WHEN A LABEL NO LONGER FITS

from "Brideshead Revisited"

This is a continuation of the just previous post about needing institutions to be trustworthy and about media as capitalist ventures dependent on trust.  I want to separate the issue of whether gay people (just gays not lesbian, bi-, fluid or whatever, not even celibate which is my category) are stable enough to be successful in media.  Clearly they are, since so many famous writers, actors, celebrity news readers, and so on are gay.

I’ve been reading about gays and reading writing by gays (including what is billed as porn) and scientific inquiry about why people are gay, and I get one thing for sure.  Gay is just one small dimension of desire, which is the physiologically-based turn-on for men by men.  (I and a lot of other women get turned on by men, but that’s different.)  The gay dimension of desire has been pinned onto a specific point in gestation when something genetic or epigenetic is binary, goes one way or the other independently of hormones and genitalia.  It seems to be as arbitrary as whatever it is that makes one bird fall in love with another: plumage or song or nest-building.  

Gay is specific to the person, but radically shaped by the culture and also by the rest of the person.  That is, a gay man comes in all the varieties of men in general (passionate or indifferent, smart or dumb, handsome or ugly) and then whatever he is takes on a shape from the culture pressing on him.  That is, being gay sometimes doesn’t matter and sometimes is crucial, but is always part of the whole person.  On top of the gay “orientation” are random events, dangers and advantages.  But to the person, if gayness is made a prime force, all these other contingencies might seem due to the gayness.  Otherwise, for the occasional person who is gay but low libido, preoccupied with other matters, the best response is a shrug.

What this comes down to is that there are as many kinds of gay men as there are kinds of straight men: hundreds and thousands.  Each may try to justify himself in a different way, be regarded by others in a different way, or seek coalitions of different kinds for different ends, some stable and some dynamic.  Because they are all men, their ability to inseminate, their drive to do that act even if there is no ovum present, their possibly superior strength and size, will create new circumstances.  For instance, children.  Or the desire to protect and nurture children even if they aren’t related to them — not by nursing them, but by guarding them.

Force comes into the picture.  Rape, violent fights, war, extreme sports and explorations, have all been identified with being male.  Those cannot be attached to or detached from the dimension of gayness.  Gay men can be just as tough and extreme as straights.

But there is always an impulse to get men rounded up and standardized, maybe in the military, maybe in Hugh-Hefner-style posh little corners of sexy gentrification, maybe the theatre.  (I was amused by Damian Lewis’ fantasy that high status Brit film actors tend to become “slightly fruity” wizards when they age.  I suppose he means Olivier and Gielgud mostly.)  The media (that venture capital operating system) tries to standardize what a gay person is — Robin Williams with a feather boa?  Or the characters of some BBC nostalgia piece, like “Brideshead Revisited”?

HIV-AIDS threw all that out the window.  Now the “venture capital” of what people want to know becomes medical, politically aggressive, and no longer just a matter of limp wrists.  Totally unsuspected gayness has now occasionally turned into ghastly death.  The profit in depictions seems impossible to predict.  Who could know “Angels in America” would be a hit and a classic?

The next loop was economic and demographic displacement that stressed families to the point of throwing out their teenaged — and younger — boys.  This has always been the case: Irish street boys, frontier wandering boys, ship cabin boys.   Some of them were gay (which was a good excuse for throwing them out), then all were pressed to survive however they could, even through sexwork.  They became HIV-AIDS vectors, particularly when they going in and out of American mass incarceration, since prisons are fermenting vats for diseases transmitted sexually.  The culture picked up interest in anal sex assumed to be rampant in prisons, demonstrated it, explored it, made it a kind of standard for all sexes.  

Simmering wars with Islamic cultures and the need to control such determined and macho warriors, led to the development of taboo violation as a form of punishment.  Torture was easy when it was only a matter of nudity or contact with menstrual blood or pariah dogs.  Of course, beatings, amputations, electric shock — they all persist.

But then comes sexual kink that focusses on torture and taboo.   The hunger for stimulation, surprise, uniqueness, have become characteristic of Western Society.  Even gay kink, a source of spice instead of sin.

But there’s another countervailing school of thought that comes to the conclusion that human sexuality is so various, so full of potential, so controlled by random factors, that the construct of “homosexual” is not really a physical, physiological, demonstrable category at all, but just a social grouping.  Some feel that busily putting labels on everyone is a fool’s errand.  They would rather accept what has been called “fluid sexuality.”  Mostly it’s been described as characteristic of females, an ability to love without permanent categories.

But maybe that could fit under an umbrella called “queer.”  That is, in the sense of peculiar, unique, even surprising — through not so strange as dogs who adopt ducks and the like.  The sexuality is more focused on care-giving than intercourse, therefore more female.  (Maybe the Lord can love a duck in the sense of sexual union, but dogs can not.)  There is no term for microdick men who find smaller mammals agreeable, though we met them at animal control.  (Micropenis — less than three inches — occurs in about 0.6% of males.)  I suppose they could be listed as “sodomy”, sub-category cross-species.  Is there a name for the people who buy sex dolls?  (Besides wealthy?)

Sometimes terms change because of research, so that the term MSM (men who have sex with men) had to be devised to mean that the men in question have families and regularly sleep with women, but also with men.  No one formally knew that until after research confirmed what people already suspected, which was to some degree admitting that not everyone does what “white, het, straight, European” men do.  They are in no sense a norm except for past assumptions.

The challenge then is to compose and abide by standards that fit all human male moral situations, something like “do no damage.”  This would also cover pedophilia, but would mean a lot higher understanding of how much damage is done to children.  To be a good person is not easy, since it demands a mixture of effort and restraint plus the skill of empathy, or feeling-with others.  People find ways.  When they are seen as a group, they acquire labels.  But individuals and groups are both processes.  Labels can become outdated and useless.  So far, “gay” still works as a category but it’s ragged around the edges.  Listen to the comedians and watch those “slightly fruity aging wizards.”  Check in with Howard Stern.

DESIRE AMONG THE VECTORS

It’s almost a half century since gender has been taken out of the closet in all three aspects:  desire, identity, and social role.  It’s been almost as long since a virus came out of the African jungles to devastate the demographic category of “gay men” and then slowly ooze out over the rest of the world until now most AIDS victims are heterosexual, including children.

It’s about six centuries since Europeans found the American continents and started the traffic back and forth across the Atlantic -- loot, slaves and disease.  Early cases of smallpox among the indigenes were recorded almost immediately.  Smallpox, and many other zoonoses, are thought to have originated ten thousand years ago in Africa near the Mediterranean, the consequence of domesticating animals so that they were kept in enclosures near enough to transmit viruses and bacterias to their owners.  North Americans had no defenses and were decimated.

Not long ago smallpox was eradicated (sort of, since hidden samples are suspected) and now they claim that an effective vaccine for malaria exists.  The cause of malaria is a plasmodium (one-celled parasite) that uses mosquitoes as a vector syringe.  It is also an African organism, thought to have originated in primates. 

Human beings are the most effective vectoring entity from Africa.  The cross-over diseases not only were stored in the bodies of the African people but were also carried worldwide by them.  These human-transported parasites have endangered other living beings, but the humans themselves are parasites on the whole balance of the planet.  Some believe the only “cure” is to fly to another planet where there are no living beings -- a sort of clean slate.  But a spaceship is a vector of the problem -- us, we are the mosquitoes -- or are we the plasmodia in the mosquito?

Syphilis, which no one knows the original cause of, is bacterial.  Sheep have been mentioned, but the main origin is humans indigenous to America, going back across the Atlantic.  Recent research seems to clarify (and it's only fair) that Columbus took syphilis back to Europe with his crew.  And we finally acknowledge that every member of the Lewis and Clark party was infected except Clark.  A few died of it right away, some later, and pretty certainly Lewis was one of those victims, dying in agony and psychosis before he had a chance to edit his journals.

Meriweather Lewis

“Genocide” by Tim Barrus is an anthology of short stories considering these demographic disease issues and society's reaction, mixing male same-gender bonding with indigenous American peoples, with World War concentration camps disguised as carnivals, and space travel in a spaceship so anthropomorphic that it wants to know about sex.  The concentration camps are to hold HIV-infected persons -- the model is leprosy.  In reality it was actually suggested in regard to HIV and currently practiced to confine Ebola.

There’s one more element: the needled syringe, the proboscis of the human insect which made it possible to penetrate directly into blood, as a mosquito does, by-passing the acid bath and molecular-parting-out protective metabolism of the digestive system.  The visionary sci-fi epic of “Dune” took on drugs in terms of early versions of LSD, as something to put in the mouth (watching in cowboy country, the movie version of "spice" looks a little like “snoose”) rather than the injectables of today.  

Our times have addressed consciousness in the most brutal and invasive of ways, from electroshock to solitary confinement to surgery on intimate parts.  We have neglected the aesthetic power and lyric savagery of life itself.  Somehow it has been reduced to chemically triggered fucking, plastic credit cards and 3D video.  Now ebola comes, requiring a brutal response -- shrouded attendants drenched in bleach who only bury the dead because once more we must struggle to find a cure.  But we haven’t yet cured HIV and now realize there is a whole family of filoviruses out there, each waiting its turn.

The universal element of this story is, of course, humans.  It’s not just the medical dimension of confronting disease, but also defining our response as “fighting a war”, thus leaving refugees and creating stigma.  Truth be told, someone is “getting off” on the control, the blaming, the playing at heroics, the secret conviction that it’s related to virtue and that the people with the money are the virtuous ones and therefore justified in not spending it on the infected, because surely it must be their fault somehow.  They should pay.

Blood cells under attack

This means that the fruits of war include sexual ownership of the vulnerable, esp. children, and for some tastes, esp. boys, who don’t get pregnant (though they can be infected).  Boys can be partly controlled by the hope of someday themselves growing into warriors, as though being a victim were preparation for being anything but a bully.

The motor of this social system is ignorance that there is any other way of organizing a culture, which is why the indigenous and historical contexts are so valuable.

I don’t read much gay literature and haven’t really been very deep into sci-fi since I was a kid -- so long ago that Heinlein was new.  But I did read H.G. Wells and understood that he was doing cultural criticism, trying to suggest alternatives or at least thinking about many worlds rising into consciousness as they did in the 19th century. It’s the root of “Star Trek” and all the time travel tales.

The Starship Enterprise

“Desire, identity and social role” are characteristics of individuals, but the culture as a whole must be responsible for supporting the survival of individuals, who exist in reciprocity with all other humans plus the other beings and circumstances of the planet.  Otherwise, it all collapses. The idea of taking on the predicaments of suffering people everywhere across the planet is pretty daunting, and yet we come up with shelters and food for them.  Why can’t we do that for our own boys right here in America?

“Genocide,” the Barrus anthology, is poetic riffs on “desire, identity, and social role”.  Metaphor, narrative, and theatrical climax.  He could defend it as experience, but that’s dancing too close to bull-fighting with the well-dressed Puritans who live in airport bathroom stalls, passing judgment and gas.

My sci-fi (if you choose to call it that -- some say there’s not enough sci) is feminist, I guess:  that of Ursula LeGuin (more than Atwood) because the Pacific archipelago of Puget Sound is a place I know.  Her portrait of the cultures is almost stronger than the desire and identity, but Ged wears the monk robe, confronts the wind, and is infected with a small black scuttling thing that could be taken as a disease.  He’s a boy, the essence of boy, and finds a niche rather than aspiring to a throne.  He relates to both the small clinging companion in his hood and to the dragons that climb the skies as though they were rockets.

Ged

“Genocide” was copyrighted in 1988.  It is defiantly and erotically obscene and not a chronological narrative, but vividly the product of one haunted mind in a devastating time.  The latest work, “Just Before the Cure” probably cannot be copyrighted, though it is composed, written, and filmed mostly in 2015 by a group of boys.  It is a pastiche, a jumble, remembered nightmares colliding, the product of argument among boys about things they know, a harangue, a tantrum, and a love story (inevitably). Photos, videos and music smash into bitter surrealism.  A lot has happened in the 27 years since Genocide, but not enough.  One thing that has happened is that Barrus has been pushed by activism from a “solitary genius” sort of mode into this group performance that is both much older and much newer.