Flipping straight men is a common theme in gay pornography. I didn’t realize this until I discovered the BaitBus, an offshoot of the Florida-based porn fiefdom BangBros. In BaitBus videos a van with a topless woman roams the suburbs of south Florida luring young straight men to come along under the pretext of being interviewed for a student film. Once in the van, the men are seduced, de-shirted, and blindfolded while they primp for an imminent blowjob. You can hear the off-camera tittering as the woman is swapped for a man. A rage-filled scene then plays out and the cameraman invariably convinces the man to have sex with the other man for a few thousand dollars. While the straight man dries the sweat from his face and catches his breath after having completed the act, the cameraman delivers the final blow, “Whoa, dude, I didn’t say you had to come.”
Like most internet porn, this is a sham, a farm league for budding porn actors. Yet, it’s hard not to think of these scenes when hearing arguments against social equality for gay people. What is it, after all, that separates a man’s anus from a woman’s? A man’s saliva from a woman’s? A man’s distribution of fat and muscle from a woman’s? We can build up these differences in language, but they can all be broken down quite easily with an onslaught of pure physical pleasure. Politics and gender stop mattering after a certain threshold of loving stimulation. Believing that gender is central to sex is a form of self-protection. It pushes away the overwhelming vulnerability we all feel in the sweaty, blushing cinch of physical connection with another body.
The revival of debate over the U.S. Military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy is consumed with this silent and irrational fear. Like most other issues that relate to the rights of homosexuals, the debate has been a brick-headed contest between conclusions free of supporting fact. Most other countries in the developed world have gratefully accepted homosexuals in the military for years. Australia recently joined Israel, Spain, Thailand, Canada, and Czech Republic in allowing transgender people to serve.
Meanwhile in America, the Pentagon conducts another drawn out review on the subject while Senators press for a vote on a new defense bill that would conditionally repeal the policy. The arguments center on troop morale and are mostly non-sequiturs. Learning to accommodate men with slightly different sexual habits would be distracting to unit solidarity, it’s said. Judging by the results of every other country to have repealed bans on homosexual military service, there is no reason to expect this, but even if it were to prove true, it is not a real argument against the policy.
There are many causes of human mistrust and resentment among people in the military, from the conspiratorial, and sometimes violent, to the gender gap and cultural resentment. All the petty reasons that cause us to mistrust one another in normal life are present: class, religion, ethnicity, manner of dress and political beliefs. Why is sexual interest thought to be any more destructive than any of those petty mistrusts? If a soldier can serve with an American Muslim in Afghanistan after the lunatic murders in Fort Hood, is there reason to expect that same private couldn’t handle being told his haircut looked nice by another private from the Castro district?
Seeing this feared boundary crossed and proven irrelevant is one of most exciting parts of living in our epoch. We have long known humans have an innate tendency towards sexual experience unlimited by gender, from the Greek mentoring system to ancient Persian homoeroticization of servant boys (the saqi). Though it might be shameful to admit, it’s unlikely you’ll have reached the point of sex’ing your first woman without first having masturbated side-by-side with another boy, or maybe even experimented in the early morning hours of a slumber party. The idea of a circle jerk wasn’t an immaculate conception, nor were the branded wooden paddles that hang on the walls in fraternity houses. When I was thirteen I went to a birthday sleepover where all the boys dared one another to give blowjobs. While no one performed the act, many a head was lowered before an un-panted penis in confused bravura before pulling back in shame at the last moment.
Most of us tuck these mortifying memories into a lockbox in adulthood, terrified that they’d be used as the loose thread that unravels our carefully masculinized personas. More terrifying still is the idea that those memories are living things that, if turned loose, might transform us from safely hetero into liltingly castigated homo. This fearful germ underlies every political rationale for limiting the rights a gay person might have in American life. It forces us to retreat into the nonsensical argument that sex is for procreation–which transforms devout Christians into mechanical Darwinists with no acknowledged irony.
I once worked with a former Army Ranger. He told me he’d seen a friend killed in a training exercise because, at that time (and maybe still), Rangers trained with live ammunition. They’d gone on a seventeen mile hike through a forest in the middle of the night, found an abandoned cabin, and performed a clearing exercise in it. Somewhere in the dark of the cabin, amid the shuffling of doors and the sound of footsteps shifting outside, someone’s gun was fired. The bullet hit one of the other soldiers, and he died a few hours later. That was a training exercise in peacetime.
I keep thinking about where and how sex might fit into that environment with those men. What real comfort might they derive from knowing the man beside them lets himself reach the heights of animal gyration exclusively with women? How long might they really wonder if, among those vaginophiles, someone secretly found his own way into that pleasure with men? It seems orthogonal to the real struggles of soldierly life. I can only speculate for myself, but I know I would never be able to find a satisfying answer to killing someone else, even a person who wanted me dead and hoped to bend civilization into totalitarian disfiguration. I imagine that’s something you can never truly resolve and, instead, just learn to leave the question where it is.
I imagine the idea of physical love might seem like alien behavior, a faraway balm from a place where there aren’t explosives waiting under every rock, nor suicidal guns waiting in every peaceful-seeming village. I suspect it would be a comfort to know that there are many more ways to love someone than the ones penned in by my own limits of imagination and experience. To have that comfort in the form of a friend, someone who might save my life should the numbers take a bad turn, would be a lucky thing. If it so happened that he was gay, I can’t imagine it mattering. Unless he butted up against the fiercely guarded memories trapped in an old lockbox, the private fear that if, through depraved trickery, I wound up having sex with a man I might actually come. It might be hard no to.
Images via BinaryApe and Bobster855
Michael Thomsen
Michael Thomsen is a New York-based writer. He has written about game culture, entertainment, and sex for IGN, Nerve, Edge Magazine, Gamasutra, and The Escapist. He has also been a contributor to the ABC World News Webcast and the Q Show with Jian Ghomseshi. ...
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baitbus, bangbros, dadt, don't ask don't tell, equality, gay rights, homosexual, internet porn, Love, soldiers, us military
