Author Archives: Tin Man

Yeah, More Verbosity, I Know

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Yeah, More Verbosity, I Know

Anyway, back to my life. It’s been a good week; since I came back from West Virginia I’ve felt pretty darn refreshed. Let me review the last seven sun-and-moon cycles. Friday and Saturday night, West Virginia. Sunday night, home. Monday night, hung out with Sparky. Tuesday night, stayed overnight at Bryan’s.

Spending as little time at my apartment as possible, and forcing myself to get across the river and spend time in the city, seemed to be doing me some good, so I decided to keep that up. Therefore, on Wednesday night I decided to go to the Lesbian and Gay Community Center to attend a meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats. I had wanted to try new things, find new social outlets, get more involved in the issues of the day, give something back to the community, a là some combination of Arthur Frommer, Barbra Streisand and Mother Theresa. So my friend Nick had suggested several weeks ago that I check out GLID, and lo and behold, when I scanned the Center’s meeting schedule on Wednesday, it turned out GLID was meeting that very night.

I got to the Center about half an hour too early, and this was even after killing time by walking up Hudson Street and along one of the side streets in the oft-forgotten land of the Meatpacking District (that name’s kind of arousing, isn’t it?) and then back along Greenwich Street. So I did what I sometimes do when I first get there, which is go up to the second floor and use the bathroom. I’ve never written about this here, but I have a pretty sensitive stomach. Sometimes after eating a meal at a restaurant — because they usually give you more food than you need, and because I love to eat and usually wind up cleaning the overloaded plate — well, sometimes bad stuff starts to happen, and not necessarily right away. This really wasn’t a case of restaurant-related bathroom panic, because I hadn’t been to a restaurant. But when you’re walking along the streets of Manhattan, it can be difficult to find a place that will let you use its bathroom. Bars are good, and so are hotels, but when none of those are around, there can be a problem. Some people have this fear that they’ll get an upset stomach while stuck in a traffic jam on the highway and have no place to go, in both senses of the word. Something similar sometimes happens to me when I’m walking along the streets of New York. I might start to feel queasy, and then sidewalk bathroom panic occurs.

I don’t really know why I wrote about that. I know I tend to be verbose here. Sorry about the verbal diarrhea. Ba-dum-pum.

After my ablutions I went back downstairs and sat on the benches in the lobby, skimming through the Village Voice, turning first as I always do to Savage Love, Dan Savage’s hilarious sex column, and doing some people-watching. I killed more time by going up to the library to see if some particular books were on the shelves; I was hoping to find this new one, but it wasn’t there.

Finally it was 8:00 and I went upstairs for the meeting. There was a handful of people milling around, all of whom seemed much older than me. I kind of stood there awkwardly, looking around, and so forth, and then someone announced, “If you’re a candidate, please sign in so we can determine the order in which you’ll speak.” It turned out this was going to be a night of listening to political candidates give speeches and then voting on endorsements in the upcoming primaries, and this seemed incredibly boring to me, so — well, I left.

After that I wandered around the streets for a while. Somehow it got to be 9:30 and I was walking down Sixth Avenue, on my way to the PATH station, when I ran into an old law school classmate whom I hadn’t seen in two years. She and I were in the same first-year law section (a section consists of 30 people and you take all your first-year classes together), and she’s now working in a New York firm and living by herself on the Upper West Side. We decided to get some ice cream and catch up. We got our chilled dairy products and walked a few blocks to a parkbench where we yammered about the last couple of years. I did lots of rubbernecking as nice-looking guys walked by, which elicited comments from her, as well as the news that she already knew I was gay, because apparently during our third year of law school a friend had mentioned to her that he’d run in to me with another guy at a restaurant on Valentine’s Day.

Eventually we wrote our phone numbers and e-mail addresses on little scraps of paper and parted ways. It wound up being a varied, enjoyable evening, something that wouldn’t have happened had I stayed at home. This was borne out by last night, when I did stay at home, and wound up getting online and ultimately meeting up with this nice, attractive guy for an hour of nakedness. Six feet tall, red hair and fair skin, a smooth gym body with the broadest, most chiseled and pornolicious pecs I’d ever seen, and a nice, intelligent guy to boot. Afterwards he suggested we explore Jersey City together some time. I agreed, but still, I wanted to kick myself when the night was over, because lately I’ve been trying to stay away from Internet-initiated sex. Part of what’s made this week so nice is that I’ve been too busy in the evenings to resort to sitting at home in front of a computer screen and feeling like a pathetic antisocial sex addict. I have no weekend plans and so I’m worried about what might happen.

Between August 15, 2000, and January 1, 2001, I had no sex at all. None. No sexual contact, not even a kiss, nothing. I was too busy getting used to my new job, and mooning over my friend Nick, and taking advantage of the novelty of living so close to Manhattan. No sex at all for four and half months, and barely any time spent in chat rooms, and it was terrific. And now I’m trying to be like that again. Not the monasticism — I probably wouldn’t turn down good sex. It’s just that I’d like to be too busy to look for it online.

(By the way, sorry if the comments aren’t working. I can’t seem to win. E-mail me!)

More Thoughts on Sexual Pickiness / “Erotic Racism”

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More Thoughts on Sexual Pickiness / “Erotic Racism”

I’m borrowing the term “erotic racism” from Queerscribe, and it refers to what I wrote about yesterday — using race or ethnicity as a way of screening out potential sexual partners. But although it’s a nice and pithy term, it presupposes a particular view, and I think we can just as easily call the issue “sexual pickiness.”

There were some particularly good comments appended to my last post. And I’ve been thinking about the issue a lot since yesterday. It’s such a complicated issue, because it combines much that society (particularly American society) obsesses over: race, sex, psychology, the right to hold your own beliefs, the right to control what you do with your body.

First, some excerpts from e-mails I’ve received. One person wrote that this form of sexual pickiness comes from an “amalgam of personal taste, [social] conditioning, and trepidation.” Another person wrote that “rather than this being racist, I think it’s more because people of a certain race are bound to have similar physical characteristics, and it might just happen that those features are not exceptionally attractive to a certain person.”

Finally, “Disappointed,” who wrote the original comment, sent me a nice and rather friendly e-mail, in which he wrote in part:

I almost never use the word “racist” because I can’t really say I know what it means. For one thing, the impossibility of defining either “race” and “racism” makes the label problematic, too fluid. Inevitably, the question of what constitutes racism is reduced to a problem of semantics. Instead of asking “Is conduct X racist?”, which can never be answered sufficiently, I find it better to ask how race is deployed in all these different social and textual settings, whether racially-conscious conduct perpetuates white privilege.

Here are just some musings as I try to figure out what I think and feel about this.

Isn’t there a difference between societal discrimination and individual sexual pickiness? If someone is denied a job or a place to live, that’s one thing, because people have certain rights. But if I deny someone the opportunity to sleep with me, I’m not oppressing that person. (In fact — to channel the spirit of Brad for a moment — some might say I’m doing that person a favor.)

But perhaps sexual pickiness is really a symptom of latent racial prejudice. And perhaps one of the best ways to overcome such prejudice is by experiencing the most extreme type of intimacy possible — skin against skin. Perhaps having sex with someone of a particular race will wind up erasing a person’s latent prejudice against people of that race.

On the other hand, what’s more important — physical intimacy, or mental and emotional intimacy? After all, there are stories of racist white men who rape or have consensual sex with black women while remaining racist. You can be sexually attracted to people of a particular race while still holding racially prejudiced views of that race. Having sex with people of a particular race won’t necessarily remove one’s prejudice.

And anyway, who says that sexual pickiness is a symptom of latent racial prejudice? I like Mike’s comment: “I am not attracted to women in general. Some of them have features that I find sexy, yeah, but they just don’t turn me on. Too squooshy. Too vocally high-pitched. Not what gets me excited…. And I refuse to provide any further explanation or apology for the sake of political correctness. I want who I want.” (I particularly loved the word “squooshy”…)

I’ve thought about this as well. After all, I already spent enough energy in my life trying to conform to society’s ideas of whom I should or shouldn’t find attractive. “Have you tried sleeping with women? How do you know you don’t like them?” Part of me wants to say, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let people do this to me again.” (And let’s not forget this guy.)

If I don’t want to sleep with women, does that make me a misogynist? No. Just because I don’t want to sleep with women, doesn’t mean that I don’t respect women or that I’m prejudiced against women, right?

On the other hand, maybe you can say that this is all a false comparison, because, as many believe, sexual orientation is hormonal, and all men give off the same hormones, regardless of race, right? There’s more of a difference between a white man and a white woman than between a white man and a black man. Right?

Sex is one of humanity’s greatest mysteries. Lots of people have sexual hangups. Sex can be used to express intimacy. Power. Control. Revenge. Love. Pity. As a tool for procrastination. Sexual abstention can involve issues of health, purity, cleanliness, even self-discipline or autonomy. Many people are very conscious and careful of who they allow near (or in) their bodies. We don’t always understand our sexual desires. We can’t even pinpoint the exact cause of homosexual attraction.

So when it comes down to it, who are you to tell someone else what that person’s sexual criteria “really mean”? And is it really your problem? I’m not saying it’s not. Perhaps it’s our collective problem. Calling it “erotic racism” seems to imply a certain question, so I’ll get all Sex and the City now, and boil it down to one question typed across a computer screen:

Is screening one’s sexual partners based on race or ethnicity harmful to society?

Or, more succinctly:

Should we fuck for world peace?