Go Homo: The Man Who Accidentally Married an Ex-Man

One of the silent terrors to Western masculinity is the straight man’s fear of being gay. I remember facing the question of my own sexual identity in high school, a time when I careened from one failure to the next with women. I was home alone one Saturday afternoon and thought for a while about the idea that there was some kernel of meaning in all of the false starts, rejections, and crippling shyness around women. Maybe my brain was forcing my body into wanting something it didn’t want. So what about men? Was that a half-open open door I kept walking past, too timid to push further inside?

Earlier this week the wife of a recently deceased firefighter in Texas was taken to court by his family in an attempt to prevent his assets from being distributed to her. The woman, Nikki Araguz, had been born a man and undergone a sex change operation, something that her husband Thomas Araguz allegedly wasn’t aware of in 2008 when the couple wed. Thomas’s lawyer told him that Nikki had been born a man and the couple consequently separated. The family’s argument hinges on the idea of Texas law not recognizing sex change operations as having changed someone’s legal gender. Apparently, in Texas you are forever bound to your birth certificate’s genital taxonomy.

The case reminded me of a psychological habit that I’ve never managed to get rid of. As soon as I feel myself falling for someone I ask myself how I would feel about her if I knew she had been born a man. It’s an irrational question for a number of reasons, and still it quickens the mind a little, breaks the slow moving fog of new affection with a question at the heart of new-formed affection in the first place. There is an instantly familiar list of adjectives we use to describe why we love someone. They’re so opaque they could be said of almost anyone with a straight face: smart, funny, attractive, independent, sweet, kind, generous, fun, driven. I’ve never heard someone begin a description of the things they love about their partner with their gender.

But in the tripartite channels that me must eventually file into when embarking on the journey to find love and sex, the first choice is purely anatomical. If love is so fleetingly delicate as to be fractured by a person’s gender, it implies there is something about love that makes it a pure function of biology. This is strong testimony against all the transcendental updrafts of serenity and life-altering affection we sometimes feel we are experiencing when the light and shadows fall across a lover’s face in the mid-afternoon.

In Danish, it’s common to refer to a partner simply as a “man” or “lady.” You can ask someone where their wife has gone by simply stating the gender and attaching a possessive pronoun. This has always struck me as a regal custom, confessing to a randomness in the selection process, as well as describing the biological walls that keep our lower halves penned in the right category. There’s something solid in it, an acknowledgement of both emotional love and the necessity of committing to the person underneath the feeling. It contains both the daydream ideal and the compromise.

In all the times I’ve pressed myself about the possibility of the woman I’m with having been a man, only once did I feel like it wouldn’t have mattered. With everyone else the thought of a natty wooling of chest hair and a dangling penis having been in place of the love canal was enough to break my affection. All the other stuff I’d have told you about intelligence, generosity, kindness, and independence would have collapsed into a chromosomal black hole.

With one woman in particular I remember the hinge moment came the first time I felt her vagina. I felt a rush of sentimentality about how it felt. This doesn’t make any sense now, but I remember thinking over and over that there was something pillowlike in the soft molding of it. I did truly admire her for all of her non-sexual qualities. She was generous, very kind, and had a sense of loyalty that I loved. But those were all the chemicals gathered around the head of the match, it needed a rough friction to transform into fire.

When I’m dating someone, one of the first signs of attraction I find in myself is a desire to lick her in some way or another. When that idea produces disinterest there are no adjectives to replace it. When it prompts curiosity or affirmation, those words are impregnated with a sense of purpose, and the thought of licking becomes a recurring thought, like seeing someone you know pass by on a carrousel intermittently, smiling and waving. This is a powerful emotion to derive from the intersection between urine, pleasure, procreation, and excess flaps of skin.

The conjuring of pretty images from the suggestion of anatomy seems like an especially male characteristic. There are experiments that show women respond to physical cues of attraction and generally gravitate towards a certain frame and symmetry in the same way men do, but projecting meaning into anatomy seems like a peculiarity in men, and perhaps a cause of the terror of homosexuality that many straight men feel in the simple suggestion of crossing into another gender channel for pleasure.

A 2002 survey from the National Center for Health Statistics found that, among people age 18-44, women were 50% more likely to refer to themselves as bisexual than men, while men were almost twice as likely to describe themselves as homosexual. Surveys about self-applied labels don’t necessarily prove anything, but the disparity does give anecdotal support to the idea of men preferring immutable categories to define their most intimate lives.

Men have a very local and very easy to identify center for pleasure, so I suppose it’s apt to be overzealous in seeking out its counterpart. It’s a kind of self-affirmation to see sex as a proxy for love, to find their perfect junction point in anatomy, making it the distinguishing characteristic of someone we are capable of falling in love with. You can see this in language, the way sex is commonly referred to as a thing gotten, rather than an experience shared with another person. We get laid. We get head. No one ever says they got a round of golf. Or they got an afternoon at the bar watching basketball. But sex is something men get, depersonalized, anatomy-exclusive sex.

For many, the mere idea of getting this pleasure, affection, and acceptance from another man intrudes on the most sensitive areas; it violates all of those half-vulgar, half-religious fantasies about the vagina. Without that, how will all those adjectives be impregnated?

In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Martin Amis described Christopher Hitchens as a pansexual, which I think is a much sweeter way of describing sexual inclination. It’s not simply a matter of herding the cattle into three separate corrals and letting them mingle. Bisexuality is an incomplete description because, I suspect, those not bothered by the differing anatomical categories of their lovers are probably open to a great many more experiences than simply dabbling in homosexuality.

The affixing of homo- and hetero- are more about establishing limits. Someone who splits that difference is probably best described in terms of hungry interest in everything, rather than a simple openness to a second biological category. There are many more categories in sex than those. My own category is a sentimental one before a physical one. And I met a woman once who, even as a thought experiment, I felt I’d have been in love with no matter what arrangement her chromosomes had dictated below her navel. I wonder what I’d do if I met a nice man, and one day discovered he had once been a woman. Those doors are always half-open, and the reason for pushing them open requires some little fire. It’s the same fire for all of us, and there’s nothing but another half-open door in the next room.

Image via Qualia1984