First, I should warn the reader that I am going to write another post about sexuality – ideally it will be my last on this subject. It hope it will be written well enough. I feel my previous post was a little approximate, a little rushed, unedited. In describing some aspects of my life, such as how I presented myself to others when I was ill, I am unsure if I got everything right. I don't really know how others perceived me then. One difficulty I have I think is that I am a good deal more intelligent than most other people which means that people I associated with may have had difficulty understanding me. If readers have seen the film Ideocracy, they may know what I'm trying to get at.
When I was younger I may have been quite good looking – I can't be sure. This relates to the issue of how others perceived and behaved around me. In Montage of Heck, Courtney Love says about Kurt Cobain that he was better looking than Brad Pitt but was completely unaware of it. It is possible that the reason he decided everyone in the world was gay except him (I discuss this in the post "An Interpretation of A Couple of Rocks Songs.") was because even straight men were attracted to him. I don't know if this is a plausible explanation for his condition but I raise this hypothesis because it is interesting.
Some think that everyone is at least a little bisexual but I don't think this is true.
In this post, as I said, I am again going to talk about sexuality. We tend to split the world into the gays and the straights. What is homosexuality? It seems that homosexuality has two aspects: sexual attraction to people of the same gender and a lack of of sexual attraction towards people of the opposite gender. It is odd that these two features tend to go together. I have a friend, a woman, who once expressed her puzzlement that gay men didn't screw women as well. "You'd think one hole would be as good as another". It was an interesting remark that I have thought about since. Perhaps there are men who identify as 'straight', who only screw women, but are no more attracted to women than men, men who don't deep down discriminate between holes (to put it crudely). Yet, setting this possibility aside, we tend to view homosexuality as always having these two aspects. There has been growing recognition, in recent years, that it is possible for people to be bisexual or asexual – yet, nevertheless, in practice, people still tend to divide the world into the straights and the gays, to subscribe to this binary opposition and to suppose that people are only attracted to one gender or the other.
The first time I found out that someone in my life was gay happened when I was about fourteen. I used to sit next to a boy called Jonathan in a science class, a violinist who would expatiate on the misadventures he'd got up to during music trips. One time he said to me, "With all this sex I've been having, I hope I don't get AIDS!" I tried to reassure him, saying "Don't worry about that Jonathan – it's only gay people who get AIDS." He said, for the first time, and as if I was an idiot, "Andrew. I'm gay". I'd had no idea. Presumably he thought I already knew but it still came as a shock to me. Walking home from school that afternoon I tried to process this revelation, thinking about my uncle (who I have discussed in the post "A Sketch of My Uncle") and my parents' divorce when I was seven. It is fair to say that this first 'coming out' greatly affected my burgeoning understanding of sexuality. I lived in world then, and would want to live in a world later, where people were openly one way or that other.
In later years when I was still at high school, my friend Shannon (who I mentioned in the post "The Confidence Man"), who stayed at Jonathan's house for a while because he had no-where else to live, said to me once, "For a gay man he sleeps with a lot of women!" It was a hard concept to grasp, the idea that gay men might sleep with women as well. I don't know whether this influenced my view of the world but, based partly perhaps on Jonathan's 'lifestyle' and partly on the film Brokeback Mountain, I decided that gay men did at least sometimes sleep with women. It was a problem for me though. I tended to assume that, if they slept with women, they must do so reluctantly, without enjoyment. The world was dived into the straights and the gays and, in my opinion, one homosexual experience was proof sufficient of homosexuality: I didn't believe in 'experimentation' or 'bi-curiousity'. I didn't believe a man could ever have a homosexual encounter unless he was gay or else in the closet. I have changed this viewpoint in recent years but only slightly – I now suppose that proof sufficient of homosexuality is one consensual homosexual experience.
My view, that a single homosexual experience is proof sufficient of homosexuality, in fact has wide currency. If a man (and to a lesser extent a woman) who has had a homosexual experience talks publicly about it, much of the world will immediately judge that person gay. This is why men and most women don't talk about such experiences. But this way of defining sexuality, in terms of experiences, is of relatively recent origin, is not the only way to define it. In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the defining criterion was marriage. If a man was married, he was straight; if a man was single he was gay – or at least considered suspect. A 'confirmed bachelor' was deemed definitely gay. The novelist Henry James may perhaps have drifted into a kind of homosexuality because of public speculation about why he wouldn't marry. This way of defining sexual preference relates to the second aspect of homosexuality – the homosexual's supposed lack of desire for the opposite sex. In those days, homosexual acts were illegal and so, if they happened, nobody knew about them (unless the participants ended up in court). Homosexuality was attributed therefore to those who seemed to show no interest in coupling up with someone of the opposite sex.
Today we no longer assume that the reason men and women are single is because they want to be. We no longer live in an age where marriage is almost the universal norm. I don't think I ever believed that all bachelors are gay as many people once believed – but I have tended to assume that men who are in relationships with women but who aren't sleeping with them are somehow 'suspect'. This prejudice naturally relates to the second aspect of homosexuality, the idea of it being a sexual aversion to those of the opposite sex. Of course, it is hard to know if a couple are fucking or not – but I have sometimes had friends (and one ex-girlfriend) who have divulged some intimate details about their current relationships, details that made me suspicious of their partners. One feels sometimes a prurient interest in others' relationships. Did Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf fuck? They had no children. But, on the evidence of Orlando, I feel sure that Virginia was quite sex-positive and was very fond of men; her feminism was all about female empowerment and had nothing to do with any animosity towards the male gender. Perhaps they fucked but used contraception. Perhaps it is best not to assume too much about others' relationships when we have so little to go on.
This issue, of the two aspects of what is bundled under the term ' homosexuality', are difficult to separate but perhaps we should make the attempt. We should perhaps divide gay men into two camps – those who are gay because they don't like women and those who are gay because they like men too much. I feel I should say that I have avoided both groups my whole life; even with Jonathan I didn't hang out with him much. I think I worried that gayness could somehow be transmitted. I imagine this admission reflects badly on me but I am trying to be honest.
At this point I would like to turn from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Sometimes men and women feel the need to try to prove that they are straight. Often this is because they are the victims of malicious rumours, slanders or libels, as happened with Tom Cruise; it may also sometimes happen when the person has got too close to the homosexual community and needs to get out. It is an invidious position to be in, the situation in which one feels forced to prove oneself straight to others, because the person has to demonstrate two things. He has to prove that he has never had a homosexual experience (and of course he could always be concealing something) and he needs to prove that, in his relationships with women, he was having heterosexual experiences (and he could be lying about that as well). It is a horrible dilemma to be in, because malicious rumours can be hard to debunk, because those who have spread falsehoods may seem credible, because people are credulous, because the more one fights the deeper into the mire one sinks, because to prove oneself straight one has to expose one's deepest soul to others. I feel myself that I have been the victim of false reportage and have battled it for years; I have discussed this in previous posts. Being myself quite an honest person, I have found it unbelievable, even appalling, that others can be so dishonest. I wish I could say that the answer is to always take people at their word but in a world equally divided between liars and truth-tellers, it is hard to know whom to trust. Personally, although I don't know the details of the defamation case he won in the 'nineties, I believe Tom Cruise is 'innocent'. And it seems time has turned the tide at least a little. At the Baftas a couple of years ago, Stephen Fry, no less, introduced Cruise as "Tom fucking Cruise!" which goes to show that he was on Tom's side. It seems ridiculous that Cruise has fought this battle for so long but we live in a ridiculous world. Possibly, and I offer this proposition very tentatively, eradicating homophobia is a good thing not only for gay people but for straight people – which may partly be why Cruise now regularly appears on the Graham Norton Show. In a world which genuinely embraces homosexuality, why would someone feel the need to conceal his gay-ness, to stay in the closet? There is a paradox involved here. But I can only repeat something I said in an earlier post, "Concerning Oscar Wilde and Kurt Cobain" – that hatred creates the thing it hates.
I once had a dream in 2007 in which George W. Bush said to me "We try to keep our club quite... exclusive." When someone has been outed, truly or falsely, it is almost impossible for that person to get back in.
This way of defining sexuality, in terms of experiences both heterosexual and homosexual, is what I always used to believe – but this is also a poor way to define sexuality. A person can be gay or straight without ever having had any kind of sexual experience at all. The Forty-Year Old Virgin is such an important film because it shows this– Steve Carell's character is a straight man who doesn't get laid until he is forty, not because he doesn't want to, but because he is unlucky in love. A man doesn't need to have had a girlfriend to be straight. Sexuality has a great deal to do with sexual desire but sex itself does not encompass it. I have had two people in my life very close to me who have both said the same thing in exactly the same words "I thought I was gay for a while – but then I decided I was just a late developer". This exemplifies a deeper problem. I admit I once toyed with a theory along these lines myself in a film I wrote, that a person's sexuality might be determined by their first sexual experience, that a woman could be recruited to heterosexuality in the same way that homosexuals are supposedly recruited, but I now think this idea is incredibly stupid. Sexuality runs deeper than experiences. A person does not suffer sexual confusion because he or she is taking longer to have sex than he or she wants; a person becomes sexually confused because other people have messed with his or her mind. Psychologists and psychiatrists are very much to blame for this, for destabilising people's senses of self.
In this post I have discussed two ways of defining sexuality, in terms of experiences and in terms of marriage. The most common way of defining sexuality today though is in terms of love. In an episode of John Oliver's show a little while ago he did just this in passing. I am unsure if this a good way of characterising sexuality but, it seems important to me that if we do define sexuality in this way, we distinguish between platonic love and erotic love and relate sexuality to the latter and not the former.
I feel I should say one more thing. I was asked by my psychiatrist a couple of months ago, not the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and January 2012, I can't remember her precise words, if I had ever suffered any sexual uncertainty myself. (It was the first time I had ever been asked this.) At the time, I said "No' and I meant it.. The fact is that I did suffer very unpleasant psychotic symptoms for a long time, symptoms that started in 2013, that were at their worst at the time I was put under the Mental Health Act in late January 2014 and right before New Years at the end of the same year. These symptoms didn't fully go away until this year. It is difficult for me to talk about these symptoms – but I mentioned them in the post Me and Jon Stewart Part 3 and a song that captures a little of what it was like for me is "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" by Faith No More. I always knew these symptoms (I can think of no other word than 'symptom' to describe them) came from the outside somehow and didn't reflect who I am. This may seem difficult to understand I appreciate but it is almost impossible for me to talk about them.
I found out a couple of days ago that the psychiatrist who treated me between 2007 and 2012 has just retired or resigned. This is a very good thing.
If a person feels that he has to prove he's straight to others, he often feels he needs to define what 'straight' means, as I have done in this post. In All Apologies, Cobain effectively defined homosexuality in terms of sexual arousal – he suggested that gay men are more "easily amused"' than straight men. He needed to assert a definition of homosexuality in order to say what he wasn't. My own view, today, is more complicated than this. But I don't know if I'll ever be able to express it directly.
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