Under The Earth

For fun and for nausea I flip through the gay personals . They are for the most part a study in insecurity. I love the ones where a man declares, “I am straight acting looking for someone straight acting.” Sometimes they add “No Femmes”. Sometimes they add a long list of demands. No one writes them. Sometimes I write them: “Stop hating yourself. Have a nice day.” Or: “Good luck, asshole.” And I have no idea what it means, “I am straight acting.” No one who wasn’t straight really fooled anyone for long except for people who didn’t’ care, or who simply wanted to be fooled. It must mean the same thing as me saying, “I am white acting, seeking another black person who is white acting.” It must mean I hate what I am and don’t wish to be reminded of it. Many a queer man hates being queer and so gets married, has children, moves on. Or seeks his pleasure n parks and bathroom stalls. Fills his life with self loathing. Even more pitiful is the gay man who calls himself straight acting, who resigns himself—and it is resignation rather than embracing, to being gay, but wants to be like a straight person, have a straight boyfriend who, I assume would be like a best friend. Actually, I’m not sure where the rationale goes in this or how it can turn out happily, but I connect it to my unsuccessful and, in the end, wearying relationship with someone who wished he was straight and couldn’t have been gayer if he wanted to be.

And he didn’t want to be.

I didn’t like the movie called in English, And Your Mama, Too, not because there was no truth to it, but because there was too much of what we have known as truth, too much of what we call machismo. The two teenage characters start out fucking their girlfriends. Then one or maybe both—I can’t remember—fuck their older female companion. They masturbate together. They’re always talking about sex. Finally they just have sex with each other. Some people would say this is the story of boys in general, this endless flirtation with sexuality, the chaste pulling back though we know the whispers about good best friends who occasionally go further than boys are supposed to. Some of us dream about, many of us know it happens a lot more than we are prepared to think.

At any rate, in the film, after the two boys come together and make love—well, have sex—one of them wakes up, looks at the other and stumbles out of the room to vomit. And this is linked to the personals I read, linked to infidelity of the boy in my past. Possibly this tumbling away from another man and vomiting is linked to anything I am about to write. For if we are going to address any problem that characterizes the lives of men Black and white, gay straight, brown, polka dot or striped it is that while Germaine Greer reconstituted Virginia Woolf to make her famous quote—most women have no idea how much men hate them—I would say most men have no idea how much they hate themselves and each other. How much men hate manhood. In fact, how much that self hatred characterizes that pitiful thing called masculinity.

Maybe if I start at the end this will make a sort of beginning. It will do something like answering questions. The straight up essay was something I never mastered. This was the complaint of a few professors and the reason I never became one. But then I don’t think many people rush to read an essay. So, oh well….

A year ago I wanted to write a book about men. Well, not only a year ago, but many times. And this would have been a book where I got many men, most of them straight, to tell the truth about many questions. But men are liars and so this never really panned out. I thought, how will I tackle this subject? But then doesn’t it make more sense to address the subject of one man instead of all men and that man be me? Doesn’t it make more sense to answer my questions and tell my story? And maybe somewhere in this story I will tell something that in time people will think of as a man’s spirituality, or a book about men. I thought, I will assemble—and I will do this with the help of many of my queer brothers, a story, or a set of stories about men. I hesitated because I thought, well this will only be about queer men. But what if through queer men we began to tell a more honest story of all men? And what if through this one queer man—this me—we began to tell a more general truth?

I type so fast there is nothing but typos in this rough draft. Things go through my mind like the dismal failure many of my brothers have in trying to date each other, like my failed almost boyfriend who, when we might have become something, some thing real, he chose to betray me and go to bed with the first woman he saw. Like a book, called The Velvet Rage where a psychiatrist goes on and on about the problems of gay men and I think, no you are describing the problems of white men with money who happen to be gay. And no fool, the problems you are describing as gay are the problems of all men, and of all people. And how unsuitable this book was, how it began, with a heavy footed naiveté to solve the problems of certain men. And I am thinking of last night, at the party, when I began to fall in love with someone who began to fall in love with me and I thought, we could fumble toward something.