There is a tall, slightly goofy white guy here who I think is named Russ. I don’t know for sure, as he picked up on my playful habit of nodding to him as we pass, addressing him as “Doctor…” as if we are medical colleagues meeting in a hospital corridor. My nickname for him stuck though, and now he’s called “Doc,” at least in B-wing.
.The other evening, Doc was talking to Jack Daniels. (That’s his real name.) Jack is about 23 and extremely handsome, he looks like he just walked out of an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. He’s also real nice, it’s hard to believe he’s here. Actually that applies to Doc as well. To most of the guys here, really..
Somehow or another, I was drawn into a conversation Doc and Jack were having about sex. Actually this has become a fairly routine occurrence, as I am the “go-to” guy whenever an authoritative gay point of view is required on this topic.
The questions I’m asked in this situation are hopelessly similar and unsophisticated. They almost always stem from basic misunderstandings of the similarities and differences between heterosexuality, homosexuality, transexuality and transvestism. The subtext of the questions is also invariably the same. A startling degree of straight men seem to be somehow afraid they can be “turned,” that by some unknown means they will wake up one day and find themselves wanting to have sex with other men, or worse, not wanting to but having it anyway. They want reassurance that being gay is too fundamentally different in is very essence to be a risk to their “normalcy.”
Perhaps they are insecure because, like any healthy men, they have fetishes or kinky fantasies that they don’t realize almost everybody has. They wonder if the first step to becoming homosexuals involves getting excited at the idea of a dominatrix in a leather body suit, or fantasizing about being watched while having sex, or finding certain sex toys erotic. They wonder if they edge into these realms, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the other side of the street entirely.
My approach was, at first, unsatisfying. They wanted reassurance about how different they were from gay men, and I told them precisely the opposite. “Listen, you know all there is to know about being a gay man,” I informed Doc and Jack, who widened their eyes at this bit of information. “You’re thinking we’re so different from you because the objects of our attraction are different. But that’s not what’s important in attraction. It’s the process involved. You’re not lusting after a woman’s vagina, any more than I’m preoccupied with a man’s penis. Not that those things don’t count, but what counts far more, is the way her hair smells, the touch of her soft skin, the way she laughs, the sensual curve of her hips. And beyond that, the excited way she makes you feel, that funny feeling in your stomach and your groin, the way you anticipate getting together, the way you replay your conversations in your head, the way you fantasize about her. I do exactly the same thing. Just with me it’s the deep voice, the square jaw, the masculine manner, the low laugh, and so on. What counts for both of is the excitement, the anticipation, the fantasizing, the experience of feeling attracted to someone. The process is exactly the same. Do you see what I mean?”
They did. I swear. “Doc” actually stepped out of character and later took me aside and said “Marc thanks for that information. It was really helpful.” No kidding.
MCO 2004
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