I haven’t sat down for the entire movie, but there’s a scene from Kinsey that keeps popping into my head as I consider the paper Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, John Holsinger, wrote for the United Methodist Church’s Committee to Study Homosexuality back in 1991. Bear in mind that Holsinger wrote that paper, not as a fellow believer, but as a doctor of medicine.
The scene is a doctor’s office. Kinsey and his wife are trying, uncomfortably, to discuss their unsatisfactory sex with him. The couple is having trouble achieving sexual intimacy. Kinsey’s wife Clara endures great pain whenever he tries to have sex with her. The doctor holds up a ruler and asks Clara to indicate how big her husband’s erect penis is on it. She seems befuddled. But it’s more then simple embarrassment at discussing such an intimate detail. The doctor moves his fingers along the ruler. This big? No? This big? No? Eventually Clara works up a little nerve, reaches over, and moves the doctors finger to a point somewhere Past the end of the ruler. The doctor nods. No wonder you were experiencing pain, he tells her, and he suggests they take a somewhat different approach to intercourse.
The scene is intended as a bit of humor, but it has a point. Clara thought that the problem was with her. She had no way of knowing that it wasn’t. Back before Kinsey began his famous studies of human sexuality, people lived in almost perfect ignorance of how humans actually have sex. Oh most people thought they knew, certainly. But what they knew, as the shock and outrage clearly revealed when Kinsey finally published, was mostly a collection of handed down folk tales and dirty jokes. Real facts about human sexuality were few and far between because no one had actually rigorously and dispassionately studied it. Before they visited their doctor, neither one of the Kinseys understood how physically mismatched they were, and that it meant they had to be a tad creative in their approach to sexual intimacy.
Which leads to this other thing that leaped out at me.
A penis wasn’t designed for an anus. The parts don’t fit. Heterosexual intercourse is complementary…homosexual intercourse is physically damaging… Gay men have had this thrown in our faces for decades now. Never mind that many of us know from first hand experience that it isn’t true…the hate machine doesn’t want to actually hear from the people it’s talking about. On and on and on like a broken record, they keep insisting that male homosexual intercourse is well nigh physically impossible, in contrast to heterosexual intercourse in which tab ‘A’ just naturally slides into slot ‘B’. But that’s not true. Male same sex couples have thrilling and blissfully contented sex every day and the only thing damaged by it are the lies bigots have been pounding into their heads for ages. And even opposite sex couples sometimes just aren’t physically well matched for each other.
I don’t like discussing my sex life in public. That’s not because I’m ashamed of it, or of anything I’ve ever done with another guy in my arms. But those moments are precious to me. And it’s not only my privacy that I have to consider. But I’m living in a time when the sex lives of gay men are a cultural battle ground and our enemies shrink from no filthy lie about us they think they can get away with, so long as it incites fear and loathing and hatred. If we don’t talk about our sex lives, the only people who will are the ones who hate our guts and want everyone else to hate us too.
So let me say that I can relate to poor Clara in some ways. One guy I dated once upon a time, was just simply too damn big for me to comfortably have sex with him. And I’m not just talking anal sex either. But I was in love, so I tried this and I tried that, because I wanted to make him happy, and let’s face it, I wanted to enjoy having sex with him too. But it was a struggle. And to this day I wonder how much that played a part in our breaking up. Thing is, he had tried the ex-gay thing previously, and had been married, and he’d told me that his former wife had the same problem having sex with him. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear it.
A penis is designed for a vagina. No…It isn’t that simple. The fact is, depending on any number of factors, intercourse can be physically very painful, even damaging, to a woman. It can be a struggle for some opposite sex couples to achieve sexual gratification during intercourse. Over the course of my many road trips I’ve probably stopped at hundreds of truck stops, probably beheld hundreds of those ubiquitous condom vending machines…
The anus and rectum, unlike the vagina contain no natural lubricating function…
…each one advertising pre lubricated condoms…
The rectum is incapable of mechanical protection against abrasion and severe damage to the colonic mucosa can result if objects that are large, sharp, or pointed are inserted into the rectum…
…and an assortment of “french ticklers”. Holsinger goes on a tear in his paper about gay men inserting things into the anus of their partners as though it’s someone everyone does, and conversely something opposite sex couples do not do to a vagina. It’s a fact the sex toy industry would be greatly surprised to hear. In the comments section of Atrios post on Holsinger’s paper, one commenter tells of a woman who went to the ER to have rocks removed…
I had to get an ER doc to remove my diaphram once. The damn thing was just stuck. I told the doc that I felt like an idiot and she said, "Oh no way. I take a lot more stuff out of there that shouldn’t be there." So of course I had to ask, "Like what?" And she told me that a few nights earlier she had taken a bunch of rocks out of some woman’s vagina. The woman and her partner apparently experimented with all kinds of objects to "enhance" intercourse.
Notice that the poster had to go herself, to get a perfectly common form of female birth control removed from Her vagina. Now…the very thought of inserting a foreign object into my body, let alone the body of a lover, just completely disgusts me. But that’s my own particular sexual temperament. Don’t fucking tell me that opposite sex couples aren’t doing that to each other every night all around the world. And don’t…don’t even think of trying to tell me that a motherfucking doctor doesn’t know this.
Which brings me to my point. But first…let us pause for a moment and think of poor Clara Kinsey. She’s in the doctor’s office with her husband, and the doctor is holding out a ruler for her to indicate the size of Mr. Kinsey’s erect penis, and she is confused. The doctor is telling her with that ruler, that you can measure the size of most men with a ruler. If you think it’s laughable nowadays that anyone wouldn’t know that men come in all sizes and shapes, let alone that most men don’t actually have foot long dicks, much as some of them seem to wish, strangely, that they do, thank the Supreme Court of the hated Earl Warren, which struck down all those obscenity and censorship laws back in the 1950s, to the absolute horror of American right wingers and fundamentalist kooks. Probably the first male penis poor Clara ever saw, was that of her husband’s on their first honeymoon night. That’s why she thought there was something wrong with her when sex became painful.
She didn’t know. Her husband didn’t either. It would be years later that he undertook to study human sexuality. But their doctor knew. Good thing for that couple. But he had to know.
And so does Holsinger.
When the complementarity of the sexes is breached, injuries and diseases may occur as noted above. Therefore, based on the simplest known anatomy and physiology, when dealing with the complementarity of the human sexes, one can simply say, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself!
What speaks for itself clearly, loudly, sickeningly, are this man’s words. When he sat down to write that penises and vaginas are perfectly mated to each other, he knew, he had to know, that it isn’t always so. He knew…he had to know…that sex with the wrong partner, let alone with an uncaring, aggressive one, can be damaging to a woman’s body. He knew…he had to know…that opposite sex couples resort all the time to lubricants, and sex toys inserted into the vagina to enhance sexual pleasure. He knew…He Damn Well Had To Know…that sexually transmitted disease is easily spread during penile/vaginal intercourse, and that before the advent of antibiotics, it was often as incurable and lethal as AIDS was in 1991
But he also knew this: that he was writing for a bunch of sexually ignorant rubes who would believe it if he told them otherwise, so he could make the sex that gay men have look ugly and unnatural.
He used his degree to give his lies authority. And he did it in the name of God, and in the name of morality. And that is why he’s George Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General. His moral values, his instinctive sense of right and wrong, are those of the religious right, and the republican party. Let’s hear it for virtuous men.
I’m splitting this into two parts because it’s becoming a tad longish and I’m sorry. Also, you may have to endure some of my efforts at writing fiction, which I don’t normally shove out onto my blog because I know my tastes in fiction aren’t everyone’s. But something struck me as I read this story this morning, from Pam’s House Blend …
I have the names of the four women, and while some of them held some sort of Wisconsin Department of Administration position while Thompson was governor, they tend not to be public figures today; one was a Milwaukee-area state representative, one a county campaign manager, one a member of the gaming commission, one a staffer at the state Division of Health, one a Portage resident. While Thompson was governor, many of the liaisons allegedly occurred at Madison’s Concourse Hotel. One of my correspondents wrote, "After he moved into the [Governor’s] Mansion, Tommy quit the practice of logging in the names of guests and visitors. Can be verified by Mansion officers." — reporter Jay Rath, about 2008 GOP prez candidate (and married man) Tommy Thompson’s colorful love life while Governor of Wisconsin. Apparently a lot of other reporters weren’t asking or telling about it back in the day.
It apparently gets better…
"Tommy had an apartment in Madison before he was elected governor," read the June 22, 1994, letter. "He kept the apartment after he was elected [to the state legislature]. Supposedly there were several women who joined him there."
In fact, there allegedly were as many as four long-term affairs before Tommy Thompson finally left for Washington, D.C., to become secretary of Health and Human Services.
These are old notes in my files that suddenly are current again. Now that his hat is in the presidential ring, it’s time for journalists to finally look at the alleged extramarital affairs of the latest presidential candidate of the family-values party.
Reporters are a clubby bunch, and the problem in getting the story while Tommy was governor was that statehouse journalists — the ones who could most easily have reported on the allegations — historically tended to be part of an old boys network; everyone was pals, and so everyone looked the other way. The rumors were a "secret" that many working reporters knew about.
So…lessee… To quote Pam, We have "Sen. John McCain (affair, divorce), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (affair, divorce, affair, divorce), and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (divorce, affair, nasty divorce)…" And then there’s Rush Limbaugh, who was caught not that long ago taking a trip to the Dominican Republic, an island that I’m told had an active sex tourist trade going, with Viagra he hadn’t been legally prescribed. Swell. Okay…now I know why my sex life is so tame. I’m not a right wing Family Values republican…
Anyway… I want to begin making my point, with a passage I wrote some years ago for my Skywatcher’s Of Aden fantasy series. (I’ve had it offline for some time now for major re-writes.) This particular passage is part of a still evolving backstory for one of my main characters, Daniel Tanner. The scene is the room of Joshua Putnum, a student of theology at the Wallensden Seminary. Daniel was sent there as a young boy by his father to insure he would never follow in his mother’s wickedness. Daniel is being groomed to become a minister of his faith. He is not a reluctant student. His religiosity is real, deeply felt and part of his bedrock. But at this point in the story, at 16, he is having a crisis of faith over his sexual orientation. To further complicate matters, the older boy, Joshua, has been trying to take him as a lover, though he too is having his own crisis of faith and sexuality.
Daniel has thoughts of suicide when his sexual orientation becomes apparent to him. But instead of going through with it, he becomes determined to understand why this curse had happened to him. He begins devouring material in the seminary and town library…anything he thinks can help him understand why this is happening to him. In the course of this research he meets Joshua, and falls in love with the bookish older student.
The critical inner difference I am trying to illustrate between the two in this passage of Daniel’s story, is that at this point, when he actually falls in love, Daniel begins to realize that his sexuality isn’t a curse at all, but a blessing. But Joshua, having rigorously conditioned himself to think of sex only in terms of lust, is still full of shame, even as he coaxes Daniel into bed with him. I was thinking as I wrote this, of the difference between someone whose spirituality is, as I like to think of it, "faith with eyes wide open" and that fundamentalism that constantly flinches away from the world like a frightened animal, and into the safety of ritual and dogma.
Understand that this all takes place in a fantasy world that’s vaguely similar to New England colonial America, but not as technologically advanced. The various religious sects in this world, including Daniel’s and Joshua’s, are not ours, but merely akin to ours in certain aspects.
In the morning of his third year at Wallensden Seminary, in the sixteenth year of his life, Daniel Tanner awakened, and saw the earth anew, as though for the first time.
He lay on his side looking across Joshua’s room. Sunlight streamed though the room’s only window, bathing room in a vibrant morning glow. Beside him, Joshua breathed steadily, still asleep, one arm flung possessively around Daniel. Daniel sighed, luxuriating in Joshua’s embrace, while his eyes took in every detail of Joshua’s room.
His eyes strayed over to the open window. A restless desire to see the world outside also awakening stirred in him. Gently, Daniel rolled out from under Joshua’s arm. He rose from the bed, and wrapped one of the light cotton sheets around him, not to hide his nakedness, but to feel himself still embraced by something from Joshua’s bed. He stepped barefoot over the room’s only rug, felt the nap of it between his toes, and stopped to look down at it.
It was a common household rug. The trader’s son in him identified it at once as a local product, made not far from where it rested now. Leeward Hills, second grade wool and remnant blend, northern single cross weave. It’s market value fixed to the penny, he knelt down and ran a hand lightly over its surface, allowing his fingers to make their own assay. First with, then against the weave, his fingertips delivered to him their own understanding of the rug, while he marveled at how carelessly he had dismissed so much of the richness of the world around him.
He rose and walked to the window. The morning sun embraced him with golden light and warmth. Outside, the main road leading into Wallensden was already busy with traffic. The sounds and smells of the street below, annoying distractions to him before, arrived at his ears like a new music, and danced with his other senses like playful children. There was a knife grinder rolling his stone up the street, gesturing to the butcher across the way with a simple, timeless hand sign that asked if there were any knifes to grind that day. A local farmer carried a stick of tobacco hands from his wagon into a tobacco shop. A man gave a penny to the paperboy on the corner, for one of his single-sheet newspapers. Like a chorus to the scene he now beheld, came the smells from the baker’s shop across the street. He breathed them in deeply, felt his body respond almost at once to their promise of nourishment.
Lord…my life is full beyond measure… For an instant, he found himself trembling again, as at his lover’s first touch. So this is what it’s all about…
There existed no word in his language for ‘homosexual’. Not until the far distant future, when clinical terms would be invented, would the idea of it as a state of being, and not a perverse habit, enter into his culture’s consciousness. For generations to come, his kind would invent and borrow words from other languages and cultures to identify themselves. Many in his and later ages, who shared his deep religious faith, would endure years of self hatred and torment, before finally achieving a small measure of self acceptance, if any. But he had already grown up with the knowledge that he would never be good enough, because he was his mother’s son.
Only hours before, his steadfast faith told him that to love another male in this way was wrong, dissolute, a grievous offense to the eyes of God. Now that same unwavering faith lifted him to heights of spirit he had never known before. So different from the warm and wonderful childhood feeling he’d had during prayer, when he felt that God was near. So breathtaking, like the electric pleasure that ran through him when he saw Joshua smile.
It was beyond questioning in him that the pleasures brought to humanity by the Jackal, the Despiser, the father of lies, to tempt humankind, were both transient and tawdry. The drunkard’s bliss. The gambler’s spoils. The lecher’s thrill. Deep in the bedrock of his nature was the certainty that only God could create a thing of beauty. He thought of Joshua’s body, of the sensation of Joshua’s hands on him, and his own body shivered in remembrance, and in that moment he knew that no amount of thanks or praise to his creator could ever be enough.
He heard a rustling in the bed behind him, and knew that Joshua was awake.
Daniel is in love. But Joshua is merely in lust, and now he’s made a night of it with another boy and like clockwork his crisis of faith starts tapping him on the shoulder.
[Joshua] saw the boy standing there wrapped in the blanket, looking like an apparition from Pagan times, the sunlight shimmering over his pale blond hair like a halo. His eyes darted away from the sight. As a young humanities student, he once beheld a nude statue of Aster, the lost son of the Prophet Thomas, created by the legendary Mary Stephan. It was Aster at the moment he realizes his father has abandoned him in the wilderness. In the figure’s quiet courage in the face of sorrow, and its sensual beauty, Joshua saw everything within himself that he was struggling desperately to renounce. He vowed never again to lay eyes on the work of Mary Stephan. Now its living embodiment was in his bedroom, looking at him.
He took a breath, fixed a smile on his face, and blandly said, "Good morning sleepyhead."
They are both deeply religious, both passionately devoted to their God. Their feelings about what happened the night before are inextricably wound up in that faith. And yet their reactions to it could not be more different…
The theologian distrusted reason. Daniel distrusted his emotions. Reason offered Joshua no sanctuary from the fact of his sexual orientation, and so it was to his religion he turned, time and again, for solace, for forgiveness, for absolution. He had become so successful at keeping his intellect away from his emotions, that now even the mildest of passions would always threaten to overwhelm him. Guilt regarding his sexual nature, had long since become a secret humiliation that he could not control himself. Daniel, when his emotions threatened his balance and self control, would flee them time and again, into a dispassionate monastery of reason and logic. Emotions were, irrational, specious, misleading. Reason was truth and light. Daniel could endure anything but doubt. Joshua, anything but certainty.
In the fire the metals behaved differently. The theologian, confronted by love, shrank away, utterly unable to distinguish it from debauchery. Daniel, pulled by an ancient tide so certain and sure he could not rationally deny it, walked finally, with eyes wide open, into its embrace. All the rest of it would have to be reasoned out later; it’s ethics and morality, what it meant to his faith, to his future, to the kind of life he would have to live. That he would only know this depth of feeling for another male was a thing he had already acknowledged. What changed matters irrevocably now, was that he knew it was good. To act as if he believed otherwise would be self deceit, a thing his intellect would not permit and his conscience could not endure.
Years later, Daniel would remember it, as akin to the moment he accepted God into his heart, and its spirit flowed immediately into every corner of his being, transforming and lifting him. Joshua would remember only how completely he had misread the boy he had held in his arms. But love’s ancient and arcane logic would remain a mystery to him throughout his life.
Tentatively, Joshua placed his hands on Daniel’s shoulder’s. He half expected, half secretly hoped, that the boy would turn away with revulsion. Instead Daniel looked right into his eyes with the straight faced expression he had become known by in the seminary, save that now his lips bore a faint smile that Joshua had never seen before. For an instant he was certain no one else had ever seen it either.
"Joshua." said Daniel, as if his name were a prayer.
Joshua gently drew Daniel close and embraced him, disturbed; he did not want to be looked at that way, did not want his name to be spoken that way. He took a moment to catch his breath. "Are you all right with it, then?"
"Yes."
It was so simply stated, that for a moment Joshua doubted Daniel was being honest. But Daniel’s embrace was firm and unequivocal, and after a moment he allowed himself a sigh of relief, hearing only the boy’s acceptance of their mutual need. But Daniel was addressing another, giving it joyful thanks for the wondrous gift of his life of flesh and blood; a gift that had delivered him into an almost perfect exaltation of spirit which had brought him not to his knees, but to his feet.
The first person you come out to, is yourself…
For years I thought of this "coming out to self" process along with the institution of the closet and all its self loathing and self destructiveness, as pretty much unique to gay people. But now…in the light of all these recent right wing sex scandals I’m seeing it a little differently. What I’m starting to see is a lot of this self destructive denial of one’s sexual nature, the shame and self loathing you see in someone like Joshua in my story, in heterosexuals too. How many heterosexual men and women I wonder, comfortable with their human sexuality, have found themselves in relationships with partners who when the lights went out, treated sex like it was either a dirty joke, or a thing of shame, a sign of humanity’s brokeness and alienation from God, not a joyful, playful, delightful physical affirmation of the spiritual bond between them.
There’s a classic sort of compartmentalization that goes on in the lives and the inner world of closeted gay people, where their sex lives and their personal lives almost sometimes seem to be living on different planets. You know the story…the all-american family man/woman god fearing sexual puritan by day who becomes the slut puppy by night. Well…I think I’m seeing that now in the likes of thoroughly heterosexual people like Newt, and Rush, and Rudy and Tommy Thompson. They rail against gays and sex and pop culture sexuality, even as their own sex lives are going down the toilet. It’s the same sort of denial and compartmentalization I once saw constantly, and ruinously, in the lives of gay people, until something blows open their closet doors and there they are standing naked in the spotlight like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. Who? Me? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…
As H.L. Mencken once said, "The most costly of all follies is to believe what is palpably untrue". It is also pretty goddammed faithless. For untold generations gay people have been taught to believe pure unmitigated crap about themselves. But as it happens, so have heterosexuals. About sex. About human sexuality. About their own inner nature. Looks to me like there are a lot of heterosexuals in the closet too…living in a state of denial about their inner selves and their own sexuality that looks more and more like the one gay people have been struggling to come out of for generations. And it’s making them act out self destructively, and lash out at anyone comfortable with their sexuality, in a kind of transference of shame.
Anyway… Give it some thought…while I gather my mind a tad more for Part II of this…
"Life begins at 66," reads an advertisement aimed at old people in Germany. But it’s not promoting orthopedic shoes — it’s for a brothel which is offering a 50-percent discount to senior citizens.
If you have to get old, Germany isn’t a bad place to do so. As well as generous state pensions, German senior citizens enjoy a host of benefits during their twilight years. Now, in addition to discounted rail travel, cut-price cinema tickets and cheap museum entry, Germany’s old folk have a new perk to take advantage of: a 50- percent discount at Germany’s largest brothel.
The brothel "Pascha" in Cologne is now offering senior citizens a 50 percent discount on sex services — but only between the hours of 12 and 5 p.m., and only upon proof of age. The offer, which many would argue beats free coffee at McDonalds, is valid for clients aged 66 and over.
I don’t see myself ever setting foot in a brothel. I don’t object to them in principle, provided that the folks working them do so of their own free will and interest and they’re not forced into it through poverty or war or crime. Otherwise as far as I’m concerned it’s a business like anything else. For some people, sex is more like recreation then romance, and that’s fine. But the point is look at how casually and matter-of-factly they’re treating human sexuality elsewhere in the civilized world.
Of course you wouldn’t start a new line of business without doing a little test marketing first…
The brothel tested the subsidized sex scheme by offering reductions once a week. The offer was so successful it has now been extended to every day. "There’s been plenty of demand and people have certainly been taking advantage of the offer," the spokesman said, adding, with a certain understatement: "Older folks are more active than you think."
See…this is why you need to read the foreign newspapers and magazines. There’s a whole ‘nother world out there isn’t there? Spiegel has been on my reading list for a while now. They’re good.
I don’t see myself ever setting foot in a brothel. But it would sure be very nice to be able to retire to a less sexually stressed out place then the country I’m living in now…
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