Two observations, from Canada, where we spend the summer. Down the road from me live an elderly couple who have been married for 62 years. They are utterly comfortable with one another, and that means, as anybody knows who observes happily married people, comfortable in their skins, with his being a man and her being a woman. He runs a perpetual yard sale out of his garage, selling anything from salt shakers to new bicycles, a generator, a washing machine, and so on. She rolls her eyes at this habit of his, but indulges him in it, because he has put that same habit of pottering to good use in the home, turning a trailer into a snug ten-room outfit that seems, in the finished basement, to go on forever. And it could go on forever, too; when the island is without power (as it was, over and over last winter), he just turns on his generator. He has all kinds of backups down there, so his wife will never have to worry about anything; a regular dugout a la French Family Robinson.
If you drive up the highway from his house, you will see a neat patch of land, apparently in the middle of nowhere, mowed and trimmed, with a white picket fence surrounding a large white cross. He erected that cross in honor of his wife's father. In the old days, the highway that runs round the island was a mud road, impassible when it snowed in the winter. So the father of that family would lead his wife and children up to the road to pray. This they did whenever they could not make it to the church, four miles away. Because that place was sacred to his wife and her family, it became sacred to my neighbor too, even though he himself never worshiped there, and never even grew up on our island. He just considers it a good husband's thing to do, as evidently his father-in-law considered what he did to be the fatherly thing to do.
Meanwhile, stuck indoors one day on account of rain, I caught a few minutes of a Canadian fashion show televised every afternoon. The hosts are named Steven and Chris, and they are too absurd to watch; walking parodies of the mincing, lisping, girl-mimicking, louche gay man. Chris, who appears to be a desperately insecure fellow, told a story about how he had waited an hour to get into the hottest nightclub spot in Bangkok, only to find when he got to the door, dressed to the nines, that they didn`t allow anyone in with flip-flops. And he'd been dying to make his killer appearance in there. So he ran out into the street and bought the first pair of shoes he could find: expensive orange crocodile shoes. (I have no idea what crocodile shoes are; I guess shoes made of crocodile leather; I don't know why anyone would want them, but then, I have no idea either why anyone would want to visit a nightclub in Bangkok rather than, say, have dinner with an ordinary family on one of the floating houses.)
It occurs to me that the pseudogamy of the male homosexual is essentially related to the need to put on an act, an act that the man not burdened with same-sex attraction can hardly understand. Suppose that because of the neglect of your father or brothers, or because their cruelty, or because of some episode of molestation or seduction, you find it difficult to identify yourself as a male. You might then compensate by the practice of a campy and exaggerated masculinity, such as is to be found in the gymnasium among weight lifters; or you might become what you see, usually by caricature, as girlish; or you might flit uneasily between the male and the female roles, but you will always see what you are doing as something donned and doffed. Of course, in the very act of sodomitical relations there is a pretense of being the male or being the female; while all along the relations are with someone like oneself. The narcissism of the attraction -- one is attracted to what mirrors oneself -- is at the same time expressed by means of an act, that one is not oneself, one is actually a girl in disguise, or a hyper-man, or whatever the idol-making machine of the mind can suggest. Hence among male homosexuals the self-advertising, the exhibitionism, the camp, the grim unseriousness, the childish fascination with bodily functions, and the other fascination, akin to the former, with death. Of all such things the old fellow up the street is wholly innocent, because he is no more aware of his manhood than he is aware of his skin, which is as it should be.
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