APPLES AND ORANGES: Maggie v. Barry

What is a gay identity? It is a person who identifies as gay. No cliches intended. Distinguishing betweeen the experience of desire and the act of identification of the self with that desire, and the sexual act(s) that expresses (or satisfies) that desire seems to me to be basic to understanding the social process involved.

Before the idea of homosexuality was invented (or discovered) by Viennese psychoanalyst, nobody was gay, as we now understand that term. Some men had sexual desires for other men, and some men had same-sex sex with men (although typically, as Dave Bianco points out, not as an exclusive choice). But the creation of what the Victorians called a "third sex" was a social construction, a stigmatized sexual identity, which had as much to do with anxieties about masculinity emerging as we entered the industrial revolution as anything else.

The idea that sex is a simple appetite for orgasm, is I think Barry, contradicted by pretty much all of human experience, without dragging metaphysics into it. Sex is interpersonal in ways that eating simply isn't. Sex involved not only physical pleasure, but possibilities of suffering, rejection, triumph, union, and affirmation that eating really does not. If sexual desire were only a desire for pleasure, people who never be moved as they are to do and suffer so much in restless search for its satisfaction.

I once explained to a man that sex always has a spiritual component. He gave me this look, this look that said: "You're a girl. You don't have a clue."

So I explained: at a bare minimum, the man wants the girl to want to have sex with him. Nobody cares what the steak wants. We are already out of the realm of the satisfaction of merely physical needs and we have not yet left lust.











posted by maggie at 9:19 AM | Link |

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