(frank discussion of sex, of various kinds, some of it in street language — so not for kids or the sexually modest)
1 is about the Bloomsbury artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; 2 is about affectionate relationships between gay men and straight women; 3 is about me and my wife, Ann.
Prolegomenon 1: Grant and Bell. From my 5/19/2 posting “Standing Male Nude (Study of Tony Asserati)”, about a time in the UK when:
sexual relations between men — of which [Duncan] Grant had an astounding number (he’s reported to have maintained that he would have relations with any man who would have him) — had to be scrupulously concealed [because it was a serious criminal offense]. As Grant’s were, under the protective umbrella of the Bloomsbury Group.
(Deliciously, I can say that DG was, first, highly masculine; and then, in the framing of my posting yesterday, “le mot juste”, yes, a whoring faggot.)
DG was partnered artistically and affectionately with Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister), who was, however, married to Clive Bell; VB managed to get him to father a child with her, but he seems otherwise to have had sex only with men, tons of them.
Prolegomenon 2: pairing a gay man sexually with his straight female best friend. These affectionate friendships are both very common and well-known. Dating and hooking up with suitable partners is wearing, often frustrating, and sometimes scary, so GM + SF offers the supportive space of a same-sex best friend, but without the potential for competition in the sexual marketplace. A kind of quiet zone.
But then some of these couples go further. As one of my boyfriends explained to me, of his SF companion (also his collaborator in artistic projects): she sometimes felt totally defeated by boorish and aggressive men, and just curled up unhappily in bed. Then he would come to her and make love to her, as slowly and passionately as he could, to show her that she was valued, just as she was, by someone who wasn’t trying to get anything from her. He had learned what pleased her physically, and was willing to give her any amount of time. He got comfortable with her body, strung out the foreplay.
But since he wasn’t actually aroused by all of this, he had to juggle a fantasy — specifically, since he was a top, the fantasy of fucking an ass like mine — to keep his dick hard, but this is in fact a skill you can learn, and then you can maintain a hard-on for pretty much as long as you want.
I think she was the only woman he had ever had sex with.
I since have come across further pairings of this sort. And then, well, there’s me.
Prolegomenon 3: Arnold and Ann. Mostly me. This posting asks how someone as blazingly bright and accomplished as I am can be so fucking dense. It chugs on from my childhood, getting stranger and stranger with the passing years. Then there is the crisis, which leads to a surprising series of ascending resolutions, out of which I will pick just one piece, because it’s parallel to the story about my wonderful Brighton (Sussex) boyfriend John Hart Gould, who was the guy in Prolegomenon 2, just above.
From my 8/12 posting “Getting picked”:
in fact I did desire other guys, painfully, and had been aware of my nature from childhood
Then came early puberty (age 10), and with it my lifelong high sex drive, which played out as a hell of a lot of jacking off. Very early on I discovered the sensory pleasures of my asshole, and often jacked off with one hand while finger-fucking myself with the other. By then I was well-read in sexual matters and knew, in some detail, how guy sex and anal fulfillment could be pleasurably combined. By the age of 12 or 13 I knew I wanted to get fucked (but that didn’t happen until much later).
Cock-sucking then took over my dreams and my jack-off fantasies, and by the time I was an undergraduate at Princeton, the full range and power of my desires was entirely clear to me, though of course concealed from almost everyone and not carried into action.
Meanwhile, I enjoyed the company of girls and women and from junior high on had girlfriends of various degrees of seriousness, but eventually involving lots of making out (I love kissing — kissing anyone nice, it’s oral pleasure) and eventually the full range of non-genital sex. I turned out to be entirely comfortable with women’s bodies, and delighted to give pleasure to them, but as the seriousness of the sex dialed up, the sex movies in my head — I have a very rich mental life; a lot of stuff is always going on in my head, on several levels at once (to put it entirely in layperson’s terms) — those sex movies shifted bit by bit into full Faggot Mode.
Ann Daingerfield became the greatest of these female friends, she picked me to be her partner, we got on to fucking fairly regularly (she was fiercely passionate, just amazing), she was an extraordinary person, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, so I proposed marriage, and there we were. It was all wonderful, but by then the sex movies in my head were almost entirely about my getting fucked. Things had drifted far, far off course.
On our wedding night in 1962 we had fabulous sweaty sex. In which I was driven forward entirely by being fucked wildly by a fantasy man. Marital Lucky Pierre, to make a joke of it. But, finally, I saw how far I had wandered.
To put it plainly, I was hooked on dick up my ass and saw no way back. How could I not have noticed? What kind of self-deluding idiot fails to appreciate that he’s become a heavy-duty pussy-ass fag? (It’s not like failing to notice a receding hairline. I mean, Gregor Samsa was acutely aware of his horrific Beetleness.) And for the first time asked: How could I compose a decent and responsible life out of all this? Can I conceal my grievous husbandly defect from Ann? For how long? I wanted what I wanted (my fantasy fucks were astonishingly satisfying), but I didn’t want to hurt her.
Despite our sharing our lives together with great pleasure and having a daughter together, all in the stress of getting me a PhD from MIT, fans were inevitably going to be hit. That was the Urbana T-Room Encounter, to be recounted in a posting somewhere down the line. From which a new, better order eventually emerged.
Theses. As non-technical as I can manage.
— loving committed companionship carries you through a lot
— whoring faggots can be adept as lovers of women (we are sometimes selfish shits, but then nobody’s perfect)
— it’s a wise idea not to dwell on knowing what’s in your sexual partner’s head
— there’s a bunch of (distinct) concepts that could fairly be labeled bisexuality, but none of them was under discussion above; it’s a gigantic can of worms
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