HEBE, THE BEST LITTLE PARLOR MAID ON OLYMPUS

Hebe, the Cup Bearer

Hebe was the cup-bearer of the Greek gods, daughter of the Lord and Lady of the Manor (Zeus and Hera), and all-around helpful little girl representing youth -- useful youth.  She’s a little older than the “straight-sided” androgynous children -- when with the right haircut and trousers you can’t tell girls from boys -- and a little younger than a voluptuous child-bearing mother-figure.  Think junior high.  (11 to 14) The sexual desire for children who are at this stage is called “hebephilia.” 

Ganymede:  The homophilic version of Leda and the swan?

Boys might be represented by Hebe’s successor cup-bearer, Ganymede, but no one talks of ganymedophilia, which is too hard to pronounce even for the Latin word-inventors.  Nevertheless, there can be sexual desire for the gangly boy with the tender mouth and big feet.  The shared characteristic of the age-group might be their transitional physical and emotional state, moving from vulnerable child to sultry adolescent, from gender-specific gangs to pair-bonds.

Recently one of the constant DSM battles was whether to include hebephilia.  Finally it was left out.  Part of the argument was that it’s natural to desire a budding person and part of it was that by this age, some of the children are themselves predators of younger children -- sexual desire is no longer a one-way street.  So therefore it may be useful to think about this age group separately.

Because so many children molested by priests fall into the category of the hebephilia, there have been people wondering whether there is something about celibacy or homosexuality that predicts or causes a priest to be hebephiliac.  Dr. Cantor is of the opinion that it’s mostly a matter of altar boys and schools:  persons with that predeliction would find they had opportunity, authority, and privacy -- as well as exposure to the charms of kids.  In short, kids that age are molested by priests because they are there and because the priests can.  It’s possible -- maybe likely -- that persons with that dynamic in their makeup would seek those roles.  Athletic coaching in schools is another platform, quite parallel.  The unstable emotional storms of an early adolescent find expression in competition, winning, belonging.

Laocoon entwinde.

Several concepts impinge on hebephilia:  care-giving, celibacy, homosexuality, spiritual formation, authoritarianism, and media concept-mongering.  We have a Laocoonian tangle of serpents here, always remembering that the healing rod of Asclepius has a serpent twined around it (not the staff of Hermes, the caduceus which has two snakes),  Those are sorted snakes.  Leaving classic mythology, we have a can of worms, including step-fathers and families that throw out atypical kids at about this age.

There’s enough material here for a book, but basically the problems of Hebe and Ganymede are due to them trying their powers, unfolding into the world, searching to find their place, accepting leaders and role-model adults, and so on.  If you have investigated their songs, movies, assumptions about life, video games, willingness to risk the streets despite drugs, violence, starvation and disease, you will know that it is one satanic dark world.  The main trouble with trying to “save” them is that you’ll have to enter their world to do it.  That means a certain experience and willingness to walk on the dark side.  Some priests enjoy their Luciferean capes.  Do-gooders prefer haloes.

The Crow

When I was in the seventh grade, our teacher was Mr. Jones, a young man who caused a certain restlessness among us.  He sponsored a photography club which was less about going out into the neighborhood to take photos and more about using the cold, damp, dark projection booth of the auditorium to learn to develop photos.  The club didn’t persist.  Nothing happened in that red-light setting of that dark room, at least not to me, but I still find the vinegar smells of the developing trays rather erotic and I don’t think I’m alone.  Maybe it’s the constantly splashing water for rinsing prints.

Anyway, Mr. Jones promoted the diagramming of sentences and I was good at it, so in my dumpling Hebe state, I was oblivious.  Other girls were not.  They complained that he looked down their bodices, which in those days were quite modest.  Then once a girl was trying to get something from a high shelf and he lifted her by her waist, but his hands slipped upwards.  Pretty soon Mr. Jones lost his job, married the kindergarten teacher, and went through dental college on her dime.  All of this was sort of “sub-social” if that can be used as a parallel concept to “sub-conscious.”  One felt the vibes, but it was discussed secretly -- which is more intense than privately.

In that same time period the local Presbyterian minister was intent on getting us into religious conformity.  Since this was an issue in my family (Presbyterian mother, atheist father), I recognized the limbless reptile and resisted.  There WAS something sexual about his insistence that he control us, forcing us into his system of virtue, though there was never anything physical.  That I knew of.

There are other factors, some of them addressed by our computer ability to investigate things statistically.  Dr. Ray Blanchard is at the University of Toronto with Cantor, but he's more controversial.  He wanted to put hebephilia in the DSM on grounds that same-sex hebephilia is a different subset of pedophilia.  “ Using an extraordinary compilation of data from thousands of men, Blanchard has convincingly shown that hebephiles consist of a sort of "missing link" between pedophiles (those attracted to pre-pubescent children) and teleiophiles (those of us attracted to sexually mature people). Blanchard's data clearly indicate that the sexual orientation of males (at least) isn't just composed of the sex of their partners, it's also composed of the age of their partners.”  But he did NOT want homosexuality to go back into the DSM though the church tries to link hebephilia with homosexuality, esp. male.  These kinds of distinctions are pretty tough for the public to follow. 

http://individual.utoronto.ca/ray_blanchard/index_files/fert_hebeph.pdf  

A Russian man

It's tough to know how to interpret even plain facts.  Among the fact-findings of the incessant surveyors is the startling conclusion that the average penis size of males (presumably world-wide, but I doubt that any Sub-Saharan or Amazonian tribes were included) is several centimeters shorter (no specifics about erectile state) than it used to be and that females are becoming fertile earlier and earlier.  Russia is depopulating, they say, with the raw numbers declining, the rate of abortions rising, and the lifetimes of males shorter by 7 years on average.  Much of this is speculation since Russia doesn’t like criticism and prevents it by not knowing.  But one suggestion is that processed foods, insecticides, antiseptics, and even cleaning formulas contain estrogens that are distorting male sexuality.  Another Twinkie defense.  Mr. Clean made me do it.

In the US we want to know stuff; particularly we want to know what will make people buy things.  This penetrates (sorry) into sexual concepts.  Evidently, as Valier and Kalispell recently discovered, men will pay for hebephilic opportunities of the female kind.  The entrappers didn’t use any Ganymedian bait.  They don’t seem to have the same ferocious ownership issues with boys that they have with girls.

Dr. Ray Blanchard, a little farther out than the angels.

Blanchard also emphasized only female hebephilia, suggesting that sex with young girls (which is an accepted part of some cultures, especially the male-dominated ones) is evolutionarily adaptive, which is how he links fertility to the issue.  But he doesn’t consider the medical danger of pregnancy and birth for girls who are not grown, esp. in places with no medical support.  Still, fertility as an issue is interesting in same-sex relations because the latter removes the obligation and burden of caring for the ensuing children, doing the work of maintaining family.  The church has accepted this responsibility for family maintenance only with great reluctance, except for a few popes who secretly sent child support to their bastards.

At this point in the research it’s clear that all is still beginning and that the answers, in particular those involving institutions that allow access to early adolescent children and those that ENCOURAGE the sexualizing of young people or offer opportunities to act on the impulse, need to be considered alongside one-on-one sexual events.  Much more is involved than morality. 

Donatello's David

PONDERING CONTEMPORARY SEX

Indulge me.  I might not agree with the statements below tomorrow or next year.  But it seems important to think about them.

CHROMOSOMAL MEIOSIS

Two strands of chromosomes, one from “male,” meaning the gender-determining chromosome has an X gene and a Y gene.  It’s also possible but rare to have an XXY or an XYY.  The outcome will not be good, but not as bad as YY or YYY.  The conceptus cannot survive without at least one X.

CHIMERICAL MEIOSIS

Occasionally two sperm may get into one ovum.  The outcome, if there is a viable zygote, would be unpredictable.  An interventional chimera is produced when the nuclear chromosomes of one woman are introduced into the de-nucleated cell machinery of another woman.  (I don’t know what happens with two nuclei but it is probably not good.)  The purpose is to remove the nuclear chromosomes of the mitochondria, which are cells within the cells and occasionally faulty.  Mitos have no secondary chromosomal input from a male.  (It’s also possible for the conceptus to be conceived in a petri dish, then implanted and gestated in a womb that is not the “biological” mother.)

We know that infant cells can migrate into a woman’s body or that an incomplete conceptus or twin can be absorbed into the developing conceptus.  Normally they persist as just a cell mass, but sometimes begin to develop at adolescence, even in a male body.

THE ECONOMY OF THE BIG EGG AND THE LITTLE MIGRATING SPERM

The female must produce the egg and take to term the conceptus.  The male only has to inject the triggering sperm.  Whatever helps the female to maintain the pregnancy and then protect the infant will persist over time, simply because any without advantages have worse chances.  The male sperm is best served by being planted many times in many “gardens.”  But if a man chooses his receptor carefully, is protective and contributes to the healthy gestation and the subsequent infant’s successful growth, then his babies will survive.

INFANCY

Every baby is born into a unique culture, environment, expectations, and so on.  Certain abilities to learn from the situation are probably genetically sourced and will help babies to adapt to some families and cultures but not others.  If the match is happy, the baby will thrive.

MIXED MESSAGES

Not every baby has the expected binary sexual organs.  A small percentage may have both, some might have neither, some might have a mix, a confusion.  Surgical and hormonal intervention is possible and some may choose to be a “woman with a penis” or a man with a vulva/vagina.  Fertility might or might not be related, depending on the status of the generating organs.  A penis is a delivery system, a uterus is a container.  The crucial creative organs are testes and ovaries and their internal support systems, whether organs or hormones.

PSYCHOLOGY OF MALE/FEMALE

If the family and/or culture’s expectations do not match the learning style or temperament or other “hard wiring” of the baby that might not have anything to do with sex, the baby’s sexual organs may not match the situation of the baby’s cultural expectations and the person may end up wanting to change, maybe by impersonation or nowadays with surgery.

ABERRATIONS

Varying from the norm in any culture means “difference” but since humans wear clothes, it is possible to hide or contradict some differences, therefore awareness of them might be low.  In some cultures a variation like twins is considered dangerous and the twins are killed.  In others, twins are highly valued.  In some cultures (this is SO tricky) twins are so valued that their sacrifice is considered efficacious in propitiating the gods.

This applies to some imagined lines of development (the children of bad people carrying “bad seed” or the children of good people inheriting high expectations) which loads up the simple ovum/sperm seams of persons with lots of cultural embroidery. 

CHILDHOOD

Because human babies are born unfinished, they must be sheltered in early childhood.  If the process of forming oneself has the added burden of adapting to sexual demands by adults, the child may struggle lifelong to overcome a felt incompleteness, which some describe as the shattering of the self.  After early childhood the burden of carrying a baby to term or competing with other males for access to a female is so heavy that humans develop in at least two more stages.  First they must unfold who they are and fit into their situation.  Some cultures require children to begin to work at this point, even something so arduous as underground mining.  The second stage, adolescence, is to become sexual in some way, which means managing appearance and drives. 

ADOLESCENTS

If adolescents are unsupported and unguided by the culture, the attrition will be high.  Mothers who are too young produce faulty babies even if they survive themselves.  Boys who are too young to compete are often victims of violence.  Sometimes they are unprotected even within the family and sometimes their drive to perform takes them into danger.  Neither is likely to have the stability to raise babies.  In cultures where youngsters reproduce, there is usually a supporting extended family.  If not, many just don’t survive.  This is not a matter of morality, but simple lack of what is needed.

COMING OF AGE

The last (4th) stage of maturation is post-adolescent, around the twenties.  In this time the most recently evolved brain capacities “come online”  -- both in terms of knowledge and emotional stability.  At this point a human being is able to manage a vast tapestry of cultural possibilities as well as personal decisions and practices.  They might choose to deny parts of themselves, transform other parts, intensify and develop others, or simply jump cultures.  

At this point the binaries of male/female are only a beginning for the multitude of possibilities along several spectrums of measurement: desire, desirability, awareness of other practices, conformity to context, faithfulness, desire for children, displacement to other kinds of creativity and so on.  

HOMOSEXUALITY

Confusion about the reference of this word is rampant.  In Biblical terms it probably had more to do with onanism, since survival of the tribe depended on willingness to reproduce.  Contrast that with the situation of China which is equally draconian about over-reproduction since population density threatens them.  In modern USA we have far more children than there are people responsible enough to protect and rear them, so it makes sense to encourage adoption by gays and het contraception. 

The real threat to “morality” is not same-sex marriage but incomplete relationships that produce children but abandon them, whether or not the relationship had legal standing.  We are only beginning to explore what the legalities of biological parents might be, whether it is in terms of “shoots and leaves” or in terms of legal sperm donors who have created hundreds of biological descendants.  Nor do we know what to do about biological mothers who do not bond psychologically, or those on whom the effect of the pregnancy hormone surge derails them. These aberrations may prevent survival of offspring, but they also damage the larger society, which is what justifies intervention.

It appears that gay men are created in the womb in a number of mammal species (though no one has identified a gay "gene") and persist genetically because they contribute to the survival of the group rather than the individual.  How they might make their contribution as "uncles" probably depends more on the culture, but often is through artistic creativity or other humanities.  They might also be athletes, mechanics, farmers or cowboys.  There is no "build" or "voice" or "gestures" that identify gays.  

Lesbians seem to be more influenced by the culture, probably more in the nourishing, protective maternal style but maybe not.  Since actual fertilization is not necessarily voluntary, women have evolved to survive where they are, even if it is an imprisonment and against their personal nature.

COMMODIFICATION

In a capitalistic and status/class based society, the culture will impose, evoke, and reinforce even such things as sexual characteristics.  Hugh Hefner’s success was as much a product of selling high-end booze, expensive cars, music, fireplaces and smoking jackets as it was sexual liberty and access to bunnies.  The real porn was the advertising.  "Gay" is a market.  Homosexuality is a major Netflix category. “Special” places, clothing, tools, etc. are all pitched to gender differences, sexual markers, and invented categories.  The appeal of them might not correlate with children: skinny women with breast implants who use many chemical cosmetics and get pregnant late in life are not so likely to have the best outcomes.  But the commodification offered to the woman who can pay for ovum donors, in vitro fertilization, mitochondrial transplant, and surrogate gestation has got to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Even that is dwarfed by the kind of commodification called “criminalization.”  Managing incarcerated prisoners is worth billions.  All the adjunct functions like methadone clinics or anger management groups have a sexual valence to them, or why would the media be so obsessed with prison rape?  How else could things like the criminalizing of carrying condoms be justified when they are so clearly beneficial?  The criminalization of drugs is deeply entwined with the criminalization of sex.

These thoughts are in part triggered by reading "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" by Donald Symons. (1979)  It's packed with challenges to people who have dominated the field, maybe unjustifiably.  Anyway, time for a re-think.

RAW NARCISSISM

I don’t sign up for RSS on many blogs but one I’ve kept up with since I was reading 2blowhards years ago is “the rawness.” (http://therawness.com) As I understand it -- and I may be way off base because I don’t really know -- this is written in New York City by a half-Haitian (black, I guess) man addressing the many many young and youngish men trying to make it in the city. They are obsessed with “game” and though they seem on the surface to mean by that scoring with women, in fact this guy (who signs himself “T” or Ricky Raw) gives advice about “human nature” and how to be a better person. He’s pretty damn solid.

The big recent topic? Narcissism. Both in terms of those alpha guys who elbow a milder man away from the bar and in terms of the histrionic female vampires who can eat a man alive and unpeeled. The main argument of the moment is that people learn narcissism from narcissistic parents -- too busy, too self-absorbed, too incompetent -- to raise the children they have been too narcissistic to prevent having. What this teaches the kids is to look out for themselves (replicating narcissism), although sometimes with a crippled, needy parent, they end up being sucked into taking care of them. Then they are a “parentified child” or “co-dependent,” always more comfortable when taking care of someone. Narcissism and codependence are reciprocal, often playing off against each other and leading to grandiosity, control issues, and other miserable stuff like borderline personality disorders. But when a narcissist finds a codependent and they’re a good fit -- hey, it’s intense. And some people really want that. Others do not.

This blogger-man reads book after book and is shrewd and dependable in his opinions of them. He’s not the male equivalent of a Helen Gurley Brown “Sex in the City” game player, but rather someone looking for the real thing: trustworthy and lasting relationships that support a meaningful life. I have three responses.

One of my tests is whether these ideas work with same sex relationships. I think that narcissism/codependency dysfunctions do indeed work as useful concepts in that context and I can think of examples among the people I know. Another of my tests is whether these ideas are a useful way to think in terms of ministry relationships and, again, I find that they are. A third context is in parent/child relationships and in this case the dynamics of identity formation are very relevant. The whole point of the generational boundary -- that the party with greater power and control be careful to protect the vulnerable instead of using them for their own ends -- is illuminated clearly.

Going back to the first context, let’s look at Yves St. Laurent (the Paris fashion designer) and Pierre Bergé (his partner in business and at home), so I can talk about same-sex relationships without getting into trouble. (When you look up Valier on one of those community analysis websites, they will tell you there are NO gay or lesbian couples here. How do they know??) So -- in terms of the Paris fashion world, this was a long and productive partnership. The two men were not “equal” -- one could argue that St. Laurent was a child while Bergé was the adult, but it was equally true that St. Laurent was creative in a way that Bergé was not. They had an asymmetrical but reciprocal relationship. Probably you could say that St. Laurent was a narcissist and Bergé was co-dependent, an enabler. It worked because it WAS about work and I believe that’s a key stabilizer. In all these discussions of “game” there is never a hint of the people involved collaborating to do something they feel passionately about. Everything is devoted to the two people’s relationship. Everything is face-to-face instead of side-by-side. Each other is the only thing they feel passionately about. A major and consuming mistake IMHO.

In the best of conventional worlds, the “something” the two adults would feel passionately about protecting and growing would be children. Conservatives feel this is the point of sexual relationship. But two adults could also join in other enterprises, like business, arts, a cause of some kind, a garden, military life, a ranch, or public service. The goal needs to be something compelling enough to supply the discipline capable of curbing the excesses of grandiose narcissism and toxic enabling. In my experience, men are better at finding this uberprinciple than women are, but only slightly. And it is a mistake to let the guiding cause justify excesses of power. A complexification in the case of two same-sex people is the stigma. If there is enough money or fame, the stigma is erased, but not the curiosity, unless people have seen enough, as in a liberal community.

Next we get into the accepted stereotype of the charismatic and admired church leader and his little supporting hen of a preacher’s wife, uncomplainingly raising the children alone and overlooking insults and trespasses for the sake of the greater good. Female ministers walk into a confusing mix of requirements based on gender stereotypes instead of practical roles. (Is she Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, or Ingrid Bergman playing a nun?) Ministers attract codependent people in droves, both genders, not always based on sex. If these needy people are frustrated, they can be vengeful. If the religious conviction is strong enough to be a governing discipline, that helps.

Back to the parent/child cathexis: how does one wean a child from the natural dependence of babyhood in an emotionally healthy way? First of all, attention must be paid to the child. Second, a child is not a puppet and must be trusted to do his or her own growing in his or her own way but without letting him or her play in traffic. Third, listen to the stories. The great strength of “The Rawness” is that he offers story after story. Mostly, in resilient families, the members go in and out of narcissism and co-dependence, learning as they go where the balance is and how to feel it. Every kid is different, times are different, unexpected things happen. Either it’s fascinating and increases the amount of love, or everyone goes into lockdown and gets drunk, or there’s some variation in between. Hopefully without violence.

And hopefully these ideas are interesting and useful enough to avoid all the pointless obsessing about “stress.” There’s too much “game” in stress, mostly coming from pharmaceutical companies. It gets very boring.

MARY'S BROTHER JAMES (Invented)

Now we're in the mega-urban-floating-in-a-diaspora age and what the heck does that mean for fathers? Clearly resurrection is off the table now. But not crucifixion (AIDS, for instance).

A father is supposed to protect, nurture, educate, be a role model, provide a living. A lot of fathers do exactly that. Some don't. Some have never evolved beyond being hunter/gatherer/warriors and only know how to do that. The best they can do is to throw the kid into the pickup with them when they light out for the territories. They are Esau, the hairy man, the hunter.

Maybe today is not for a generation of fathers. Maybe now it's up to the brothers. Jesus had brothers or at least half-brothers. We don't know about Joseph’s or Mary’s brothers. Let’s try imagining Jesus' Uncle Jimmy, the one who is gay. This is a sort of new gospel. There are a LOT of really old gospels, you know -- old scrolls stuffed into jugs and lying in caves. The authorities just picked out the ones they liked (four of them) for the New Testament and put some of the others in the Apocrypha, but there are even more. In one of them Jesus keeps kissing John on the mouth. So much is well-known and accepted in the study of religiion that ministers are not allowed to take back to congregations. But this “gospel” (good news) is one I’m making up. Not in a spirit of mockery, but as an exploration. You won’t find any confirmation.

I had an Uncle Jimmy, actually my great uncle, my grandfather’s brother. An ugly little man who worked his heart out every day and had the gentlest, most generous spirit of anyone I've ever known. Totally unlike my fiery unreasonable grandpa. Yet when we pulled into his yard late one night and put up our tent trailer, he came out with the shotgun because he thought we were stealing off his woodpile. He was capable of being fierce. He was not gay; in fact, not very sexy at all, but he was quite real. I borrow his name with fondness.

NA tribes who didn't have a tight grip on conception -- so couldn’t always point to the father -- expected the mother's brothers to do the teaching and protecting. And disciplining. So let’s imagine that Jesus has an Uncle James. (Maybe he was gay, but he certainly didn’t have AIDS, which didn’t make the jump to humans until later, though they say now that the monkeys had it 30,000 years ago.)

Let’s get outrageous. What if Jesus turned on Joseph one day, the way he did on the money-changers, and said, "Joseph, old man, you're a loser. I don't want to be a carpenter all my life, I'm outta here." And maybe in exasperation Joseph beat him. In those days he could legally stone his son to death. And then maybe Uncle Jimmy (who was after all not Joseph's brother but Mary's brother) came to find Jesus and took him home and comforted him and sent him off to India, the San Francisco of those days. (Still is!) And Jesus picked up a lot of ideas over there and brought them back with him. Things like “no violence” and compassion for the poor, magic like how to multiply loaves and fishes. Gandhi sorts of things.

Consider Mary’s point of view. Being inseminated by God must be quite terrifying. None of the girls of the Greek myth world seemed to welcome Zeus. Their children didn't fare so well. But then neither did Jehovah's son. I should think at that point Mary would have been pretty grateful for a sheltering man with a home and a job, despite the amount of moving around they seemed to have to do, but maybe she also depended on her brother Jimmy quite a bit. He had no children. That might NOT be because he was gay, because gay men can still inseminate and they can still be “turned on” circumstantially to women or they might simply be adaptable.

Among the Plains Indians there was a certain “type” who enjoyed women’s work, dressed as a woman, and had a special fondness for children -- NOT pedophilia (that’s a Euro concept, isn’t it?) but “uncleness,” care for the well-being of nieces and nephews. I’ve known local tribal men like this. They didn’t dress like women, but they enjoyed women’s work, even as defined contemporaneously. (Secretaries and nurses.) I don’t know any stories about transvestites in the Bible -- just in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” But that’s irrelevant anyway. Gay is not the same as cross-dressing which is more like identity confusion. Of course, Jesus wears a long dress and some people argue about his sexuality. In fact, I reject the whole thing of male versus female as a construct sometimes useful and often not. I think gender/sexuality exists as a spectrum in society and as uniqueness in individuals.

What does gay Uncle Jimmy have to contribute in a male role model sort of way? One thing that comes to mind is love of the arts -- not that one has to be gay, but my girl friend in the fourth grade had a gay uncle who took us to the ballet. (I didn’t realize he was gay then.) Of course, my theatre classmates included a lot of gay guys -- quite various, not types. Among my students I noticed that some boys were good friends to girls. Some protected smaller, weaker boys. Might or might not have been gay.

Biologists have known all along that maybe a tenth of males in any mammal species will attempt sex with other males rather than females. The question is how they have escaped being weeded out by evolution. The answer is that survival fitness is not a matter of individual success but of the persistence of the whole group, the tribe. If individual success is at the expense of the group, survival is endangered. Contributions to survival in the cases of both gays and grandmothers is not in reproduction, but in the health and resourcefulness of the children once they are born. Life is a continuation of the gestation begun by insemination in the womb, extended outside the mother. Even the sacrifice of the occasional fetus/infant/youngster in the interest of better lives for the rest of the group can be a “fitness for survival.” We are mistaken to think that aggressive fierceness in men is a fitness when it destroys groups and possibly nations in useless wars.

The importance of the Uncle Jimmies of the world is that they share genes with their families and contribute to their health, defense and wealth without producing more children who consume and burden. Anyway, I find them to be lovable and dependable friends.

"LOVE IN A DARK TIME" by Colm Toibin

Though I get entirely absorbed in this book collaboration with Tim Barrus, a person can only be perceptive and skillful at writing for a limited number of hours in a day. At least that’s the case for me. So there are other ongoing projects, one of which HAS to be the yard, just now emerging from a spring snowstorm that is making it leaping greenly as an ee cummings poem.

Another is reading with a specific goal, to try to get a grip on the concept and phenomena of “gay.” A hopeless project, sort of like trying to get a grip on, say, the concept and phenomena of India or even Native Americans. Because it’s a construct, imposed from both inside and outside so that all boundaries are controversial, and because it’s so multiple and morphing that one has to chase along with a butterfly net, hoping the mesh is strong enough to hold whatever one is pursuing.

My latest book is Colm Toibin’s “Love in a Dark Time and Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature.” He’s a tough, clear writer as the best Irish always are, but more than that, he always has his underlying concepts under control and sharpened. So far I’m only a couple of chapters into the book, but already the ideas are thick and rich.

The first chapter, called “Roaming the Greenwood,” addresses writers who defended against being accused of homosexuality and the second, “Oscar Wilde: Love in a Dark Time” gives a clear account of why they should do that. Maybe it’s clearer to start with the second.

Wilde was a frog in heating water, married with children, successful, gentry, popular -- all the good things. But his love affair with Lord Douglas (“Bosie”) made him vulnerable to extreme legal punishment for just that, though it was disguised as being a characteristic of his essential nature or un-nature. If he had simply cruised in the usual manner and quarters, the gentlemen’s agreement was that all would be overlooked. But when he took the relationship as seriously as, say, “gay marriage,” Bosie’s father made it publicly, crushingly, impossible. Things like property get involved, don’t they? Control, inheritance, allowances . . .

I had known that Wilde went to prison while Bosie skipped out, but I had imagined that prison meant something like Galileo’s house arrest or maybe the Marquis de Sade scribbling in a cell. In fact, Wilde was treated like a terrorist, which was pretty much the way all “criminals” were treated in those days, including those who were the victims of the criminalization of poverty. He had to sleep on a board, the food was so substandard that he couldn’t digest it, he was constantly a victim of diarrhea, and he was forced to march on a treadmill to satisfy the requirement of “hard labor.” (I hope the two female journalists just sentenced in North Korea are able to escape anything parallel.) The screaming and bellowing of whipped prisoners echoed through the place. Almost worse was the denial of reading and writing.

Wilde survived, only barely, and said his “mainspring had been broken.” Afterwards he tried to help prisoners he’d somehow grown to know, but with little success. He didn’t live much longer. It is clear to me that he was not punished for “buggery” but for being frank and self-determined, which are supposed to be characteristics of a proud and educated person. The homosexuality part only made him vulnerable to revenge for his real offenses, which were offenses to individuals (Bosie’s father) rather than to the state or to any religion.

The whole idea of homosexuality is a construct, because human sexuality is amorphous, situational, and varies in many dimensions. For instance, men who desire sex with other men is not the same as men who desire to be women or men who desire to be desired by men instead of women or men who are effeminate. Prison rapists of the weak desire power, not sex. Some have access to men they desire but no will to act on it. Some are confined by social mores. Some never realize that they desire men physically. Some displace physical desire into intellectual or even athletic channels. Some act out desire for men without feeling anything at all.

And that’s just men.

Toibin takes a look at writers who have been reverse diagnosed as repressed homosexuals, once that concept formed: people like Henry James or Kafka or George Orwell. As soon as the concept exists, it can be imposed on or drawn out of everywhere. It’s like “co-dependence” or “blaming the victim” -- as soon as you realize what the pattern is, you see it everywhere, including oneself. But then what do you do with it? It’s part of life, isn’t it?

Anyway, Toibin has this major insight: homosexuality, like anything that has to be hidden, becomes expressed in literature in many coded ways: spies, terrorists, underclasses, a life confined by convention (maybe racism) so that it is without love, a vulnerability to revulsion on the part of others (being a cockroach), being shut out, powerless. And, reversely, homosexuality -- which can be converted into all these other manifestations -- can become a coded version of them in turn. How do you know whether you are reading/writing about spies as gays or gays as spies or both?

Here’s the horror I can see coming and it has nothing to do with sex. A statistic going the rounds is that the USA has 6% of the world’s population but incarcerates more than 30%. We must be criminalizing something that the rest of the world is not. We are criminalizing minorities, mostly through maintaining the criminalization of marijuana possession in small amounts. (I support the criminalization of meth, the other poor person’s drug and a huge source of anti-social behavior.)

What I see coming is debtor’s prison: the re-criminalization of poverty, even among formerly respectable mainstream people. Forming just under the surface is a contempt for anyone who isn’t “making it” and the assertion that this is a choice. Pushing out the low-wage immigrants means that other people must be forced into their jobs, which are the equivalent of treadmills. Reforming health care means capping how much medical intervention you “deserve.” I predict that in a few decades no one will care how gay you are, so long as you’re rich. And when the costs of incarceration become too high, we will go “Chinese” and simply erase the poor, converting them into organ assets.

I’d better go back and read more Colm Toibin. If the Irish don’t know about this sort of thing, no one does.