The Man Inside Me

I gave up direct-replying to other blog posts a while ago, partly because I backed off my breakneck pace of daily long-form posting about five years ago to escape the self-imposed pressure to produce. And because my personal life went temporarily to shit. And because long-form personal blogging as a means of social expression collapsed in the gravity wake of the necessary sort of black-hole vortex that shows up to sweep away all things sociotechnologically current in order to make room for whatever's next, whether we're done with the last one or not. It's difficult not to be nostalgic or even a little bitter about the unwanted cultural-relevance reshuffle, even if the same singularity also freed us from the big-hair-and-padded-shoulders-type retrospective embarrassment that was MySpace. There might be a tendency among some of us to remember that period a bit over-fondly, like they were the digital Hôtel de Rambouillet and we were all hanging out with Balzac, but maybe with a few more dick jokes mixed in. I tend not to re-read my older work too closely for fear that really it was just expanded versions of droning, precious inanity begging to be rescued by the chirpy, character-limited inanity of Twitter.


I can say that I don't read anyone else's blog anymore, not really. I don't even read this one, to be honest. It's just not to my taste. I never really cared for the self-congratulatory pop-culture referencing, the pseudo-comic tangents or the tortured metaphors. It's like reading a Spalding Gray monologue translated into whalesong and then back into English. I'm not saying you can't like it, I'm just saying it's not my cup of whatever it is you enjoy drinking more than I do. Something with gin in it probably.


I do read Andrew Sullivan's blog, not because I like him more than I like you, it's just that he puts WAY more work into his than you do. There's research and intellectual consideration and aggregation of opinions from all around the internets, all handily collected and filtered through the prism of the overeducated gay English expatriate I always imagined myself to be. It was there that I was directed to read a blog post written by someone else entirely, which I haven't done in quite a little bit. And, because I can take direction like any good textual bottom, I didn't even just skim, I read the whole thing about the openly gay Mormon guy happily married to a fully informed heterosexual woman.


The first level of interest is obviously purely prurient. I'm curious about the sex. Like most intellectually lazy people, I only have my own experience to draw from for parallels, so I imagine he must feel the same way about the delicate lady bits the way I feel about cock. Which, and I'm sorry to be graphic here, but is not unlike the way I feel about cooked spinach: yes, I understand the intrinsic value, but I've no interest in putting it in my mouth, thank you. Not only is it a totally gross image, but it's not even an apt one since, as I sit here and really think about it, I would likely blow a guy before I'll eat cooked spinach. I don't mean that sequentially, like one's an appetizer for the other, I mean preferentially. I hope that was clear. No fucking way I'm doing both.


Just to paraphrase the blog post, this guy is a marriage and family therapist who acknowledges his biologically-arrived-at sexual attraction to men and (not squirrelly implicitly but openly stated) pheremonal indifference to chicks. So getting deeper than the prurience (because, you know, no pictures or diagrams or anything), we're left to actually consider how this works. The first reaction is obviously to understand the situation in pure Lifetime Movie of the Week terms, where this poor bastard lives a Secret Life of torment and guilt and compulsive re-reading of back issues of Men's Fitness under the oblivious, perky nose of his trusting wife (probably played by Crystal Bernard) who doesn't realize she shouldn't feel so guilty about sleeping with the Latino personal trainer with the good teeth (probably played by Antonio Sabato Jr.).


The second is to cast a sidelong glance at the Mormon angle and brace for the injunction to pray the gay away, Marcus Bachmann style.


But it doesn't happen. Dude just talks about how he loves his wife. It’s weird how it’s about love and it’s so clinical, so practical. But that’s what makes it resonant: the lack of corroding, distorting romance, both in the ideation of love as it is AND (this is more important) in the idea of religion and god. I was thrown by the application of an actual New Testament version of all-loving god, which is absent almost entirely from the public sphere without being immediately shaped down into an amorphous blob of unanthropomorphic hippie "spirituality."


There's also a strain of modern American liberalism that would fault a person like this for being inauthentic, for denying his "true self," as though the center of our selves is necessarily a political expression of our biological (ethnic, gender or sexual) identity. Which is kind of the same intellectual process used to support racism and patriarchy.


My basic position on this is the same one that is creeping into almost all of my social and political positions as the partisan edge of my youth dulls against the ultimately un-fell-able tree of experience: I don't want to have to care if I don't have to. The Ex-Gay Movement people I'll pay attention to I guess if they're going to run out into the community and spread shame and hypocrisy and un-gayness as a system for fixing what they have chosen, tragically, to identify as not only a personal but a societal ill. But I find it hard to get excited one way or the other about a dude who's made the conscious decision, with the informed consent of his missus, to plug his nose and go vaginal spelunking on a semi-regular basis. He's clearly not a threat; he keeps his shit in-house. And, just to make sure I'm not on anyone's side in the overall reaction spectrum, neither is he my hero. It's dressed up as personal courage I guess or challenge-conquering, but it's a challenge of choice and entirely of the guy's own invention. It's hard to give him too much credit for that. I didn't tell the guy he had to marry a girl. As an invented challenge, I guess in that way, it's kind of like the Iraq War, except with no civilian casualties. Which, ideally, is how you want a war to go if you can help it.