Saturday, Aug. 24, 2002 - 11:47 p.m.
Getting Our Act Together
While an honest appraisal of gay life—and how I do or do not fit into it—is timely for me, I do not want to become a jaded old queen; reading this (thanks to KarlTM for the link) reaffirms just that. In that linked op-ed piece, a 39-year-old gay man named Charles Karel Bouley II expresses his disillusionment with gay life, particularly the high rate of substance abuse and sexual promiscuity; I’ve read it half a dozen times over the past few days, and tonight is the first time I’ve been able to get through it without my blood boiling. So maybe it’s time to write out my reaction.
Bouley raises some good points; he highlights some problematic issues in our “community,” particularly addictions, unsafe sex, and the fucked-up self esteem crap that results from impossibly high standards of physical desirability. Alas, however, he raises this important stuff in such a judgmental, bitchy way that the rant accomplishes nothing. Zilch.
Not only that, but woven through the piece are conservative—I would go so far as to say homophobic—ideas and admonitions which Bouley seems to think will educate us misbehaving queers. His argument seems to be that our troubles will disappear—our civil rights shall fall magically from the heavens—if only we’d act more hetero.
That is the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard—and I’ve certainly heard it before reading this particular piece. Many gay men consciously or unconsciously choose this or that aspect of the so-called conventional heterosexual lifestyle; many, too, happily make other choices, choices reflecting a more radical queerness. It’s all good, that’s what I say, and for many—certainly for me—life is a fluctuating, sometimes chaotic blend of the radical and the conventional.
I’m calmer now, sitting here, but it infuriates me that conventionalizing nonsense like Bouley’s gets held up as some panacea for the serious problems many of us struggle with. Wanting straight people to like us better is no reason to get sober or work on self-esteem or body issue stuff; it’s certainly not a good enough reason to make any change stick!
Someone appended a comment to my last entry (under the enigmatic moniker “one of the farmboyz”) urging me not to impose some inauthentic, normalizing solution to the problems I’m having with sex and self-esteem. I hear him, and I do not believe that is what I’m doing. Social convention—Oprahesque notions of what constitutes intimacy, for example— easily embeds itself inside our psyches; a large part of the critical voice inside my head rants at me the way Bouley rants in his piece; obviously, that’s why I’ve had such a strong reaction to him.
The point is that the changes we make in our lives are most whole—most likely to be durable—when they flow from something far deeper than all that opinionated crap about what’s appropriate or acceptable. As far as sex goes, I don’t know what’s around the corner for me but what I do know is that I’m feeling open again. And I’m so fucking glad that whatever decisions, risks and plunges I might make in that area of my life will be made clean and sober. Not because I think heteros will like me better as a non-drinking, well-behaved homosexual, or because I feel more entitled to be treated as a human being than if I were out there drunk, drugged and squirting cum all over the city. I’m worthy of a sober and sexual life no matter what anyone else thinks. Especially and including judgmental homos.
I’m worried about the rise in unsafe sex and HIV infection in our community; it sickens me, and I don’t know what to do about it. But certainly there is important stuff to do. Condemning the younger generation of gay men, many of whom have never known any one who’s died of AIDS, doesn’t strike me as particularly helpful.
And don’t even get me started on Bouley’s negativity about sex.
Nope, the bitchy jaded perspective doesn’t have a lot to offer me. I’m glad I read that infuriating piece: it affirms where I myself do not want to end up. There must be better ways to dialogue with each other about this important shit, no?
Which brings me to that book by David Nimmons I’ll be starting to read next week. I’m struck by a couple things on his webpage: (a) the mission statement strikes me as the perfect blend of critique and vision when it comes to gay life, and (b) Nimmons has done a lot of important work in the field of gay male safer sex. All this makes me excited about exploring his ideas further.
I’m feeling hopeful again. I won’t ever completely blend sex and love together in my life, but as I gradually thaw from this recent bleak phase, the journey itself beckons. And there are writings and people and experiences—sexual, spiritual and otherwise—out there that I’m again open to learning from.
Charles Karel Bouley II happens not to be one of them.
