FOREWORD
This entry is the third in a series of monthly installments that present the rationale behind my second novel, Thinking Straight. The series is written from the point of view of a gay man—which I am not—so I'm labeling it as a fictional open letter to humanity, addressed to anyone who will read it and consider its points. My hope is that it will further understanding and acceptance.
The installments will be presented in logical order (Part I and the full list of installments was posted in April), and I encourage readers to start at the beginning and proceed through. The series will be highlighted each month on DREAMWalkergroup.com in the DREAMScene newsletter.
THE CARDS, continued: ABNORMAL and PROMISCUOUS
I’m going to let our homophobic bigot friend (from Part II) back into the conversation for just a minute. He says, “What you are is abnormal.” As with “unnatural,” he says this in a tone of voice that makes it sound like something worthy of Satan himself.
So, you tell me this time. What’s the definition of abnormal? I hear you saying, “The opposite of normal.” But you know I’m not going to let you get away with that. What’s normal?
I’m right-handed. Let’s say I’m a caterer, and I’m working this weekend at a convention for left-handed people. If the specimen sample is everyone in the convention center at its height, I’m abnormal. But just let me walk back out onto the street, and change the sample to everyone within several city blocks, and—presto, chango—I’m normal again.
There’s another way to apply a test for normality, too. You don’t have to confine your examination to a single point in time. So, for example, we can look at a characteristic as it appears in the human race over a period of time, and apply the findings that way.
When I was born, it was illegal to be gay just about every place in these United States. This was true when Dr. Alfred Kinsey was doing his research. It isn’t true today; at least, it’s not illegal in as many places. Today we have entire television networks dedicated to a viewership that accepts homosexuality in society. We have major gay characters in some very successful television shows. Depending on where you live, it can be viewed as edgy, as almost fashionable, to be gay. Or at least no big deal. (I did say “depending on where you live.”)
There’s a lot of controversy around the findings of Dr. Kinsey’s reports on sexuality, and there’s a lot of debate today over what the percentage is of people who are gay. After all, there are people who answer polls in the negative incorrectly, because they haven’t yet figured out that they’re gay, and there are people who won’t admit to themselves that they’re gay, and people who know damn well that they’re gay and lie about it. But one thing everyone has agreed on is that as far as anyone can tell, the percentage hasn’t changed. So if roughly the same percentage of people are gay over decades, regardless of law and fashion, that percentage becomes a statistical norm.
So it’s normal for a reliable percentage of people to be gay. And for that group of people, it’s natural to respond sexually to people of the same sex. Therefore, there is no rational support for basing the conclusion that “Gay Equals Bad” on the topic of normality.
Another one down.
Are we having fun yet?
This card is almost certainly more often hurled in the faces of gay men than gay women. And the reason for that gives you a clue as to how we’re going to destroy this one.
Step one: define, in terms of sex (it has other definitions, too). I’ve heard it said that promiscuous is a word you apply to someone who has more sex than you. This one might be as tough to define as unnatural. Is someone promiscuous if he (notice the pronoun) has sex with two different people in a month? A week? A weekend? What if he knows them, and he sees them regularly? What if he doesn’t even know their names? What if it’s someone who is married, has promised monogamy, and has sex once a year or so with a prostitute or with someone he encounters casually?
Tricky, defining this one. Let’s just say it means having indiscriminate sex, which isn’t terribly specific, but probably each of you has your own idea of what this might mean, and that’s okay for now. And as long as we’re calling it indiscriminate, let’s agree that it would be committed by someone who had very little trouble treating sex as “just sex” when they wanted to. What’s “just sex?” Read on.
Apply it. Here’s a scenario: Heterosexual married couple, arguing bitterly. One of them says, “But, honey, it meant nothing to me!” The injured party replies, “Nothing? Does it mean nothing to you when you have sex with me?”
So, it’s pretty clear what they’re arguing about. One of them has been unfaithful. But which one? The husband or the wife? It could, of course, be either, but be honest. In your mind, didn’t you picture the first person who spoke as the man? Let’s face it: historically, it’s far more common for a husband to be unfaithful than for a wife. While I’m not excusing infidelity, I’m going to propose that there are two reasons men are more likely to stray. There may be lots more, but I’m limiting myself here.
One reason has a lot to do with how a man and woman experience heterosexual intercourse differently. If you think about it, the woman, who is probably smaller and almost certainly less physically powerful than her male partner, must trust him enough to allow the insertion of an object with which she may be more or less familiar, but that she does not in fact own or control, into an extremely intimate and sensitive part of herself. Over. And over. And over. And … you get the picture. So while there are certainly women who love sex for “just sex,” there are likely to be fewer of them than there are men who can see it like that and be comfortable with it.
The seeds of another reason men might be more likely to be promiscuous are in the first reason. We know that like many other aspects of life, women are more complex than men. Maybe it’s got something to do with the genes on the extra leg of that second X chromosome. And their sexual response to their partners is more complicated. It’s typical (always leaving room for exceptions, of courses) for a woman to start thinking about romance or intimacy on her way to thinking about sex. With many women, that’s the only way they want to get there. So it starts in her head and/or heart, with emotions, and works its way down to the physical pleasure centers.
In comparison, the sexual response in men typically begins below the waist. It can work its way up to his head, and he can get just as into the emotional and spiritual aspects of the act as any woman, but for him it can begin and end all in the same place without moving much more than however many inches he can lay claim to. He’s more likely than she is to get the concept of “just sex” and think that’s okay. Like our husband in the scenario above, he thinks that telling his wife that an act of sex meant nothing to him will make sense to her. In most cases, it doesn’t.
Not too long ago I heard a woman ask a straight man if he thought it was true that gay men are more promiscuous than straight men. His response was all male: “They’re probably more successful at it.” Think about it: if a straight man wants to have sex with a woman, he needs to do whatever it is that gets her in the mood. She might be easy, but chances are she’s going to require more warming up than he does. But if two guys want to go at it just for the sex? Well, not only do they not need to feel mushy about each other, they don’t have to wait for anybody to get in the mood, if all they both want is “just sex.”
In the next installment, I’ll apply this process to the card that reads “Pedophile.”
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