We Hold These Truths To Be Self Evident...

I was getting caught up on back issues of The Nation the other day when I came across an article by Walter Mosley entitled Get Happy.

"Citizens are not treated like members of society but more like employees who can be cut loose for any reason large or small, whether that reason be an individual action or some greater event like the downturn of the stock market. We are lied to by our leaders and the mass media to such a great extent that it's almost impossible to lay a finger on one thing that we can say, unequivocally, is true. We wage a "war on drugs" while our psychiatrists prescribe mood-altering medicines at an alarming rate. We eat and drink and smoke too much, and sleep too little. We worry about health and taxes and the stock market until one of the three finally drags us down. We fall for all sorts of get-rich-quick schemes, from the stock market to the lottery. We practice rampant consumerism, launch perpetual wars and seek out meaningless sex."

It was those last few words that got to me and echoed in my brain for days - we seek out meaningless sex...meaningless sex. The rest of this post is going to be a careful balance between honest and open sharing and too much information (after all, my mother reads this blog from time to time).

In 1969, in a bar in Greenwich Village called the Stone Wall Inn, patrons fought back against yet another typical police raid on a gay bar. Often if two men or two women were witnessed to be so much as touching hands in violation of some "obsenity" code, the police would move in and load everyone up into a wagon and arrest them. The next day's paper would include a full list of the names of all individuals scooped up in the raid.

In the years following as the movement took off, a significant number of queer folk rejected the so called norms of conventional society in the way that feminists rejected traditional gender roles, people of color rejected assimilating behavior (e.g., African-Americans straightening their hair to be more "white"), and hippies rejected all manner of middle class values.

For gays this meant a variation on free love -- an open expression of their sexuality, whenever, as often, and with whomever they wanted. This is not to say that throughout this period there were not also a substantial number of queer folk who chose to model themselves on the norms of society. The tension between both points of view has existed in most all of the various social justice movements. Think Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X...SNIC versus Black Panthers.

The stereotype of promiscuous gays comes out of this new found freedom. Many men were and still are promiscuous. I don't care for that word. If you've played in that free wheeling culture you will see that the definitions are not quite accurate - they emphasize randomness--indiscriminate in choice of partner. One can be selective in choice and still be having lots of sex that would curl the hair of conventional society.



This clip is from And The Band Played On. I've always loved the point at which Lily Tomlin challenges the doctor and his conventional attitude. Of course, this clip also serves to introduce my next point. In 1981 a nasty little retrovirus bursts out into this sexually rambunctious culture and spreads like wild fire, killing thousands and complicating the politics of sex.

By the grace of God I survived the 80's and 90's and continue today HIV negative. The individual that I am today was shaped by my own sexual exploration in the midst of the plague--the risk, the pleasure, the fear. Sir Ian McKellen plays a character who initially is convinced that he will not become infected because he is so proudly monogamous and normal in the movie. However, he too also dies from AIDS--in the end it really wasn't about the numbers.

We now live in a world in which state governments are arguing over gay marriage. To my eyes, the assimilationists have won and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I am wholeheartedly behind same gender couples having full and equal partnership rights. In fact, I believe that any group of individuals that want to legally declare themselves a family unit should have access to those same rights. I simply hope that we don't completely turn on our free loving brothers and sisters as we strengthen our foothold in conventional society.

Similarly with greater societal acceptance of gays and lesbians has come the advance of the ad men marketing to queers the way they have to heterosexuals all along. In addition to the blast of advertising convincing women how they need to improve their appearance and body to please men are an equal emphasis on beauty and perfection marketed to men. Eating disorders within the gay community have risen as we too are told that our bodies are less than perfect.

If you were to study the presentation of the male body in gay adult film (yes, I mean porn) you would find a significant shift from actors who are rather average in their appearance to today's actors who are these beefed up, shaved, buffed up, well endowed, beauty queens or prize steers - wait, aren't steers castrated? - bulls, that's probably more accurate.

I moved to the Upper Peninsula in part to remove myself from the prevalent gay culture in Chicago. I was not a good assimilationist - there were no wedding bells in my future - and the free love lifestyle was shifting, turning into a beauty contest in which my aging body was no longer able to compete. Yet, even up here in the woods, I have not lost my determination in defending free love as a valid choice.

That is why I was taken by that quote - it really gets to the heart of the matter. The problem in my mind isn't whether the sex is occurring within or without the bonds of holy matrimony or how often or with how many different partners. It really comes down to meaning. What is the meaning of what is going on? That is what truly matters.

For myself I slowed down to the current long dry spell of celibacy because the more casual encounters had lost any meaning for me and so they were no longer worthy of the effort. It would be so easy from the sanctity of a marriage to turn up your nose and decry any and all "promiscuous" sex as meaningless, but I think there is a hell of a lot of meaningless sex occurring between married partners too - a "committed relationship" doesn't preclude meaningless sex.

Sex doesn't get to be meaningful automatically because there's a legal document granting it authority. It has meaning because of the intentions of the adult participants. It can be an expression of love after 50+ years of marriage, it can be a comforting but unexpected encounter between friends in a time of crisis, it can be a casual encounter between strangers. Some will disagree with me on that last point.

However, I will always remember, for example, one encounter I had with a man from Italy who was passing through Chicago on vacation. Because of my coloring and blue eyes, he was convinced that I was northern Italian rather than Polish. We spent a lovely time together, but in the end he had to leave and return to Italy. From the onset it was clear that there would be no longevity to our friendship. It was what it was, and it was very sweet.

Hemingway wrote in For Whom The Bell Tolls, "I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years...So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have the value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it."

In sex and everything else, be sure there is meaning - your own personal meaning - in what you do. Otherwise it is too easy to become just another mindless "rampant consumer" that Walter Mosley was decrying. Peace.