Everything But The Gay

This blog entry will be a blatant violation of my “scholarly” self—it will describe a severe disconnect between my academic, professional beliefs and my personal preferences. So allow me this disclaimer, in the words of America’s great gay poet, Walt Whitman:

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

My scholarly self believes in queer. I believe that any absolute can easily be undermined, any essentialized identity can easily be queered—in fact, I believe that queered identities are more common than absolute identities. As an academic, I believe in transcending binary thinking. I believe that we are never either one thing or another—we all occupy shifting positions along any conceivable spectrum: gay-straight, male-female, masculine-feminine, intelligent-ignorant, neat-messy. You get the idea. I truly believe that if more people on this earth understood and promoted these ideas, as a human race, we would have far fewer problems than we do now.

That’s what I want for the human race, for the world—I want everyone to accept and celebrate diversity and difference, to fight for inclusion, to open themselves up to the possibilities of difference.

As for myself, I want a man.

Let me be more specific—I want a masculine man. I want a man who reeks of testosterone. I want a man who looks, acts, sounds, smells, and feels like a man. I want a man whose body is covered with hair in all the places where you’d expect a man’s body to be covered in hair. I want a man who loves sports, theater, film, literature, music—culture of all kinds, really—who loves to cook, kiss, cuddle, and do romantic, thoughtful things for me. I want a man whose identity and behavior encompasses the full range of masculine, whose every cell permeates the various dimensions of masculinity. I want a man who’s more of a man than I am.

Usually, when I encounter a man who approximates this idealized vision of mine, that man turns out to be straight, which means—to me—that he’s not quite masculine enough for me. My idealized vision of masculinity is a masculinity that desires masculinity—a gay masculinity, so to speak. Most of the men that I’m attracted to fall just short of this—they’re Everything But The Gay.

Now I know that these desires are heretical to my queer sensibilities and that I am making myself vulnerable to accusations of heteronormative complicity—but I ask you—isn’t admitting these desires, these desires that counter the fluid ideations of queered identity—isn’t that admission a pretty queer thing to do?