First published at 365gay.com on January 16, 2009
Why are our opponents so obsessed with butt sex?
I’ve personally pondered this question more times than is probably healthy. It occurred to me a few weeks ago when a poster on a conservative blog complained that gays “expect us to approve of butt sex and call it marriage.”
Really?
Then last week I was reading an essay by the philosopher Michael Levin. After denying that homosexuality is immoral, he goes on to describe it as “disgusting, nauseating, closely connected with fecal matter. One need not show that anal intercourse is immoral to be warranted in wanting to be as far away from it as possible.”
I think I would have liked “immoral” better.
Then, yesterday, I received an e-mail from a 15-year-old living in a small UK village. He’s thinking about coming out to his “mum and dad,” so he asked them what they thought about homosexuality. They told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was “wrong, unnatural, and disgusting.” He continued,
“But one major point they kept pointing out was… ummm… well they said it was gross how a man would stick his… yeah up another guys… ummm… yeah. And they said it’s where they sorta… yeah I ain’t going into much detail….But what I really want to know is how would you respond to someone who thinks like that?”
You mean, aside from telling them that they could probably use a big fat one up the bum themselves?
That’s not what I actually replied.
Instead I wrote, in part,
“In the abstract, of course it’s weird (and from some perspectives, gross) to think of a man sticking his penis up another man’s bum. But isn’t all sex weird in the abstract? Sticking a penis in a vagina, which bleeds once a month? Sucking on a penis, something both straight women and gay men do? Pressing your mouth—which you use for eating—against another person’s mouth, and touching tongues, and exchanging saliva (i.e. kissing)? Weird! Gross! (In the abstract, anyway.)”
Sex makes no sex in the abstract. But then you have urges, and you eventually act on them, and what once seemed weird and gross becomes…wow.
Our opponents recognize this in their own lives, but they can’t envision it elsewhere. It’s a profound failure of moral imagination—which is essential for empathy, which is at the foundation of the Golden Rule.
How can one “love thy neighbor as thyself” without any real effort to understand thy neighbor?
Our opponents contemplate our lives, our love, our longing, and what do they see? “Butt sex.” Such obtuseness is depressing.
Of course, not all gays engage in “butt sex”—some of us never do—and not only gays engage in “butt sex.”
Of course, most of what we do in bed is exactly the same as most of what they do in bed: cuddling and touching and caressing and kissing and sucking and rubbing and so on. (Not to mention sleeping, which when shared regularly can be beautifully intimate as well.)
What we do is the same not just in terms of formal acts. It’s the same in terms of being weird, and silly, and messy, and sublime.
Yes, Virginia, we make funny faces when we come, too.
It’s always easier to criticize the weirdness in others than to confront the weirdness in the mirror. (Perhaps that’s why mirrors in the bedroom are thought to be kinky.)
Our opponents take anxiety about sex—a natural and virtually universal human phenomenon—and wield it as a weapon against us. Shame on them.
As for the marriage-equality fight, what do you say to someone who thinks that we expect her “to approve of butt sex and call it marriage”?
Thankfully, another poster responded to that one more effectively than I ever could.
The respondent described herself as a lifelong Christian, daughter of a conservative minister, and “personally against gay marriage but passionate about gay civil rights.” (This description will strike some as paradoxical, but bravo to her for understanding the difference between personal beliefs and public policy.)
She then warmly depicts a gay couple she knows who have adopted two special-needs children. The children, she writes, “RADIATE happiness at each other, their parents, and the people around them. Somehow ‘butt sex’ doesn’t seem to neatly contain all the emotions, commitment, and wondrous devotion that their parents’ relationship has provided them with.”
She concludes by chiding her fellow Christian, “Please think carefully before you speak.”
Amen to that.