01 Monday Aug 2016
Posted in Art, Bisexuality, Masculinity Studies, Satire/Humor, Sexuality
Tags
Art, basket, Bisexuality, garden, growing, Homosexuality, Humor, masculinity, Original Drawing, Passive/Active Sexual Performance, Penis, Sexual Fantasy, Sexuality
Marcus’s Garden
20 October 2015
07 Tuesday Jun 2016
Posted in Academic Books, Feminism, Politics, Queer Theory, Sexuality
Tags
"PC Police", Academic Book, Bill Maher, Boobs, Breasts, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, Gender Expectations, Gender Fluid, Gender Trouble, Henry Killinger, Henry Kissinger, Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, Lady Gaga, Lesbianism, Luce Irigaray, Madonna, Miley Cyrus, Miley Cyrus's Tongue, Millenial, Pansexuality, Passive/Active Sexual Performance, phallocentrism, phallus, Queer Theory, Sexual identity, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, This Sex Which Is Not One, tongue, Vagina, vaginal imagery, Woman's Body
I like Miley Cyrus. I recognize immediately that this statement is sure to lose me some friends, associations, professional contacts, and they key to the hall of Badassery (I’ll miss the swans the most), but I am willing to make it because I admit freely that I’m not a huge fan of her music. While Cyrus has behaved erratically from time to time, her work in the LGBT community, specifically her work with raising awareness for Trans homelessness is something truly admirable. Miley Cyrus as a musician is likely to be remembered the way Madonna or Lady Gaga will be remembered: the record will reflect that some music was made, but for the large part what will be studied is how these women affected the public 
perception and discourse around the female body. Miley then will most likely be recorded because of her tongue.
While my own reading tends to deal more with male sexuality and body image, understanding perceptions of women are just as, if not more, important because usually the best method of determine the nature of a thing is to understand fully what it is not.
The reader may immediately object by noting that: Gross, you’re gross, seriously what the fuck? Why are you even talking about her tongue? Are you some tongue obsessed serial killer? You’re just, weird man. Ew, just, ew.
Now that you have that out of your system I’ll continue.
Miley’s tongue is a discourse unto itself, and while popstar’s body parts typically derive cheap entertainment fodder it is interesting to observe the populace, as well as Miley 
herself, fascinated by the recurring image of her tongue stuck out. Simply Google image searching the name Miley Cyrus reveals several images of this action after the first few lines, and should the reader search “Miley Cyrus Tongue” they’re greeted with an entire page. Cyrus has explained in an interview with Barbara Walters that this sticking out of her tongue is simply her trying to cope with always being watched or stared at by cameras since she doesn’t know how to smile. It would be enough to leave it there, but alas a great portion of the population possesses a not-so-well-hidden perversion in trying to understand and dissect the sex lives of celebrities and as such Miley’s Tongue has become a discourse that is worth exploring.
The reason for this is the idea of phallocentrism. Before I get to that though I need to address Cyrus’s gender and sexuality.
Originally the inspiration for this particular essay was Bill Maher. I don’t consider myself a liberal by any means, in fact my mantra for politics is usually “fuck liberals and fuck conservatives, Elmo/Cookie Monster 2016,” but between the bouts of self-righteous dick waving the man can be legitimately funny. I honestly can’t remember the set-up, he was likely complaining about the “PC Police” and during his “New Rules” monologue he made some random comment about a “Millennial’s blog post about Miley Cyrus’s Tongue.” I laughed at first because I was positive that such an essay probably existed and it probably 
would confirm every bad stereotype about Millennials, but upon deeper reflection I really began to think about it. Writing about tongue’s would have to involve discussing sexuality, and when approaching the topic of the public’s fascination with celebrity bodies this actually becomes something relevant, as well as something which has been done before.
Jack Halberstam has written a book entitled Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal which, while I haven’t read it, explores aspects of Queer theory within popular culture and this idea becomes something pressingly relevant given the fact that more people probably know the name Miley Cyrus than they do Henry Kissinger.** Miley Cyrus is not just a wannabe celebrity desperate for attention, she’s become a figure within the public consciousness, and unlike previous 
instances of “the IT girl,” Miley is unashamedly queer.
Miley Cyrus has openly identified herself as gender fluid and pansexual. If you don’t know what either of those are I’ll provide a basic explanation. Gender fluid is a state in which individuals self-identify as both genders, but rather than have it fixed all the time as man and woman it depends upon a person’s feeling or individual mood. She has said in one article:
On not conforming to gender stereotypes, she continued: “I don’t relate to what people have made men and women into. I know I’m more extreme and badass than most guys, but that doesn’t make me a boy.
“And the other night I wore a pink dress because I felt cute. I can bake a cupcake and then go play hockey.”
Gender fluidity is not free-for-all, nor is it simply “what I feel like at this moment.” Gender fluid is one of the most mistaken gender identities because it is derogatorily perceived as someone just being weird or confused. Despite naysayers which would argue that this is a vapid identity structure, it is a conviction that one simply does not recognize a gender binary (the idea that there are only men and women) as the core of their identity. As for pansexuality this a sexual preference in which individuals do not center their erotic attraction based upon gender. Whereas straight men and cisgender lesbians are attracted to women, and likewise straight women and cisgender homosexual males are attracted to men, the pansexual is open to a wide variety of body types and gender identities. This is 
sometimes mislabeled as the Cole Porter hit “Anything Goes,” and if the reader is confused do not feel bad for both this gender identity and sexuality is often poorly represented in cinema and television so understanding will not always be direct. Pansexuality, like all sexuality, is nuanced and for each person there are preferences and fetishes. Simply put: the Pansexual person does not hold one gender as desirable, but in fact believes that any human being they encounter can be sexy regardless of sex, gender, or sexuality. For lack of better clarification I’ll let Cyrus speak for herself:
“I’ve had really bad anxiety and depression in my life and a lot of that stemmed from the way I look,” she confessed to the publication. “Now I really try not to give a f**k. If you’re funny enough and cool enough and confident, that’s what will make you feel beautiful.”
With all of this in hand understanding the public discourse of Cyrus becomes easier for too often the critics talking about her often use “her.” Even I’ve done it if you’ve been paying 
attention, and while Cyrus hasn’t made any public comment about pronoun usage this does complicate all the talk about her tongue.
Looking at the tongue in general the average image association can become rather phallic. Gene Simmons the base player of KISS has even gone so far as to suggest openly that Cyrus has attempted to “steal” his tongue “look,” and given the fact that Gene Simmons is Dr. Love immediately Cyrus’s physical gesture becomes connected to the idea of the phallus(I believe the colloquial term is “The D”). The tongue during sex becomes a pseudo-phallus penetrating the vagina and stimulating it and thus the figure using it becomes the “active penetrator.” Which is an elaborate way of saying the one using the tongue is “the man.”
The problem with this is that this is bullshit, at least as far as Cyrus is concerned. Cyrus’s 
tongue can’t be a penis because that would be an aspect of gendering her. To get a clearer perspective of this the reader should consult Judith Butler’s seminal text Gender Trouble in which she explores her thesis that gender is a performance rather than the innate biology. Looking at the way human beings gender bodies she notes:
Pleasures are said to reside in the penis, the vagina, and the breasts or to emanate from them, but such descriptions correspond to a body which has already been constructed or naturalized gender-specific. In other words, some parts of the body become conceivable foci of pleasure precisely because they correspond to a normative ideal of a gender-specific body. Pleasures are in some sense determined by the melancholic structure of gender whereby some organs are deadened to pleasure, and others brought to life. (95-6)
The reader may be wondering what that exactly said seeing as how Butler’s work is incredibly academic, and also tremendously theoretical (in the humanities sense, not the scientific sense). Butler is arguing that sexual pleasure is often centered in the erogenous zones of the breasts, vagina, and penis because society designates them as erogenous zones. The reason the penis is the sight for male pleasure is because men from birth are told that they are men, that the penis is the sight for orgasm and all pleasure, and any other physical pleasure is either unnatural or else a fetish. The same dialogue takes place 
over breasts. The reader most likely has a friend who often shares photos or videos of women breastfeeding in public and being scorned or else told to go somewhere else (it’s me, I’m your friend that does this, it’s an important issue). The reason for this is because our society has over-sexualized women’s breast to the point they have negated their original purpose. Breasts by design are meant to produce milk and feed babies, yet the rhetoric of pornography and advertising has inundated the public at large with the paradigm (sort of a standard of behavior or ideology) that breasts are sexual objects and “the bigger and less saggier the better.”
The reader may then ask, well so what? Why is that important or relevant to Miley Cyrus? Why should I give a damn?
The reader should give a damn because Cyrus’s tongue is being sold and mass marketed as a phallus. Miley Cyrus’s body has become a discourse and corporate product, and the sexual rhetoric around her becomes problematic. I will try to look at both interpretations.
Miley sticking her tongue out is photographed, recorded, and contextualized alongside her misunderstood sexuality to sell either “lesbian” pornographic fantasies, or else to make her tongue appear as a pseudo phallus.
The tongue is sold to heterosexual audiences, either of mainstream media or private pornography, as the lesbian’s main sexual tool. I think the reason for this is that straight audiences fall back upon Butler’s argument, and can’t process anything outside the typical erogenous zones best explained in the equation “dick = great.” Straight people more or less write the tongue off as the lesbian’s “penis” and this attitude is best expressed by a joke a friend of mine, who happens to be straight, told me during high school:
What do you call a homosexual woman with an extra-long tongue?
What?
A well-hung lesbian.
This attitude repeats itself, and what’s important to note is how the vagina, labias, clitoris, fingers, and lips are totally absolved from erotic responsibility. The tongue is a penis where there seems only absence. Recently I’ve begun a book This Sex Which is Not One by Luce Irigaray and the opening passages held some interesting insight into this matter:
Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. Thus the opposition between “masculine” clitoral activity and “feminine” vaginal passivity, an opposition which Freud—and many others—saw as stages, or alternatives, in the development of sexually “normal” woman, seems rather too clearly required by the male sexuality. For the clitoris is perceived as a little penis pleasant to masturbate so long as castration anxiety doesn’t exist […] and the vagina is valued for the “lodging” it offer the male organ…
In these terms, woman’s erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallus organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to 
sheathe and massage the penis in intercourse […]. (23)
Ultimately it all comes down the idea best expressed by a work colleague of mine expressed so eloquently: “Everybody, apparently, is a fan of “The D.”
Irigaray’s arguments are valid, though it’s important to note that her book has more to do with women’s bodies that a gender fluid person’s body. For now we’ll work with the fact that Cyrus possesses similar physical territory and work from that. Regardless, Cyrus’s tongue is often comparable to a penis and Irigaray’s is able to express clearly how this pollutes the concept of a person’s, specifically a woman’s, erotic anatomy. It’s not just that the penis becomes the only object of importance during sex, it’s the fact that a woman’s vagina is treated and perceived as useful only for receiving the penis and holding it during the act of sex. Nevermind the fact that lesbians have been using vaginas for sex, and apparently enjoying themselves just fine, for centuries without the need for a penis.
In the case with Miley’s tongue, the rhetoric around it suggests that it is a lesbian-penis but it can’t really be that because lesbian’s don’t like penises unless you watch “lesbian” porn in which case there’s phallic objects galore…or so I’m told (*cough*). This may be getting too theoretical for the reader but I promise I’m almost done. To me part of the lasting impression is a point Irigay makes a few pages on when she says:
But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere. Even if we refrain from invoking the hystericalization of her entire body, the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined—an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness. (28).
Sex is not limited to just the interaction of genitals but too often people are told, sold, and buy the idea that the penis is the center of all sexual activity and this is a problem. Sex is not just stimulation, ejaculation, and then some Conan before bed. Sexuality involves the entire body from the shoulders, to the stomach, to the thighs, and even, to the tongue. If it’s not clear at this point that this was never really about Miley Cyrus then I really don’t have anything else to offer you except a few more closing thoughts.
It is rather ridiculous to spend the time and effort to write up an essay around some pop-star’s tongue, but going over these ideas of genderization and phallocentricsm I really don’t think it is. Talking about sex and gender may be the stuff of bad blogs you make one 
semester while you’re finishing up your core with a gender studies class, but the way we talk about sex and gender at large does matter. Miley Cyrus by her own admission isn’t a lesbian, but neither is she straight, but because the public at large is still catching up to the nuance of sexuality and gender expression a discourse has emerged because she stuck her tongue out during a few dozen pictures. Looking at these images casually it’s easy to simply write Cyrus off as a lesbian, but it’s also incorrect. Just as it’s incorrect to assume that that the only way two women can have sex is through tongues because that’s the closest thing to a phallus besides a finger.
The tongue is part of the body and as such holds the potential to become an erotic instrument, but instead of simply looking at the tongue as a second penis there exists the alternative to realize: it’s just a tongue. That’s all it is. Like so many things in life it really doesn’t matter what you think of it, it just matters how you use it.
With that bad joke, I’m out.
*Writer’s Note*
I’ve included links to a few random articles I found while working on this essay that deal with the topic of Miley’s Tongue. They range from using the images of it to talk about her health, to her activism, to her performances. Enjoy.
http://perezhilton.com/2015-11-09-miley-cyrus-licks-grand-piano-lgbt-center-awards#.V0fc8L73i7o
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2013/08/20/miley-cyrus-licks-mtv-vma-moonman/2676617/
http://time.com/3918308/miley-cyrus-transgender-rights-instapride/
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/reacting-to-miley
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/miley-cyrus-gender-neutral_us_57ffad9ce4b05eff55820a7e
**Writer’s Note**
Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State for Richard Nixon and is widely regarded, by me and a few others, as one of the world’s most revolting human beings. Apart from prolonging peace talks with the Vietcong while helping Nixon lead bombing raids against civilians in Laos and Cambodia, he was also partly responsible for the establishment of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, a dictatorship maintained through a systematic employment of torture, incarceration, censorship, and execution that lead to the deaths of at least 40,000 people. And don’t even get me started on Cyprus.
Case in point: More people know Miley Cyrus than they do Henry Kissinger, which is depressing if only for the fact it makes the Henry Killinger reference in Venture Brothers that much more confusing.
06 Friday Nov 2015
Posted in Academic Books, Bisexuality, Book Review, Masculinity Studies, Queer Theory, Sexuality
Tags
Academic Book, anal penetration, Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, Freud, Gore Vidal, Homos, Homosexuality, Leo Bersani, masculinity, Michel Foucault, Passive/Active Sexual Performance, Penis, phallocentrism, phallus, Queer Theory, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, William F. Buckley Jr
There’s a point in your academic career when you realize that you’ve just spent the last three hours reading about anal penetration between men and none of it came anywhere near close to being erotic.
Most people will probably never read Homos. The simple reason is because few people possess an interest in Queer theory, though I may be selling a great portion of the 
populace short. The only problem with a book like Homos is it’s an academic work and right off the bat that means the readership dwindles to a handful of intellectuals working in an even smaller handful of universities. To be honest if it wasn’t for Brokeback Mountain I never would have even heard of the book. But I just realize you’re walking in on me mentally masturbating and my isn’t that a pleasant image that will get stuck in your head while your partner is busy talking about her day.
Maybe a little background will help. And listen to your partner more, seriously he married your butt when he could have shacked up with that rich dentist from Maui. He gives and gives and you don’t even try man. Five minutes, seriously, it’s the little things that make a marriage.
Starting in January of this year I began an independent study dedicated entirely to Queer Theory, a brand of social, and in this case literary, theory that attempts to understand how homosexual, bisexual, queer, etc., identity fits and at times is at odds with the dominant discourses in society. A friend of mine who was the VP of the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Alliance organization at the school, and who I had only recently discovered was transgender, told me about it and invited me to join him. I jumped right in eager to see how exploring sexuality in an academic setting would go. The class was really just a bi-weekly meeting with the professor, and often my friend and I would do most of the reading and talking over coffee. I started to confide in him more and more, and the reading list was a real challenge. I decided to do a Queer reading of the Western, focusing specifically on Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. In my research I found a book listed in the works cited pages of several academic articles.
With a title like Homos, it’s hard to miss. Given the fact that most titles of academic works avoid cleverness like the plague, and the fact that all of them seem to require not only 
colons but multi-line subtitles, Homos is like a breath of fresh air. However before my reader rushes off to buy a copy and bask in its warm glow of gay academic script I should probably make sure they are aware of something: This is an incredibly academic text. Take one sentence from the introduction:
Even more: why should sexual preference be the key to identity in the first place? And, more fundamentally, why should preference itself be understood only as a function of the homo-heterosexual dyad? That dyad imprisons the eroticized body within a rigidly gendered sexuality, in which pleasure is at once recognized and legitimized as a function of genital differences between the sexes. (4).
(*snort*) Huh? What? Sorry dozed off, where we? I’m kidding, but this quote does give a pretty solid example of what the reader can expect. Leo Bersani’s book, did I mention him, he’s the author, he might be important, is an attempt to situate and understand male homosexuality in Modern culture looking at works that deal with same-sex desire, to sadomasochism, and warning against group identity politics. That’s really just a fancy way of saying that Bersani looks at the way men desire other men and why society seems to have a problem with it. In fact, one of the reasons Bersani’s work is so interesting is the fact that, for an academic work about sex, he does actually spend a fair amount of time discussing sex. He says later:
De-gaying gayness can only fortify homosexual oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays. […] Furthermore, gay critiques of homosexual identity have generally been desexualizing discourses. You would never know, from most of the works I discuss, that gay men, for all their 
diversity, share a strong sexual interest in other human beings anatomically identifiable as male (5-6).
Speaking as somebody who typically reads a fair amount of queer theory, this sentence is as validating as it is charming, especially when you’re writing about male-male desire and you have to dig through Foucault. I love the man but he could have been a little more direct about dudes who like wang. And, not to be a nasty little butthole here, but that turtleneck, SO last fall.
I bought Bersani’s Homos because I needed to address how the anal sex scene, the only erotic moment in Brokeback Mountain, constituted a “queering” of the landscape of the Western. Since most of the canon of Queer theory are written more about the abstract notion of same-sex desire, and since many of them are written by women, tackling the issue of physical intimacy between men is difficult beyond citing the Joy of Gay Sex, and the trouble there is it becomes difficult for the academic community to take you seriously. And, to be honest, I bought it because it was a fun read.
While several of my steady readers shake their head and text their buddy to confirm 
suspicions they have of the writer, I wanted to return to the idea of intimacy between men. This is a topic I’ve explored before, but since this is an academic work as opposed to a general non-fiction history or philosophy, Bersani is able to really explore how society has intellectually processed the act of anal penetration. In the past this has manifested in the question I’m sure many gay men have had to smile through, “So which one is the girl?” This question may alter in terms of language, but the sentiment remains the same. Bersani notes this perception and elaborates upon it while quoting David Halpern’s observations of male-male desire:
This meant, specifically, not only that phallic penetration of another person’s body expressed sexual activity and virility, while being penetrated was a sign of passivity and femininity, but, even more, that “the relation between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ sexual partner is thought of as the same kind of relation as that obtaining between social superior and social inferior.” (105).
He continues this thought saying:
“In a sense, the Greeks were so open about their revulsion to what they understood as female sexuality, and so untroubled in their thinking about the relation between power and phallic penetration, that they didn’t need to pretend, as nineteenth century sexologists did, that men who went to bed with other men were all secretly women.
“Only half of them were women, and that judgement had enormous social implications; the adult male citizen who allowed himself to be penetrated, like inferior women and slaves, was politically disgraced. The persistence of this judgement throughout the centuries and in various cultures is well documented.” (106).
If you are the partner that typically “receives” your partner’s erection then you’re “the girl,” and therefore weak. The proliferation of the idea that if you enjoy being penetrated, then you must be a woman inside rather than a man is a patriarchal notion that, as he observes, goes back as far as Greek society. The conflict for really approaching this as 
homosexuality is complicated because the gay behavior of the Greeks is really more pederasty than it is homosexuality, but the idea has continued throughout human society resulting in the term “invert” that rose to prominence during the late 1800s, early 1900s. Even after the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s that gained recognition of homosexuality, gay men still are asked whether they like getting fucked in the ass. It’s not just the barbarically rude curiosity that exists in this question, the larger concern is for men on the receiving end, for once the act of intercourse is complete they may compartmentalize this public perception and begin to question their own virility.
Am I still a man if I want to have a man fuck me? If I just give blowjobs does that constitute being the passive partner? What if I don’t want to fuck someone, and just be fucked, does that mean I have no say in anything? Am less of a man, or a human being, because I prefer receiving?
Bersani moves from this concern to Proust and the ultimately to Freud’s theory of the fear 
of castration during sex. The next quote in paperback copy is a big pink highlighted brick because, to be fair, it’s without a doubt the most entertaining and intriguing passages I’ve ever read in an academic book:
“We might imagine that a man being fucked is generously offering the sight of his own penis as a gift or even a replacement for what is temporarily being “lost” inside him—an offering not made in order to calm his partner’s fears of castration but rather as the gratuitous and therefore even lovelier protectiveness that all human beings need when they take the risk of merging with another, of risking their own boundaries for the sake of self-dissolving extensions. If there is no fantasy to read behind the happy faces of those two gays we began by observing, perhaps there were, supporting their lovemaking, the shadowy figures of the loving child and the daddy he coaxed out of his terrorizing and terrorized castrating identity, figures who may have helped them, Foucault’s couple, to spend a night of penile oblation” (112).
Who says the Humanities is boring now? Quote this to your republican brother-in-law who owns the Lamborghini at Thanksgiving and see if he’s still so quick to say you never do anything interesting as an English grad student. 
Go on, do it. He’ll respect you for it, I promise (*Results may vary*).
The above quote stands out to me as a kind of final summation revealing the inadequacy of the question, “Who’s the girl?” The people that ask reveal their own phallocentric view of the world in which it penis is designed to fill every physical and intellectual space of human existence and therefore the one who possesses it and uses it is truly strong, however the fault of this mindset is revealed in this Freudian understanding of the “Invert.” As the man buries himself in his partner, he loses that phallus while his partner is the one left holding the golden ticket, so to speak. Bersani is understanding the homosexual sexual relationship through Proust and Freud, but also challenging it. The man being penetrated may be being fucked, but he’s stronger for lacking fear in the act, actually supporting his “active” partner’s fear with an offering.
“Who’s the girl?” is a stupid question, because being a woman is not a sign of weakness. Second, it’s barbaric to keep asking that stupid question because if two men in a relationship are a cisgender homosexuals, neither of them are the girl, they’re both men. If a man says he’s gay, it means he like men and if either of them wanted to be with a girl they wouldn’t be gay. You’d think this was obvious, but alas it needs clarification.
It’s at this point my reader may be wondering: Why would I want to spend my time reading about gay sex unless I was gay? What does this have to do with my life?
This is a fair question since I have reiterated that this book is predominantly written for academics, but I feel I may have mislead the reader by stating that. Bersani’s book is certainly bound in theory, but like all books, it can be relevant to anyone possessing an interest in human sexuality, and given the number of people who have found this blog looking for black dick pics, I believe it’s fair to say a fair majority of the population shows an interest in such efforts. Bersani’s book is important because his claim is that the homosexual movement is “de-gaying” itself by merging into other identities. He says earlier:
“Our de-gaying resources seem limitless. Most recently, we have decided to be queer rather than gay. The history of gay is too bound up with efforts to define a homosexual identity. But queer has a double advantage: it repeats, with pride, a pejorative straight word for homosexual even as it unloads the term’s homosexual referent. For oppressed groups to accept the queer label is to identify themselves as being actively at odds with a male-dominated, white, capitalistic, heterosexist culture.” (71).
Speaking as a member of organizations on and off campus for LGBTQ individual rights and liberties, this statement does seem to possess a great deal of relevance. The term queer is 
often, and has often, been thrown at people like a knife. William F. Buckley’s televised debates with Gore Vidal possibly being the most poignant and perfect example that springs to mind. Being a Queer theorist myself and bisexual to boot, I feel Bersani’s point to be a little troubling. I understand his concern as a gay man and wanting to find solace as a gay man, but does it seem he’s trying to stop Same-Sexual desire from changing generation to generation? I’m not sure he does for he says later:
“If Queerness means more than simply taking sexuality into account in our political analyses, if it means that modalities of desire are not only effects of social operations but are at the core of our very imagination of the social and political, then something has to be said about how erotic desire for the same might revolutionize our 
understanding how the human subject is, or might be, socially implicated” (73).
Homos is an effort of love for a political identity. Sex in our culture is often politicized and treated with a grandiosity that distracts us from the simple act and joy of fucking, but books like Bersani’s are important to read even if you don’t have multiple PhDs and enjoy reading The New Yorker. Who you fuck, and how you fuck is a private matter, but it is also part of the narrative of your life and all Bersani really wants his reader, and my own to consider, is how important is that decision in the larger narrative.
“I’m a gay man,” is a story, and one worth telling, because for many young men in the world they may not have the language to even begin to know where they fit in the larger narratives of human society, or else they fear what their desire says according to other.
Queer theory only ever asks questions, and rather than accepting straight answers (see what I did there?), it asks more questions of the larger heteronormative trends to see if they ever really are heteronormative. Do you enjoy anal sex? Do you like to recieve? Are you gay? And if all of these are true, does this really strip you of your humanity? More importantly, does this remove your chance to speak honestly about how you express your sexuality? If it does, then there’s something wrong in the world you live in, because everybody should be allowed to express themselves, no matter what the story they tell reveals.
*Writer’s Note*
I have explored my own reading of Bersani rather than providing an objective review of the book, but my training in Queer theory in general has taught me that ultimately studying sexuality is about asking questions rather than trying to arrive at one central conclusion. There may be some of my readers who are gay men that object to the ideas, if so please let me know what you think. I love conversations.
**Writer’s Second Note**
Also please note the title is not meant to be dismissive I just thought it sounded clever. My wife tells me I’m really not that funny.
***Writer’s Final Note***
The image of the group of people was taken last year during National Coming Out Day. I’m the dude on the far left wearing the purple shirt, polka-dot bow-tie, the kilt, and the hat who looks like I smelt a really lousy fart. Here it is again. You’re seeing it now aren’t you? What was I smelling?
Still. Fun day.