LIVING
I think about how we should live. That is: how men like us should live, men who are queer—I won’t say gay because far too many of us are tired and angry and pissed off. Not happy at all. The happiness is often an elaborate farce, exhausting to maintain and exacting in price.
I am twenty-nine with small but expendable income, no desire to raise children and, though there is the desire to meet a man, no desire to commit to him and establish a thing like a marriage. I look to someone years younger, in Oxford blue shirt and grey pants, married with a child, preparing to pay the mortgage, playing grown-up. I cannot envy this.
But I’ve heard it brought up several times that we should. That we should mimic the lives of other men. I will not say straight men. I will say other men. And I have heard it said that we—as if we are from another planet—should take on the values of the “straight world.” There is no such place or rather that place has been ill defined. Nor should we pretend that the current values of this society are as they have always been. Though there are a few mainstays for the last five thousand years.
Mainstay 1. Men marry women to produce children.
Mainstay 2. Men and women come together to uphold society by means of the family unit.
These are the two mainstays and here are the mainstays we—as queer—violate:
1.That the happiness and uniqueness of the individual should be subjugated to the group
And:
2. That people should come together from love and desire. (Contrary to what we are told up until now love and desire has had nothing to do with people coming together in sexual union, hence the reason that up until now there has been no queer culture… or for that matter, much of a genuinely heterosexual one.)
It would be better to ask not, should the queer take on the values of the straight world? But rather how much any of wishes to take on the sexual and social values which have guided our societies for these last four to five millennia. I remember when Ben used to talk about being married, about wanting a wife and a child. Even the fact that he was gay couldn’t stoop him from wanting these things, made him go off and find a woman. When I said I had no desire for marriage or children he looked at me with shock and astonishment, like I’d spoken a blasphemy, the way I ought to have looked at him when he said he didn’t believe in God, or committed sex in a long term relationship, or abstinence from drugs, or eating meat or…. There wasn’t a lot Ben believed in. But he believed in marriage and family and maturity and “being a man”—which meant being distant and cold.. I believe in something else, and I’m trying to describe the shape of that. Sketching it as I write. Maybe all my writing is sketching it.
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