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but you wonât be able to fool all the people all of the time.â And that was that. We just went about the rest of the class like nothing happened. I didnât get it at the time but the implication I think was that I would not be successful at hiding my true sexuality from everybody for the rest of my life. I think this is such a great message to send to kids in 9th grade.
I donât even consider myself to be gay. Iâve had sexual relationships with women since I was age 16 to age 44 (Iâm 46, havenât had any sex for two years). Iâm into womenâs bodies. When I search for visual aids to arouse myself I look at naked women or women having sex. I like to look at nude paintings and sculptures and frankly judge how well the painter or sculptor captured the physical appearance of female flesh. Lots of artists from antiquity had terrible taste in replicating ideal female beauty, in my late 20th-early 21st century opinion. The lush body measurements of the Hindu apsara statues in the National Geographic appealed to my developing hormones. As a kid I hid the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue under my bed for my perusal until my brother came around and asked me for it. But this teasing comment from Mr. Long has participated in instilling in me an awareness that there could be some deep dark secret inside you (me), maybe even inaccessible to my own consciousness, that if others found out, which they will, the truth of my abstracted gayness will be known to other people at some point.
It served as a useful lens with which to view the world. Social situations at school and work, and messages from the culture at large, reinforced this idea that if you dug deep enough about a person and guessed correctly, you could see that they were actually secretly gay and even if they were doing a good job at hiding it, nobody would be 100% perfect at containing it all the time. You had to be on your toes in case someone got the wrong idea about you. Adolescent boys and college age too became masters at trying to throw each other off their game and derive proofs of their adversariesâ f*gg*try and thus win some tacit competition. At work speculation abounded about other people, like it was a parlor game, and if you were found out you were not just a laughable loser but you were shunned and considered to be somehow contagious. And also that this was some deliberate choice of yours and that you were morally deficient and righteously open for bullying and maybe physical violence.
Somewhere along the way I picked up an understanding that the people who struggled the worst with this were those who internally resisted against it the most. You saw it in some people who beat up gay kids. You got some kind of picture that this guy last night had had a dream about showering with one of his buddies, had woken up in a confused terrified state, and to repress it and to demonstrate his straightness to others, when he went to school he would go out of his way to torture externalized objects of his internal repulsion: gay classmates. Homophobia was integral to my high schoolâs social fabric, like glue, or oxygen. If directing fear and anger at gay students had not existed and been part of the value system of the in-group seeking outsiders against which to solidify themselves, the microcosm of high school society might have fallen apart and lost its precious coherence and conformity. Which is a sad commentary on Generation X in a rural school district.
When I was also in 8th or 9th grade, a classmate of mine had dropped out mysteriously and no one saw him for a year. He was known to be unhealthy. He had hemophilia and couldnât attend gym class like other kids because he would bruise easily and it was dangerous for him. We had hung out at lunch in earlier years and I would show him my comics which he liked, but he didnât come to school anymore. His family were wealthy and his group of closer friends was somewhat different than mine. It eventually came out that he was dying of AIDS and thatâs why he wasnât at school. Having hemophilia, he had received blood transfusions in the days before blood donations were screened for HIV and he had the misfortune to have gotten the virus.
A female teacher when the news of his diagnosis trickled out went on a rampage of gossip and spread the information around the school almost gleefully. Scott died shortly afterwards. Some of my friends overlapped with his friends and I remember one of my friends, Christy, got sent to the principalâs office because she had unloaded all her most furious invective at the gossipy teacher. Christy almost had to be physically restrained. Students that were friends with Scott had to go around defending the dead boy at school: âhe got AIDS through NO FAULT OF HIS OWN.â Rumors spread. AIDS wasnât understood well at the time. It was the tail end of the 80s. Itâs starkly obvious that some kids whose understanding of medicine and public health was non-existent called him a faggot and said that he got what he deserved. I wouldnât be shocked if some teachers basically agreed with these ignorant kids.
My brother teased me about being gay seemingly every day when I was a kid. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue stashed under my bed was irrelevant. It was the source of endless clever mocking songs and barrages of questions designed to ferret out the slightest molecule of queerness in me and lock onto that like a heat seeking missile. In the fullness of time, Iâve definitely slept with more women that he has. But according to the âCasanova Doctrine,â which was the au courant theory among a lot of young people in my field of awareness, certain men who have a lot of female sexual partners might be doing it to overcompensate and camouflage their actual homosexuality. You could use sophisticated divination techniques and sexual sophistry to determine who was gay through other methods than witnessing how lucky they were at getting laid. That was a smokescreen. In some ways sexual activity had nothing to do with it and you just knew someone was gay because of other clues. You just had a sense about some people. And it was held against them, that they would be so deceitful as to try to hide it by getting lots of heterosexual ass.
In college there was a special class of woman who made it her duty to go into full detective mode and find out who the gay males were. It was a point of pride that she would figure it all out and help these poor unfortunate creatures by outing them to everybody else as a form of communal service because as we all know, being out is better than in when it came to the closet. People who were in the closet were lying to themselves and actually in some ways contributing to the unjust conditions of the world and needed help, so they were forcibly kicked out of the closet in order to âbe themselves.â This girl often complained that âall the best men are either already taken or gay.â From a certain angle you could chalk up the numerous false positives of this hyperactive gaydar to the fact that no one wanted to date this woman so she was perhapsânot so consciouslyâtaking revenge against some men for not being interested in her by alleging they were homosexuals. As a defense mechanism for her ego that just happened to cause a certain amount of social destruction for other people.
In all the sleuthing it was somehow just a safe baseline to assume everyone was gay until you could get clear proofs that they were straight. In some situations your sexuality was kind of like an impounded car, that you would have to show convincing proof of ownership and pay a fine to have released to you. If you couldnât, well then your car was held in a common space where everybody was free to make assumptions and you didnât have any control over it. It was held in arrears. The fact that I have thought it all over in such detail doesnât speak highly of me or my protestations of being straight, Iâm aware.
I went to every party I could in college at SUNY Fredonia. My presence was in many ways a guaranteed feature among the gallery of ever present faces which might have been what made parties so unpleasant and boring and repetitive in that college town after a while. The same people always showing up. I could write a whole book about the wasted potential and misdirection of energy of my college experiences at that school. At one house party I was talking with a woman I didnât know very well. She wasnât part of my circle of friends. As the hour got later she said she wanted to go back to her dorm and asked if Iâd walk her home. I forget where my head was at, everything from those years was a fog. But it was somehow clear to me, I thought, that she was not interested in me romantically or physical and just wanted a man to walk her home at night for protection. As we stood outside her dorm and said good night, I signed off with a fine display of character and class by bitterly asking, âWhat makes you think I was such a safe person to walk you home?â As if to suggest that her asking me for protection was a mistake because I was in truth a âdangerous guy.â I had taken it as a kind of black mark on my character that she thought I was a ânice guy.â Thatâs where the sexual frenzy and frustration had led my mind. Did she think I was gay? Looking back this was a terrible question to ask her, an ultra defensive irrational socially impaired thing to think and accuse someone else of believing. Maybe I was drunk. The ends of parties, and the goodbyes and the rejected feeling of sexual hope dashed and disappointed at the end of the night was for some people a bitter experience that happened night after night, a conundrum that for the lonely couldnât be solved. The next day I told a friend about what Iâd said to this woman Iâd walked home. This is a guy who had infinite pools of savoir faire and all kinds of success with women whereas I was a hopeless case. Maybe he asked about it because heâd heard something. When I told him what I asked her, he cringed visibly and said âWhy did you say that to her?â
I donât know why I said it. I was a very fucked up unwise person back then, and still am to a certain degree. One thing that could be said is that in college and beyond, we did not have a very robust understanding of bisexuality. You were either gay or you werenât. And bisexual men were like the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs, they were mythical creatures that didnât exist. Any man who said he was bisexual was clearly gayer than Elton Johnâs personal shopper and was lying to themselves. The categories were pretty rigid; less so for women it seemed.
I have since arrived at a hopefully more mature position that, as I have said elsewhere, any âartistâ who is being thorough, honest, and empathetic in their reproduction of human life, who wants to replicate something of the human experience be it in the plastic arts or literature or whatever, must have some kind of conception of bisexuality as a human state, if not a practice of it. I create female characters and I cast myself into their minds and their bodies as best I can, and with an attempt to exercise empathy a la Flaubert creating Emma Bovary or Tolstoy creating Anna Karenina, I try in my rinky-dink male writerâs way to imagine their thoughts and feelings and desires. If you are using your imagination for real you have to be a kind of intellectual switch-hitter and go into areas of self-doubt and uncertainty that to my brotherâs heat-seeking interrogations when we were kids would be clear evidence of gayness. The artistâs imagination if itâs working correctly should be a kind of universally accepted passport into all types of human experiences. It wonât ever be perfect. Iâm sure there are penumbral zones cut off to my field of vision about everything related to this subject which will describe my shortcomings not only as a writer and artist but as a human being. Empathy, or the capacity to peer inside other people and describe their interiors, has limits unfortunately, limits that depend upon our inability as artists to let go of ourselves and our own fixed position inside our own identity. This is being debated in literary circles and I wonât go into the arguments regarding âbeing allowed toâ write about people different than yourself vs just writing about yourself. I think a writer who could write from any personâs point of view on earth would be threatening to the writer who can only write from one point of view, and not very well, and who wants to tell the first type of writer that they shouldnât attempt to write the whole human being. There is no shortage of cop mentalities in the arts as well as just in regular life. I donât know if Iâm resentful of the shrunken horizons of empathy that Iâve experienced as a member of Generation X, or grateful. Iâm trying to be a broader person than I was, and trying to see what a world where (according to some poll, apparently) 1 in 6 members of Gen Z identifies with being a member of the LGBT communityâwhat in that world might correspond to the loose puzzle pieces within me as an artist and a father and a human being.
I have often witnessed that poking/testing/challenging that you describe between you and your brother. It always struck me as stupid and sad, and telling more about the questioner than the questionee. Women might be slightly less prone to it but they're as quick to judge: this girl doesn't date, she must be gay. That need to put people in boxes and sticking a label on them probably goes back to living in caves ad finding security in close-knit clans.