Putting your middle finger up God’s “rectum”: genderfucking, disability, and querying (gay) masculinity

A strange thing happened when I put on makeup, and admitted to liking this, while having no desire to become trans. Aside from minor subversion of the normal for its own sake, I like it because I can imagine that the people who often stare at me in public are doing so because of the makeup and not because of my disability and all its attending unpleasant drama. On the whole, this experience, along with a deep and intense exploration of sexuality and gender generally, has been positive. But what I can’t get over is the fact that some gay men are still so obsessed with masculinity to say that drag queens and, by extension, feminine guys and transgendered people make it more difficult for normal gay people. There is no normal person, much less normal gay men. Once you opt out of the heterosexual social contract, you make it deal with the devil; and — whether you like it or not — you are a rebel with a cause. So we need to quite literally fuck (against) assimilation.

Though drag queens were the first to stand up to the police in the Stonewall riots, it is unfortunate that ableism, misogyny, racism and transphobia are still highly prevalent among Canadian gay men. In fact, I often wonder, in a chicken and egg like scenario, whether my internalized inferiority on account of physical disability was a consequence or cause of my male homoerotic sexual orientation. Unfortunately, to this day, I am preoccupied with “the Platonic male form” — an Adonis -like body, free of flaws,  erotic precisely because it is hyper- able. It can climb trees, lift weights, start bar fights, strata lovers and fuck them endlessly. It knows all the moves to access hitherto untapped resources of pleasure. It never fails or shows weakness. It pursues pleasure, and it repels pain effortlessly. Indeed, it wasn’t any particular man I fell in love with that first revealed my gayness, it was that body — the feeling of activity and power I had been keenly aware of lacking since earliest childhood.

From very young,  I came to believe that women were no fun. The exception to this was, of course, when my mom wasn’t preoccupied with the intense amount of care I needed at a young age, and adopted a “more masculine” attitude. Often misinterpreting caring for needless restriction, women were associated with the medicalized parts of my life. What I needed to do to overcome my disability, the humdrum parts of existence, such as school, my stretches, speech therapy and the like. In short, I disliked the necessary and loving activities that made me different and separate from  other children. Yet, by contingent arrangements of parenting, when I was with men, I experienced more freedom; truthfully, this dynamic, unfortunately, continues to this day, because the institutional care of the disabled is dominated by women, who — rightly or wrongly — impose  innumerable restrictions on my life in the name of efficiency, equity or related abstractions. In such contexts, it is a great struggle not to be misogynist. When you add to this considerations of internalized homophobia, and the fact that, like many gay men, I was taught that the worst thing for a boy to do was show signs of femininity, it becomes a Herculean struggle. And this struggle is further exacerbated by  the connection between misogyny and internalized ableism. Even then, however, there seem to be an escape, since both my parents have always been implicitly aware that gender is a humorous performance. For this reason, this is not a struggle, however difficult at times, I intend to lose.

Though rationally I cannot hold this view, and, for obvious ethical reasons, it repulses me, I am influenced by the classical Aristotelian model of sexual difference, whereby “the male” form is considered the fulfillment of human development — women and cripples our less perfect instantiations of it. We are soft, whereas “the male” is hard; we are dependent whereas he is independent. He fucks ;we get fucked. Greek philosophy, and by consequence the Western imaginary, is influenced by anxieties over fucking and disability in more ways than we can possibly imagine.

 I will never get rid of my childhood fantasy entirely, nor do I think it is particularly all that terrible to fantasize about beautiful naked men wrestling while covered in oil, but I now realize it is a fantasy. Judith Butler’s greatest contribution is to help us recognize that sexualities and abilities are tragic comedies, insofar as their performance is characterized by a fundamental lack. We are never fully what we perform. Now, my favorite insight of Lacanian theory is that there has to be a distance between us and our fantasy life. Otherwise the comic nature of our existence can turn nightmarish exceedingly fast. Let me be blunt, fascism, like the kind offered by Mussolini or Hitler, is both a comic and terrifying instantiation of the political enjoinment coming from homoerotic desire (The Party was in love with Hitler, and I’m sure German soldiers secretly jerked off to photos of their leader) and able-bodied normativity. It is no accident that these things are connected. Indeed, Mussolini and Hitler are particularly instructive, since they were the exact opposite of what they were imagined to be: Hitler was not an ideal Aryan, nor was Mussolini especially masculine, despite the patriarchal performances of his party.

There is nothing wrong with a healthy appreciation of masculinity, and I’m not saying these things are equivalent in scale. Yet in the sometimes ludicrous tribalism of Grindr and the over aesthetic and sexualized nature of some parts of gay culture do we not see the dissipating shadows of this homoerotic and hyper- misogynist able-bodied fascism; and are we, at times a very disenfranchised group, willing to endorse its racist, and for gay men especially, ironic eugenic implications? Are we, who have been excluded from capitalism’s full privileges until relatively recently, willing to accept the complete commodification of sexuality and our identity as a target market?

The reason sodomy is a hot button issue is because it exposes the authoritarian nature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. God is the creator of humankind, so he should be the one on top. Men are more perfect than women, so they should always be penetrating. To have sex with the man, in any form whatsoever, or to behave like a woman in any way, subverts the proper hierarchy of submission and domination in God’s heavenly schema of nonconsensual sadomasochism. The disabled gay men is, by dint of this taxonomy, twice feminized yet never truly woman or man — his cock, regardless of functionality, being placed in perpetual suspicion. To use Lacanian terminology, he has a penis, but the tenuous way he holds onto the symbolic power of the phallus is made more obvious, inasmuch as his masculinity is more queer. For this reason, I find overzealous attempts to masculinized disabled men (e.g. Rick Hansen) rather pathetic and unhelpful. In order to gain masculinity, we replicate the same discourses that oppress us in the first place, and the same holds true for gay men who believe it is appropriate to rank each other in an imagined hierarchy of gender. This is a narcissistic fantasy predicated on the pursuit of an imagined body and an ideal embodiment that does not and could not ever exist.

Political and psychological benefits notwithstanding, the truth is I don’t think it is possible to separate sexuality from gender, at least in the current context. However much we may strive against archaic conceptions of fucking, and rightfully so, to assume genders is to take certain ascribed and , if one is lucky, chosen positions — both literally and figuratively — in relation to sexual activity. Likewise, sexuality is not a given, but, instead, emerges as a semi-designed and semi-autonomous system for the contemporary regulation of social behavior. Human beings are not free, nor are we determined; instead, we exist in contexts of greater degrees of agency/constraint.

To put this somewhat crassly, even if one does not butt-fuck, and even if one is a stallion when topping or a power-bottom, we have not yet escaped the shadow of sodomy. I don’t think this is a bad thing, in fact, as an atheist and a feminist ally, I think the community sometimes would do well to remember the adage of gay liberation, appropriated from second wave feminism — the personal is political. We still need to view subversive sex as an emancipatory act; for, even in our present age of “tolerance,” to admit to liking all sorts of man-sex is to put your middle finger squarely up the rectum of the  patriarchal and ablest conception of the divine. I have nothing against sexual subjection; I, however, insist that it be by choice.

I don’t know whether I am a masculine guy or feminine guy. I certainly exhibit behaviors from all over the gender map. But, if feminine guys are guys who are open to challenging gender expectations, intuitive, nurturing, well groomed, caring, thoughtful, sensitive, expressive, less aggressive, talkative, good cooks, into arts and culture and less violent. And masculine guys are  protective, courageous, physically and emotionally capable, striving to be rational, methodical, goal oriented, passionate and spontaneous, I don’t see any reason why I cannot and should not demand all these things from partners and friends, nor why any of these qualities attached to gender. They are not a marker of gender as such. Rather, they are markers of maturity and complexity, and form and important web of resources that the sophisticated person draws upon at any given time.

One final point is that I don’t think a gender fluid stance questions the experience of trans people. First, I’m not suggesting that in order to be progressive one must be equally masculine and feminine in all times and all places. Clearly, this would be impossible, since certain individuals have stronger orientations toward certain behaviors than others. Second, no one, whether or not they are sis or trans, can fully embody any gender, any race, any class, any sexuality or any ability level. Third, I suspect that taking a more relaxed approach to gender and sexual embodiments may make it easier for trans identified people, who are often subject to intense questioning, if they do not embody their gender orientation correctly, by expertly using external and always heteronormative signs.

It’s time, though this process can never be complete, for many people in gay culture to move beyond an implicit understanding of sex predicated on ancient Greece and the Bible. Not only is this ignorant based on what we know about gender and ethics, it also irrationally limits the expression of pleasure, creativity and intimacy for no benefit. I’m trying not to be the crippled gay boy who longed for the perfect able, youthful and invincible male body. I am grown now, apparently, and, therefore, I must — as St. Paul says — “put away childish things”.