Wednesday, March 01, 2006

A Brokeback thought, sorta

I recently got into an argument that got me thinking about how much is still unknown, even in the elite/enlightened/feminized/latte-sipping circles in which we move, about the complexities of "straight" sexuality and "gay" sex. The argument I had was about the inclination, or lack thereof, of straight men to have sex with other men if they find themselves in an all-male society for an extended length of time. My position, reduced to its essentials, was that all other things being equal, most men would go for it because other-induced friction is often preferable to self-induced friction. Not all men, but many men need non-masturbatory sex enough that were they to they find themselves in your average all-male society—the navy, prison, a pirate ship, an English boarding school-- they're going to conclude that having sex with another man is a reasonable, pleasurable thing to do.

"All other things being equal," of course, includes the stigma attached to homosexual sex by many, or most, cultures in recorded history, and I wasn't suggesting that such stigmas are small things. They're determinitive, in fact, for the majority of people the majority of the time. I was just saying that my general sense was that if you look at the totality of what we know of all-male societies and what we know of societies, like ancient Athens, where male-male sex was in fact a norm even though there were women around, it suggests that the aversion to, or repulsion from, same-sex sex is predominantly cultural rather than natural.

The two guys I was talking to disagreed, to greater or lesser degrees. One of them was made so visibly nervous by the argument, in fact, that he had to walk away. That wasn't so much what interested me, since I've been around long enough to know that for some men even the hint that they could under any circumstances fool around with another guy is profoundly threatening. What interested me was what the other guy said, which was that he actually could imagine having sex with an exceptionally good looking man (he mentioned Brad Pitt), but that otherwise he just wasn’t interested and so, if he found himself in prison, he would choose to remain chaste, insofar as he had a choice, unless he found an exceptionally good looking man to bonk.

My initial instinct was that he wasn’t really making sense, that he was more just looking for a way to acknowledge something about the mutability of sexuality without owning up to the possibility that he might find it pleasurable to have run on the mill sex with another man. I said as much to him.

“But wait,” he said, “what if we turned it around? What if you were stuck in a prison with a whole lot of really unattractive women, women who you would never try to seduce if you were on the outside. You couldn’t even imagine yourself fantasizing about these women, and the idea of sex with them, on the outside, would be vaguely repulsive. So do you think you would, if locked up with them, end up having sex with them? Or maybe just the best-looking one? ‘Cause that’s what Brad Pitt is to me, the best possible looking individual in a basically unattractive set.”

My answer, at the time, was that if I were surrounded by enough sex, and immersed in a society where the standards for attractiveness were different enough, I’d probably find myself attracted to a variety of people. The truth is, however, that I didn’t really know. And then I realized there’s a lot I don’t know. For instance, we all talk about the Kinsey Scale, and how there’s a continuum and all that, but is that true? And if it is, can the most purely heterosexual men and women still enjoy sex with someone of their own sex if the mood is right and they’re given some erotic narrative that works for them? What was the male-male sex like for the men of ancient Athens who weren’t predominantly into men?

The first proto-sexual experience I can remember having I had with another boy; we were 11 or 12. “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang was playing on the radio, and at the chorus, when they sang “it’s time to come together; it’s up to you, what’s your pleasure?” we would dance toward each other and grind our crotches together. I didn’t orgasm, but I knew it felt good, though I didn’t connect it to “sex” in any sense for many, many years. That was also the last even remotely “homosexual” encounter I’ve had in my life, and though I don’t regret that, it certainly makes me wonder whether if I’d been just a bit more adventurous I could have happily supplemented my women-oriented sex life, which was pretty pathetic for most of my life, with the occasional trip to Brokeback Mountain.