From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: What Gay Sex 
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 92 03:05:36 GMT


In article <1e0n4vINNdgp@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
ai888@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Thomas Flesher) writes:

>anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:

>>In fact, what *is* gay sex?  What sex act makes a person
>>gay?  Surely not fisting, since straight people do that too.
>>Surely not oral sex, since straight people do that.  Surely
>>not anal sex, since straight people do that.  Surely not
>>kink, since straight people do that too.  Etc.

>>If we say sex between two people of the same gender is gay
>>sex, we've skipped over a lot of gender questions and we've
>>skipped over bisexuals pretty noticeably too, haven't we?
>>We've also skipped the people who identify themselves as gay
>>(or bisexual or even straight) who don't have *any* sex,
>>including people who've *never* had sex.

>I'd say you're approaching the issue from the wrong
>direction.

Perhaps I didn't make my rhetorical method clear enough.  At
several junctures you've apparently taken questions to be
assertions.  Not the intent, of course; rather it's a more or
less standard (and transparent) way to draw people out, to
elicit what others think.  Despite possible skewing, it
seems to have worked pretty well here.

>Sexuality is better defined by whom you desire than what you
>do.  Regardless of whom you have sex with and whether or not
>you actually have sex at all, if you _want_ to have sex with
>motss, you're gay; if you _want_ to have sex with motss and
>motos, you're bisexual; etc.

I think of that as a useful outline, but in fact I think
it's more complicated than that.  It doesn't seem to me to
be a matter of a particular sex practice, nor of the gender
of the lust-object person, not even of the love-object
person (said persons being represented perhaps most of the
time by images, rather than flesh-and bone beings), but
rather a complex interweaving of all of these in contact
with autochthonous impulses generated strictly within
ourselves.

According to this model, erotic behavior is more like a
tapestry of mental and/or emotional constructs than acts or
even sets of acts.

>>It's all rather difficult to categorize, I think.  It's easy
>>(and practical) for me to assert that *for me*, whatever sex
>>I do is gay sex, because I'm a gay person.  But as I've
>>maintained several times -- over the incredulous objections
>>of some -- the men with whom I've had sex might not be even
>>a little bit gay; they could be a[s] straight as straight can
>>be.  Or, they could be neither gay nor straight.

>I suspect from these lines that you might already share my
>view.

In some ways, now amplified with greater detail.

>You began by trying to define sexuality by sex acts ("What
>sex act makes a person gay?"),

A question is not an assertion.

>but here you try to define sex acts by sexuality ("whatever
>sex I do is gay sex, because I'm a gay person").  

I didn't see that as a statement of sexuality, actually.

>So: if you aren't defining yourself as gay on the basis of
>your sexual activity, how are you able to say that you're
>gay?

Well, that is indeed the question I was asking.  When
pushed, I will say something like: "Oh, I dunno, I just
*am*." But I certainly have erotic responses that include
women in addition to men.  This is one source of the
tapestry concept I was using above.  I don't see much
in the way of a gain from pushing myself further than
that in an effort to answer the kind of question you've
asked.

>Incidentally, when you define sexual preference by desire
>rather than action, it's quite possible for a man to have
>sex with another man and not be gay.

It seems to me the tapestry concept expands these
possibilities considerably.

>>The solution, if such it be, seems to me to simply avoid
>>making any such categories at all, since they don't really
>>exist *apart* from the dominant society's sexual hangups.
>>Or do they?

>That isn't a solution; it's a denial of the problem.

I don't see what you mean by that, as I don't see anything
being denied; rather, I'm raising the issue of whether there
*is* a "problem" subsumed by the idea of what we
conventionally call "gay sex."

>We all make distinctions (to call them categories is perhaps
>dismissive) as part of the process of understanding who we
>are.

I'm not sure what distinctions you have in mind there; I see
what you've called dismissive as merely a notational
convention.  But if you're making some other point, I'm not
seeing it.

>If society has a "hangup" in this regard, it's false
>simplicity: the notion that a person's erotic life is
>adequately defined by specifying the gender(s) involved.
>Sexuality is much more complex than that.

Well, this echoes what I was saying earlier on, and also
echoes my motives for asking the original questions.

My assumption here is that we are rather conditioned to
pick up defining concepts as part of the large, uncritical
package of received knowledge provided *primarily* by
traditions and conventions that developed in a putative
"human nature" *as defined by straight people*.

I further assume that it's in our best interests to see
ourselves in terms that derive more nearly from our own
basis in experience.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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