“At the root of nearly all female and male opposite-sex attraction are a whole series of unanswered and probably unanswerable questions. There are mysteries and confusions that occur at the levels of the dating ritual. These have been the staple for nearly all comedy and tragedy from the earliest times right up to the present. But the greatest and most enduring questions reside underneath the courting and dating rituals and often find full expression at the stage of the mating ritual. Women want to know what it is that men are after, what they want and what – if anything – they might be feeling during the act of sex. These questions are a staple of conversation between friends and a source of unbelievable private concern and angst at some stage (sometimes all) of most people’s lives from adolescence onwards.
If there is any one thing in society that gets even close to matching the confusion and angst of women about men, it is of course the list of questions which men have about women. The subject of nearly all dramatic comedy is the inability of Men to understand Women. What are they thinking? What do they want? Why is it so hard to read their actions?
Why does each sex expect the other to be able to decode their words, actions and silences, when no member of the opposite sex has ever been given a decoding manual for the opposite sex?
At the root of the heterosexual male’s set of concerns and questions is the same question that women have about men. What is the act of lovemaking like? What does the other person feel? What do they get out of it? And how do the sexes fit together? The Ancients contemplated these questions of course. They linger in Plato – and are suggested most famously in Aristophanes’ contribution to the Symposium. But none of it is answered. The Mystery continues, and most likely always will.
And that is where the presence of especially male homosexuals makes its unnerving entrance. For until the advent of plausible surgery for people who believed that they had been born in the wrong body (of which more later), the most disturbing travellers across the sexes were male homosexuals. Not because of a strongly feminine part of their nature but because they knew something about The Secret that women hold in sex. It is a Question – and a concern – which has existed for millennia.
Consider the legend of Tiresias as recounted in the Metamorphoses. There Ovid tells the story of Jove and Juno, who one day are idly joking about lovemaking. Jove tells Juno, ‘You women get more pleasure out of love than we men do, I’m sure.’ Juno disagrees and so they resolve to get the opinion of Tiresias: ‘He who knows both sides of love.’
The story of Tiresias is complex. Ovid tells us that Tiresias once came upon a pair of huge snakes mating in a green copse. He attacked them with his staff and was immediately transformed from a man into a woman. After spending seven years as a woman, in the eighth year he came upon the snakes again, and struck them again. ‘If striking you has magic power / To change the striker to the other sex, / I’ll strike you now again,’ he tells them. He does so and returns to being a man.
Jove and Juno summon Tiresias because they want him to declare judgement on the question of whether men or women enjoy lovemaking more. The traveller across the sexes declares that Jove is right: women enjoy lovemaking more.
Offended by the claim, Juno condemns Tiresias to be blind, and it is to compensate him for his blindness (for no god can undo the act of another god) that Zeus endows Tiresias with the gift of prophecy – the gift that will later allow Tiresias to predict the fate of Narcissus. Gods, snakes and staffs aside, the legend of Tiresias raises – and suggests An Answer to – A Question of the greatest depth. It is one that gay men also play a part in.
Remarkably few people have taken this question up. One of the few who has done so in recent years is the writer and (not coincidentally) classicist Daniel Mendelsohn in his 1999 work The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity. In that family history-cum-memoir he delves deep into this subject. Asking what it is like when two men have sex he writes:
In a way, it is like the experience of Tiresias; this is the real reason why gay men are uncanny, why the idea of gay men is disruptive and uncomfortable. All straight men who have engaged in the physical act of love know what it is like to penetrate a partner during intercourse, to be inside the other; all women who have had intercourse know what it is like to be penetrated, to have the other be inside oneself. But the gay man, in the very moment that he is either penetrating his partner or being penetrated by him, knows exactly what his partner is feeling and experiencing even as he himself has his own experience of exactly the opposite, the complementary act. Sex between men dissolves otherness into sameness, men into de, in a perfect suspension: there is nothing that either party doesn’t know about the other. If the emotional aim of intercourse is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible. But since the object of that knowledge is already wholly known to each of the parties, the act is also, in a way, redundant. Perhaps it is for this reason that so many of us keep seeking repetition, as if depth were impossible.
Mendelsohn goes on to describe a poem written by a friend about a young gay man who watches football being played by men whom he silently and jealously desires. The poem finishes with a lustful, imaginative description of the players having sex with their girlfriends and of one man ‘falling through her into his own passion’. Mendelsohn describes his own earlier heterosexual experiences, and whilst admitting that there was nothing unpleasant about them, they were, he says, ‘like participating in a sport for which you’re the wrong physical type’. But he adds:
From those indifferent couplings I do remember this : when men have sex with women, they fall into the woman. She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going. She is the destination. It is gay men who, during sex, fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again.
He goes on:
I have had sex with many men. Most of them look a certain way. They are medium in height and tend to prettiness. They will probably have blue eyes. They seem, from the street, or across the room, a bit solemn. When I hold them, it is like falling through a reflection back into my desire, into the thing that defines me, my self.
This is a remarkable insight, and also a disturbing one. Because it suggests that there will always be something strange and potentially threatening about gay people – most especially gay men. Not just because Being Gay is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity and a hideously unstable way to try to base any form of group identity, but because gays will always present a challenge to something innate in the group that make up The Majority in Society.
All women have something that heterosexual men want. They are holders, and wielders, of a kind of Magic. But here is the thing : Gays appear in some way to be in on The Secret. That may be liberating for some people. Some women will always enjoy talking with gay men about the problems – including the sexual problems – of men. Just as some straight men will always enjoy having this vaguely bilingual friend who might help them learn the other language. But there are other people — insecure people — for whom it will always be unnerving.
Because for them gays will always be the people – especially the men – who know TOO MUCH.”
He’s Sincere.
Zod :
