APPLES AND ORANGES: Barry v. Maggie

Actually, Maggie, it was you who brought up the idea of incapacity (see your post below) as a possible defining characteristic of a gay man. Desire and not capacity/incapacity more accurately indicates sexual orientation.

In fact, I pointed out in my previous post that basically gay and straight men often do behave in anomalous sexual ways. It is quite remarkable what we have a capacity for. A starving man lost in a wilderness might be quite surprised to find himself dining on creatures he would never have considered touching let alone eating. But when returned to civilization, he quickly reverts to prime rib and never again yearns for slimy grubworms and roasted rat.

Sex, too, is an appetite that often demands satisfaction even under less than optimum conditions. The propensity for normally straight men in prison, isolated from women, to engage in homosexual behavior is a well established phenomenon. I recently read an article about the prevalence of homosexual behavior in, of all places, Afghanistan. Men there are in a prison of sorts. They, too, are isolated from women. Though they would like to marry they often do not have the financial resources to acquire a wife. Their libidos are satisfied by handsome young men who offer their "services" for a modicum of cash or an occasional present. When they finally do marry, the homosexual behavior is most often, but not always, abandoned. Though not by choice, it may become an acquired taste for some. (I suppose roast rat could become an acquired taste as well. We have no more choice in our gustatory desires than we do our sexual ones.)

But back to the main menu: desire as the distinguishing characteristic of sexual identity. No, I would not say that a man who call himself gay and takes on "gay identities" (whatever those might be) and yet likes sex with women is deceiving himself. I would just say that he is not using the term gay appropriately. The same is to be said of a man who calls himself straight and has taken on "straight identities" and yet likes sex with men. The term straight is hardly fitting. And just how do we distinguish between a gay man who likes sex with women and a straight man who likes sex with men? They are mirror images.

I don't have the problem that you seem to have in knowing who really is gay. If a man only likes sex with men, he is gay. If he likes sex only with women, he is straight. If both men and women are desirable sex partners, he is bisexual. Of course, these categories represent the status quo. Through chance circumstance--the Afghan finds a wife, the prisoner is released--a particular individual may find himself at a different point on the continuum and hence in a different category. Hint: reread the quite different experiences of the two men mentioned in my previous post.

I am glad you acknowledge that we do not choose our sexual desires and they are fluid and don't represent a hard fact about us. It was a point I made in my previous post, that sex desires are indeed on a continuum and we might find ourselves at different points on the spectrum at different times of our lives--though never by choice, just an existential fact.

posted by maggie at 12:12 AM | link

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