Annons
Annons
Jane Ward: In my early 20s I was still dating men occasionally, and, as I explain in the book, one of these men started telling me about the elephant walk, which is a ritual that is notorious in the Greek system. This is basically a ritual in which men are holding the penis of the guy behind them and they have their thumb in the butt of the guy in front of them. This was a totally straight guy—I can't imagine a more hetero-masculine man—who I had known for many years, and I just thought, How were you making sense of this when you were participating in that? And so I was interested 15, 20 years ago in this question, and then I just started to see more and more evidence that straight men have intimate contact with one another's bodies and don't necessarily perceive it as sexual.
I imagine you get a lot of people saying "Oh, these men are just closeted."As homosexuality and homosexual sex become increasingly normalized, they'll stop triggering the gag reflex in your average American. —Jane Ward
Absolutely. I think because sex practices are still so closely scrutinized and morally laden, I think people—including many LGBT people—are most comfortable with sex when it adheres to clearly defined categories and when it's relatively predictable. And so I think people like to believe that there are three sexual orientations, straight, gay, and bi, and it's becoming increasingly popular to believe that we are born with those sexual orientations. Any sex practice that's more complicated than that or that can't be explained by that schema is especially threatening.I've gotten a lot of feedback from bi-identified folks, who I think have not read the book but have read the title of the book, who feel like this is contributing to bi-erasure, but from my vantage point, bi is a distinct and significant queer identification. So I can't see why we would want to take straight-identified men who have no interest in bi-identification whatsoever and who are completely invested in hetero-normativity and who don't even understand the contact that they're having as particularly sexual, and who are framing that contact within misogyny and homophobia—why would we want to claim them as part of the queer community? It reduces bisexuality to just a technical description of sex acts. I understand bisexuality more broadly than that.You make the point that before the rise of identity politics—before we had sexual identities that were neatly constructed into packages like gay or straight—men who thought of themselves as "sexually normal" had somewhat more freedom to engage in same-sex practices, because doing so didn't necessarily mean they were "gay" or "bi." Do you think that means that straight guys used to have more gay sex?
There's a great book written by this historian George Chauncey about precisely that. It's called Gay New York. I remember very clearly excerpts in it from an interview with a gay man who says, "It was really a bummer when the gay liberation movement started pushing people to come out because it meant that straight men were far less willing to have sex with us." All of a sudden, there are all of these identitarian consequences.I think that we're again in a time in which all of this is shifting, because there's such a push by the mainstream movement to normalize and assimilate all of us queers, through marriage, for instance. So I think what we'll see is as homosexuality and homosexual sex become increasingly normalized, they'll stop triggering the gag reflex in your average American. There'll be more and more room for people to engage in it and to make sense of it however they want. But that doesn't mean that the binary between normal and abnormal will go away, because that's always shifting. So for instance now, I think you can be a "good gay" or you can be a "bad gay." Either you're a married gay with kids living in the suburbs, and that's good, or if you're still wearing leather and you're into kink or whatever, then that's bad. I think we're seeing the culture always adapt a little bit in ways that sometimes look like progress but half aren't.Follow Hugh on Twitter.