FOREWORD (52 page)

1. I’m not a homosexual, have never had a homosexual experience, but I do have a lot of homosexual tendencies and feelings, and I put them into fantasy, which for me is the most productive thing to do.

As I masturbate, I will close my eyes and think of fucking another man – a faceless, anonymous man – so as to be rid of any shame and/or guilt on my part – I think how beautiful it would be to just suck a big, beautiful cock till it comes and comes and comes. The reality of a homosexual experience is repulsive to me as I’ve had many chances, but I’d never give up my fantasies.

2. This fantasy is a real old one, but it’s still around, not too often, though. I fantasize I’m a prisoner in a war camp run by women only – I’m like a “trustee” – I’m a servant, sexual servant that is. My job is to fuck and suck the women from the time I wake up till the time I go to sleep. After a while this fantasy altered occasionally with me being punished by being tied hands and feet to an upright pole – in the nude. And then the women would gather around to watch as one of them would go down on me and suck me till I came.

As I would scream and groan in ecstasy, at that exact instant, the headmaster would take her knife out and cut off my dick Nancy Friday

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and stick it in my mouth. I feel no pain in the fantasy and this is where it has stopped.

After eleven years of drug use, I’m now drug free and for the first time am experiencing what sex really feels like. I love it – sex, fantasy, any shape, form or fashion of the two together. Fantasy allows me an outlet for all my feelings and emotions that I am too fearful to release in reality. I’ve clearly determined my own personal cutoff point between fantasy and reality. I am a very, open, intellectual sort of person, very passionate, very understanding (only bad thing is I’m ugly), and I also share my fantasies with my women and find it tremendously fulfilling.

JONATHAN

I am male, forty, and serving eight years for hash smug-gling.

I have just finished your
My Secret Garden
. It filled me with excitement and admiration for the wildness and imagination of women’s minds. Through the plethora of recent writing by women, I have learned more about them in the past three years inside than I did in my various thirty years outside. I have some findings of my own that I thought might be of interest to you.

In the first three to five years of incarceration, men’s masturbation fantasies seem to be similar to those outside, i.e., the majority are almost unresolved situations of women they have never had any relations with.

After three to five years, however, the fantasies turn more to the remembrance of things past. Whether this is an attempt to recapture and confirm the existence of the outside world or whether it is because the old fantasies are so worn out from reuse, I don’t know.

I have only met one other man besides myself who admits to having sex role reversal or homosexual fantasies. But I have not asked too many as I value the wholeness of my skin Men In Love

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too much. I had a girl friend who was in a women’s peniten-tiary for eighteen months. The ease and naturalness with which they are able to handle their homosexual relationships with one another could not be more opposite than the violent neurotic anxiety that pervaded men’s institutions. It’s the superbutch, black and white, cowboys and Indians, all-American male attitude personified.

CHANDLER

I am a college teacher of philosophy, thirty-six, with a religious background. While I am creative, I am also a con-formist in most areas as is my wife. Here are my fantasies: 1. This one I act out. I tie and gag myself in front of a mirror. I lie on the floor in the sun which shines all over my naked hairy body. I struggle and undulate against imaginary men and women, who want to use my semen against my will to impregnate some women, so my sexy body can be reproduced. Also, these people massage me for pleasure.

2. Four friends wish to have group sex. One male is in a female missionary position. The other male places his erect penis between our kissing lips. The other woman starts sucking the second male’s cock on the head, while the man and woman making love try to kiss each other around the shaft of the intervening penis. All fondle the body of the kneeling male gently. I would like to do both male positions in this fantasy. I have told this one to a friend who thinks it’s original.

3. Sucking cock used to repel me. But having seen many porno movies, I think I have acquired a desire to do this. This is probably due to the sensual treatment of cocksucking and cock worship throughout porno movies. I wonder if the recent fashion of bisexuality is connected to this phenomena in porno movies? Speaking for myself, I would like to love a friend sexually. But not if there is no mutual sharing of giv-Nancy Friday

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ing of pleasure. I have been exclusively heterosexual for thirty-six years.

The only image of male tenderness I know allowed by society is one of death: a soldier cradling a mortally wounded comrade in his arms on the battlefield.

My contention is not that society would be better or worse if it were more bisexual. Readers who fear I may be encouraging homosexuality would seem to have had too little personal experience with the erotic power of the male-female combination: Millions of years of human evolution guarantee that heterosexuals will never be an endangered species.

If we are not allowed – or do not allow ourselves – to face troubling feelings, they do not simply disappear. They surface later in distorted form. An example is the unreasonable hatred a man will evidence at hearing about a homosexual incident a hundred miles away. What he fears is that the homosexuality is a lot closer. Women may not like homosexuals for threatening their symbiotic needs for men’s exclusive attention – but only another man brings a kind of uncontrollable rage to the subject.

I’d like to forward a hunch of my own here: It is exactly those men who hate homosexuals most who are also angriest at women. The man who believes lynching is too good for a faggot will also denigrate a woman as “just a piece of ass.” A common resentment seems to be burning here: both gays and women can openly lust for men; the tough guy can’t. Erotic feelings for other men would not be so threatening if he had not once felt them so strongly himself. If this is so, how can he not be angry at women – the people for whom he gave up the ease and kicks he once had with the other guys? Haven’t women always met him less than halfway in all things sexual?

Beginning with adolescence, when the boy extends his hand to the girl in sexual friendship, he is met with fear and the anxiety of rejection. “Men are animals.” And so, at times, Men In Love

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he may act like one. But he never stops lusting after women, too: One half the man’s feelings are expressed in heterosexual love. His anger goes underground to boil up again – very often, in another form of heterosexual love: sadomasochism.

17

Bisexuals

The fantasies that follow represent changing ideas of gender identity: the way we experience ourselves, at our core, as men and women. Though the contributors in the previous chapter had homosexual fantasies – even youthful homosexual experiences – it was extremely important to them to be called, and for me to know that they now felt themselves to be,
heterosexual
. It is not so vital to the men in this chapter.

To most people born before World War II, a bisexual was

“really” a homosexual trying to disguise his aberrant tastes –

which meant, to them, he was not fully a man. It is only in very recent years that official psychiatric thinking stopped labeling any man-to-man sexual contact as symptomatic of pathology.

This leaves a “middle-aged businessman” like Farrell (below) trying to straddle both worlds. He is like the men in the previous chapter in that, despite his twice-repeated insistence that he is heterosexual, he nevertheless has gay fantasies.

Unlike them, he continues to have sex with other men to the present day: “I believe we all have a touch of the bisexual or homosexual in us.” A “touch” – nothing more.

Farrell of course has a right to call himself whatever name he needs to keep himself in focus. I might even have put his fantasies in the previous chapter – these are always decisions about shades of gray – except that I wanted to contrast his point of view with fourteen-year-old Clark’s (below). People of Clark’s generation can more easily say they are bisexual without feeling they are thus diminished as men.

Clark’s experiences to date have been only with boys, but he feels that is because so far the girls he knows prefer

“Jocks” and “superjocks.” This much has changed: Bisexuality is beginning to receive social acceptance; a new kind of Men In Love

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identity is being carved out of the space between straight and gay.

But the young men in this chapter still show some of the old insecurities. “I am primarily a bisexual,” says Clark,

“leaning to the heterosexual side.” I think if he could find the right ruler, he would measure the degree of this “lean” just as he has put a tape to his penis. In his constant concern as to whether he “measures up as a man,” Clark is not so different from previous generations.

The men in this chapter are still their fathers’ sons. Behind their brave talk, I feel they are as tentative as any liberated woman trying to feel 100 percent confident in her new sexual equality. Things don’t change that fast.

I don’t care if Clark is 40 percent homosexual and 60 percent hetero, or the other way around. Numbers like these don’t mean much. This transitional generation had fathers who taught them that homosexuals were mincing, effeminate fellows. Clark is trying to define himself as not one of these.

The fact is that a homosexual may look like the most virile fellow in the room. Many homosexuals take pride in their tough-as-nails demeanor. They dress as cowboys or leather-and-steel motorcycle riders not as a disguise, but as an outer, reinforcing expression of their inner feelings of maleness.

The number of homosexuals who go in for drag is limited, and many men who do like to wear garter belts and satin gowns may never have had sex with another man.
Homosexual
and
transvestite
are very far from interchangeable terms.

On the other hand, the notion of closet queen rests firmly on the fact that many homosexuals are so indistinguishable from straight men that they can go through their entire lives with their secret unsuspected.

Ironically, among those with the most unshakable conviction of gender identity are transsexuals. Despite the supposedly incontrovertible evidence of anatomy, they remain convinced that they are the opposite sex, born into the wrong body. Nothing will deter them; they will undergo the most Nancy Friday

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profound surgery to undo what they believe was nature’s mistake.

Perhaps it is easier for women to feel conviction of gender identity, because you don’t have to do anything to prove you are a woman, just be. It is the rare man who, feeling an urge to put his arm around a friend, or give him a hug, can act spontaneously; the other guy might misunderstand. If a woman does it to another woman, she is just being affectionate – “that’s how women are.” Also, in a society in which being female is still close to second-class citizenship, threat of loss of the female label is not seen as expulsion from the ruling caste. It might even be said that to many people, for a woman to have homosexual feelings is regrettable but “natural”; the recent gay rights legislative battles show that most Americans think of homosexuality as a moral issue, a sign of weakness. Women are supposed to be weak.

But men must be strong
. Manliness is held out as an achievement, a goal to be fought for – not given from birth.

“Be a man,” little boys are exhorted if they cry; they are being told that for the moment, at least, they are not being male at all. “We Make Men,” the Marine Corps boasts. Masculinity seems to be something that you have to earn. It is fleeting, an uncertain thing that may be taken away next time you fail to charge that machine-gun nest, can’t produce an erection on demand, or merely feel nervous about asking thè boss for a raise. Have you ever heard a woman call herself, “200 percent all she-female?”

Economic pressures – far more than the idealism of the sexual revolution – are forcing us to question rigid definitions of masculine and feminine. As both sexes take on work that used to be distributed along gender lines, there is a need to rethink how we feel about being men and women. A man who must share in the raising of his children is exposed to feelings he could have spent a lifetime avoiding. That does not mean he will become bisexual, or that if he does, he will be any less a “real man.” It simply means he has choices his father did not have.

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Peer pressure, too, is working to change ideas of sexual identity, denigrating masculine role playing, positing sexual experiment and rebellion as a way of life. As absolutes fade, anything goes. The men in this chapter refuse to accept those harsh definitions of masculine gender identity that dominated (and shortened) their fathers’ lives. It is of the first importance for the reader to note that, aside from Farrell, all the men in this chapter are young. This is not due to my selection, but theirs: Fantasies on this subject came only from younger men.

They leave me feeling optimistic. As a heterosexual woman I do not feel threatened by the growing social acceptance of bisexuality. The harsh rules of adolescence once strait-jacketed us by demands we be Boy Boys or Girl Girls.

How anxiously we tried to measure up, judging our failures by the supposed success of others. Why continue all that into adult life? I’m not the first person to note that the more secure someone is in his/her gender identity, the easier he or she is about ambiguities in someone else’s.

Most of the grown men in this book turned from youthful homosexual play to heterosexuality. So may Clark. Or he may not. Meanwhile he seems to feel that until girls become available to him, he will pursue his alternative: homosexuality. Whether he transfers his affections to women later on is less important to my mind than that he feels his sexual op-tions represent a form of freedom, not a reason for guilt.