After my first actual boyfriend, and even during him, in that time when i waited chastely for him to get his act together, and the most affection my virginal body knew was a kiss, my sexuality was screwed up. But surely it was screwed up before. I was frigid, that was one reason nothing ever happened with us. When he began to have sex with someone else, and a woman at that the way I looked at sexuality and myself as a sexual person was completely ruined. The person I was closest to, who I loved and who claimed to love me was engaged in casual and shameful sex with someone else, to make himself into a heterosexual. Add to this, though he was capable of fucking, or even of touching affectionately someone he didn’t care about, his care for me came out as if I were biohazardous, the untouchable virgin. If he touched me it would all be over.
Once as I was leaving his house he took my gloves, put them on and pretended to strangle me, and then smiled.
That was him, let's call him, even in preparing to touch me he needed some form of protection. This contrast to the person he began having sex with while still romancing me and hoping for a future life between the two of us was enough to fuck me up a great deal, both as a young person in love and a young queer.
I bring him up again, after I am all too happy to put him down and leave him there, because his unexplored conviction that being straight, having a girlfriend (who only wore ill-fitting stilettos and made him ejaculate over himself I might add) and possibly be married was better than being what he was—which was manifestly homosexual. He wasn’t a queer, he wasn’t gay. That’s choice. That’s moving toward something. He was homosexual in the very evangelical sense of the word. Ashamed, dirty, defective, wishing he was something else.
Well, of course this meant he had to go. I had someone in my life that thought that my life, my values, any love we would have had would have been defective. Which is where I begin my talk on pornography. Pornography, the big bad devil that every queer website is, if not linked to, then two or three degrees away from being linked to. Why, when the rest of the world states out loud that porn is bad and some people murmur that it is… something, do we, despite our complex feelings about it… support it, largely?
I do support porn. Gay porn, queer porn which I hold to be as different from straight porn as being straight is different from being gay. Both forms of pornography map out in large the way we feel about heterosexuality, homosexuality. It was watching porn that I began to understand the ex-boyfriend I hated, began to have compassion for someone who became the symbol of my revulsion. It was watching two men make love to each other that I learned that, although I sort of knew what I wanted, I never knew exactly how far it could go. I learned to manipulate my own body. After my conflicting feelings about sex, connecting it with how I felt about Boyfriend—not good—watching porn actually allowed me to enjoy sex, exalt in my sexuality and in sexuality in general. It’s not going too far to say I got a healing.
Gay porn is really the only place you can see the sort of sex you want after straight people fucking on billboards, in movies, on Trojan ads are foisted on you twenty-four seven, or where you see tenderness between two—or more—men. It’s the place where a different sexuality, the one you nacreously dreamed of, is mapped out. I doubt the porn industry is run by altruistic people, and I doubt there are a lot people doing porn with the thought, “I want to map out a new sexuality for queer peoples and show them all the diverse possibilities of love the above ground world doesn’t show.” I doubt they do it intentionally, But they do it all the same.
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