When we emerge into communities fully accepting of our
erotic integrity, it’s like arrival in a Promised Land. I’m not talking here
only about life in gay-positive neighbourhoods, work in queer-positive
institutions, worship in queer-positive churches, shuls, temples. I’m talking
about the moments of connection and, yes, I’ll use the word grace, that many of
us have experienced in bathhouses, sex clubs, networks of lovers and
friends-with-benefits, faerie gatherings, erotic workshops--moments so vividly
captured by Mark Doty in the poem to which I included a link here a couple of
weeks ago.
When we cross over into such spaces, our affirmation of one
another is a natural extension of the affirmation we’re amazed and relieved
finally to have experienced ourselves. Go to the Folsom Street Fair or to Dore
Alley, or to the festivals they’ve inspired far from San Francisco, and, amidst
what moralists are quick to condemn as hedonistic exhibitionism, you’ll see an
affectionate cameraderie, even an innocence, that comes when when we can
finally let go of fear.
It makes sense that we compensate for years of condemnation
and rejection by doing our best to celebrate the difference of others’ erotic
lives from our own--and to set aside our negative reactions to the sexual
diversity of those around us. That’s part of our healing, and part of healing
one another.
At the same time: on guard against ourselves becoming sexual
oppressors, we’re capable of coming to view the very concept of “sexual ethics”
warily, almost as a contradiction in terms. Instead of looking deeply for the
roots of our erotic longings in the bedrock and groundwater of our souls, we
throw up our hands, abandoning the work of self-reflection, as though the
search for deeper awareness were itself tainted with repression.
Feminist analysis is way ahead of us on this. Women have
ample occasion every day to see and experience all too directly the emotional
and social havoc and violence wreaked by unreflective sexual assumptions and practices.
We kid ourselves if we imagine that being queer wipes our slate clean of the
exploitative messages about sex-as-self-aggrandisement that pretty much all cisgendered
boys and men in a society like ours begin absorbing from early childhood on.
We let ourselves off the hook, when what we need most
authentically is the insight to distinguish what truly feeds us and enables our
growth, and each other’s growth, from what leaves us stuck, dissatisfied, only
half-awake to who we are--and oblivious to our failures to treat one another
with reverence and respect.
We’re capable of failing to call ourselves and one another
to account. We play mutual consent like a trump card to rationalize compulsive,
abusive, or seriously dangerous behavior
when it creeps into our own lives--or say nothing when we see it
creeping into the lives of those we know. By focusing on acting out our
fantasies rather than on why they speak to us in the first place, we slough off
the deeper work of coming to understand, and encouraging one another to
understand, how and from where they arise , how best to accept their presence
as seeds within us that we can choose to water, and when, and how--or not (to
use a Buddhist metaphor).
One of the most satisfying aspects of John Cameron
Mitchell’s wonderful film Shortbus is
that the sexual explorations of pretty much all its characters involve their
growth and their awareness of one another’s deep humanity. It’s a beautiful
example of what the living out of an unapologetic queer sexual ethics might look
like: unstinting in its acceptance of the lives of others on their own terms, full
of detours and trips up blind allies, and at the same time mindful that what we
do with our own and one another’s bodies, we do as well with our souls and
theirs.
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