Post 87

Hello again,

         Contrasting two things is a useful strategy to enhance learning. For example: knowledge is power, and ignorance is not bliss. It’s important to be informed, for what one doesn’t know can indeed kill them. Where there’s a pro, there’s usually a con, and losing oneself on one side of an issue while ignoring or shutting down opposing views is not wise.

         I began my blog to increase understanding about homosexuality by noting that gay men have a strong desire to access other men’s phallus and also by referencing the gay lament: “So many men and so little time.” The crude street vernacular I encountered in my youth pointed bluntly to a truth that could also serve as a warning. The message was that “a hard dick has no conscience.” Despite gay activism promoting the idea that gay is good and that once gay, always gay, there is another side to the matter. Men sucking up to another man’s primary symbol of masculine virility can be likened to squirrels in a cage on an exercise wheel. Or it’s like eating a photograph of a banana expecting to be nourished. Such actions are deceptive mirages that will most likely never get squirrels or gay men to a desirable destination. The gay man’s compulsion for yet another fix is sustained by the failure of same-sex sensual engagements to produce what is genuinely needed.

         The following is another contrast, a moral juxtaposition: “Man is that he might have joy,” and “Wickedness never was happiness.” It may be that gay males are able to realize their teleological destiny to become finished men, only through identity-affirming, non-erotic rapport with heterosexual males. Iron sharpens iron, and among men that common mutuality is termed brotherly love.

         Gay men who fail to acknowledge the relational wounding and role-estranging circumstance they experienced during the first five years of their lives are destined to slavishly continue following its inhibiting script through the remainder of their mortal journey. 

         Believing that sexual engagements signify being loved is a mistake desiring people often make. What is proposed is that each gay man carefully consider the first five years of his life and recognize and acknowledge clearly those conditions through which he failed to have a masculine identification reflected to him properly. Through those critical formative years, each lived in circumstances where they became psychologically much like their mother and female friends, while being offended by or too far from, and not becoming like, their father or other boys. Early on, they spurned rough male engagements, preferring gentler association with females. But into and through adulthood, they continue to need that unity and sameness with their own gender.

         The same-sex attraction each is unable to ignore really is not a call to have another man, but rather is a prod to become a man. Same-sex attraction is an innate corrective component that provides the motivational power required to blast through the opposing defensive detachment that stymies potential growth and prevents movement toward maturity.

         Men need to love one another, and surrogate “nursing fathers” could come to the rescue of identity-impaired and role-estranged males. Men get closer to each other through sharing soul and sinew than genitals. This undeniable gender-specific urgency, this force drawing gays toward other men, is a good thing, but it should not be short-circuited and misdirected through inappropriate eros.