It is late. This may be terse.
Why must gay guys engage in penetrative intercourse? Why does penetrative intercourse define what is gay? What does it bring to a relationship? To me it seems as though it is an attempt to appropriate heterosexual standards for relationships and sexuality. Is there not more to intimacy than penetrating your partner? Is there no other way to express passion? I have never looked at things this way, but in doing research for my queer theory paper I began thinking about the structure and gay identities portrayed in Latter Days. The scene where Christian and Aaron are happiest is immediately after they have had their first sexual encounter.
To me the act of penetrating one’s partner seems primitive and quite unnecessary for achieving emotional intimacy with one’s partner. I am reminded of a scene in Star Trek: First Contact, Data and Picard are interacting physically with the Pheonix and Data asks of Picard “Does physical contact make it more real?”. Picard evades the question and tells him that it was a childhood fantasy. I understand the need for physical contact, as I do enjoy it a lot, but somehow the intercourse portion just doesn’t make sense to me. Perhaps this is because I am a non-traditional gay. I am excited by emotional intimacy and more basic feelings and less by the idea of being penetrated or penetrating.
For me personally there is a different aspect of masculinity at work that I am attracted to. I am less attracted to the power of the penis and more attracted to the power of the man. The phallus serves as a nice indicator to confirm biological pre-requisites for manhood, but it is not the only object of my interest.
We are gay, can we not take a more evolved approach to sexuality that is less carnal?
Now that blast of mental energy is out there, I will either integrate it into my current paper (on social control of gay identity) or I will carry it over and complete it in another semester as another paper.