I am a pervert impeded only by my respect for those I am attracted to. I want to consume them like a delicious meal whose intense scent makes my tummy rumble, but it has to be voluntary. It's really not fun unless the intimacy is a mutual desire to know each other, to protect and nourish each other. There's nothing wrong with a bit of exuberant sweaty sexiness when everyone understands and is comfortable with its meaninglessness, but I'm reaching for something deeper.
Why am I sexually attracted to straight men? Some masochistic desire to deny myself? Some dangerous idea of a challenge? Or maybe I know that when a straight man allows me to gently graze my fingers down the tender sides of his torso, or lightly touch my nose to the open pores of his neck in naked embrace, then the purpose of our encounter really is to communicate, to open ourselves, to touch another human being across the tortuous divide of our individual incarnations. It is not enough for me to find someone whose peculiar fantasies match my own so that we can get each other off pleasantly for an hour or three. I'm looking for something else, but I'm still letting my sexual desire guide me.
Perhaps our attractions, momentary though they often are, are deeper and more profound than we usually acknowledge. Maybe our beings are interconnected in ways that we cannot fully know or comprehend. Maybe beauty is a form of communication, and when someone is beautiful to us they are demanding our respectful attention.
I have the utmost respect for the messages my body sends me, surely the only reliable source of information about how to exist in this world. When someone's beauty draws me towards him - I don't know why I am mostly attracted to men in this way - I feel an empowering surge of energy, love and focus. I give this man a focused attention I would not bother with if my attraction had not drawn me towards him. I try to breathe into the intensity of this feeling, to not scare him away in his civilised vulnerability, and whether I like it or not I respect him enough to not leap on him and consume him like an overripe mango or a stolen block of chocolate. I look into his eyes and wait to see if he's brave enough to match my gaze. I move towards him to see how proximity feels. I want to touch him, I want to talk to him, I want to smell him, but what I want is not important. What's important is that which moves between us.
During the summer, when I was strong, confident and full of lusty joy, a young man smiled at me at a festival and I was instantly in love. I saw him leaping around like a big dumb kid, two metres tall, 19 years old, surely as horny as me. One day I finally approached him, I gave him a head massage, he relented further into a back massage before we finally spoke. That night, with my heart pounding and my genitals filling with warm blood, we snuggled together and talked. He had a lot to share with me and for some reason I was the exact right person to tell. For hours we talked and I listened joyously in the warmth emanating from his clothed flesh. He allowed me to press up against his unspoken but unambiguous boundaries and I was happy to give every particle of love that my attraction provoked. When the conversation was finished he said goodbye and rushed off into the night. Though I was still so horny I had to masturbate to relieve the tension, I felt totally satisfied that our connection had been completed, that the mutual moment that my sexual attraction had drawn me into was fulfilled.
Apparently we had a mutual need that his beauty made apparent to me, I confronted that beauty, uncertain of what would be required of me, but comfortable in our mutual ability to see and hear one another's needs and feelings.
So what if I develop a trusting friendship with a straight man with whom I am sexually attracted, whose painful and delicious beauty compels me to give him the attention I would otherwise not bother with? Is my love real or am I just trying to get him naked? Will he trust me that my love is stronger and more real than my perversion? That my respect and desire are totally indistinguishable? Can we fully embrace each other and what is emphatically real between us? Or must we fear the confusion of moving beyond the cultural roles that are supposed to define our relationships, as if every needy, joyous and sacred moment we share can be correlated to a series of distinct categories?
I cannot relate to any of these categories, so if my behaviour disturbs you you have to tell me. To me, every moment of genuine connection is something new, a step beyond a culture that separates with words from the world of experience. It is entirely unknowable, rather it is tangible, we can smell it, and feel it in our belly.
If we feel safe, if we feel so inclined, we can draw closer together. We can find a place where the state will not charge us with obscenity and we can enter fully into the surrender of trust and intimacy, whether sexual or emotional or linguistic. In this moment, my perverse sexual fantasies are profoundly irrelevant, and yet it was my insatiable sexual attraction that drew me towards you initially.
Why do I call myself Faggot or Queer in this lifetime? "Faggot" comes from the fagus tree, branches of which were used to burn witches or heretics at the height of European theocracy. At this time "heretic" was indistinguishable from "homosexual" and so it is that faggots like me are the heretics of a culture that seeks to homogenise our diversity. Even gays are supposed to get married and get mortgages now.
Having failed to destroy homosexuality the theocratic culture we all continue to perpetuate is seeking to draw all faggotness into its narrow bubble of normal. They tell me my faggotness is supposed to separate me from the luminous beauty of your relative straightness. I refuse. I am not gay, the opposite of straight, I'm a faggot, which has no opposite. Perhaps I'm lucky to not live in a time when the stake is my opposite and burns me at the state as a heretic. Perhaps for this reason we need not be so brave to reach across the divide and touch each other.
Why do I call myself Queer? Because my role in my tribe is to queer the straight, bend the rigid and blur the boundaries; to confuse the rational, to embody the ambiguity and to kiss you if you want me to. I won't tell anyone.
2015-06-02
The loving power of attraction
Abstract connections:
attraction,
faggot,
homosexuality,
pervert,
philosophy,
poetry,
queer,
sexuality,
spoken word,
straight
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