The Sexual Compass

by Michael Reed

  “Surely, anything that can reduce the gay scourge is a positive development,” says I, for a joke. Oops. Not the right thing to say.

  Firstly, I discovered, I am a “slut”. Secondly, it must be easy being me because I just have to get pregnant if I need more money. What the hell? I may have actually flinched when Gary said it. Delay between looking hurt and looking incredulous: about two full seconds, way too long to pull it off convincingly. I had overstepped the mark with my joke at completely the wrong time. But when I put my arm around someone, I don't expect to be attacked. From there on, the match was lost.

  Rob had been waiting for this moment for about three years, and he now had his chance. “I don't even know why she comes here,” he said with a solemn tone of resignation. Bastard.

  I'd regained some composure and my eyes flicked to Simon who began to speak: “Fuck off, Rob. And that's a bit strong, Gary. Everyone needs to calm down.”

  Not bad, I thought to myself. Not great, but a reasonable start.

  And then my beloved brother turned to me and said, “In all fairness, your comments are wearing a bit thin. This might be a joke for you…”

  I couldn't believe what I was hearing. All I could do was say, “Oh, all right then.” My voice didn't wobble too much. To save face, I stayed for another five minutes and then made an excuse to catch the bus back.

  On the way home, I fantasised about telling them to fuck off when they made their apologies. I was going to enjoy this, so I made sure the ringer on my phone was turned up, not wanting miss the call on the noisy bus. By the time I was home, I decided I might have to curtail their punishment period. They were obviously operating under extraordinary stress due to unusual circumstances. I'd try to take that into account when they rang me.

  “Not going to Simon's this week, love?” asked mum, when she saw me in the kitchen the following Thursday.

  “I'm a bit bogged under with coursework this week, actually,” I lied.

  To be fair to them, the pressure had been turned up by mouse–that's what everyone called the drug cocktail that turns you straight. None of the ingredients were technically illegal and loads of people were making themselves sick eating things that contained glucose. Diabetics and people suffering from hypoglycaemia had been warned not to take their medication out in public and to store it in a secure place.

  Mouse talk was everywhere, and I'd experienced the effect of these new developments, on gay people, first hand. The biggest surprise was that this discovery had uncovered a demand for sexuality reorientation, and that was interpreted as a massive insult to gay people. The term taken up by almost the entire media, the “gay cure”, summed up the whole problem: some people still thought that being gay was wrong, and therefore something to be cured.

  There had been a noticeable shift in attitudes. A Daily Mail journalist opined: “My sympathy with homosexuals would be diminished if being gay turned out to be optional.” Admittedly, this was no wet liberal, but even so, it was a surprisingly stark opinion on homosexuality to see in a newspaper article. This was someone who had been forced to keep his disapproval to himself in the past; he wouldn't have dared say it in print until a few weeks ago. This hinted at the real problem: for people of my generation, homophobia may have seemed unjust, but more than anything, it seemed uncool. The recent groundswell of anti-homosexual feeling in newspaper articles revealed what some people had really been thinking all along.

  Political correctness had a lot to answer for if this was the end result of not being able to say anything bad about being gay for thirty years. Preventing discourse had not changed attitudes, it would seem, not deep down. The comments beneath online articles, the modern equivalent of pub-talk, were mostly awful. Something had been unleashed. Obviously, the websites of some papers were worse than others, but they were all at it.

  “Finally, some common sense on this issue!” from a man who'd been waiting fourty years to say his piece, he claimed, although he wasn't specific about what his point actually was. In more normal times, I would have repeated that in front of Seriously Gay for comic effect.

  Seeing “It's about time. We'll soon be rid of them forever,” modded up to the high heavens made me cringe. People suggesting that they will be able to get men tested for it before they can work with children, ditto.

  “They should put this in the water supply of schools rather than encouraging it like they do now,” sounded as crazy and baffling as, “At least the taxpayer won't have to pay for them any more.” Huh?

  One man said in his comment, “I am a gay man and I would be interested in this, if it works.” Fair enough, I suppose.

  Something else had been bothering me, and it too related to political correctness. My mum was as PC as you could get. I remember her warning the young Simon that he shouldn't be looking at porn on the Internet. He had looked embarrassed and she had smiled.

  That she enjoyed the situation had not registered with me until that moment, five years later.

  If he had come out while he was still a schoolboy, I think his home life would have been much better than he might have imagined, due to Mum and Dad. But would Mum have issued a similar warning telling him that he mustn't look at naked men on the Internet? It seemed like a double standard. In fact, if she had caught me having a look, would she have given me the same smirking lecture?

  Porn is, if we're being honest, consensual sex. If Mum would have been unwilling to criticise her daughter or a gay man for looking at it, she should have shown her seemingly straight son the same respect for his sexuality. Were moments like that, ironically, part of what made him keep his sexuality a secret?

  Conclusions: a huge number of people still considered being a gay a fault; they were willing to say it when they thought they could without chastisement; a casual lack of respect for other people's sexual goings on had always existed.

  Understandably, gay people felt embattled, but they were not, as a group, free from fault in this matter, either. All of the discussions had revealed a stubbornness on their part. The party line had been, at least with Simon's crowd, that you were born gay. So, therefore the determiner was biological rather than social. According to them, nothing could change it or prevent it.

  Okay, let's look at that. If it is something within the biology of your body (chemicals, hormones, genetics, or neurons within your brain) why is it impossible to change it? It seemed to me that it would be easier to change something that was physical rather than something that was psychological. I mean, how do you unbake a cake?

  Perhaps a person's sexuality is something that develops as a result of formative experiences or adherence to social norms? So, a social and psychological rather than a biological determiner. As a heterosexual, I don't have a problem with that. Perhaps my sexuality would have been different if I had been exposed to a different set of experiences.

  I had boyfriends before Steven, and I had sex with them, but Steven was my first real love. In all fairness to him, he is lovable despite his faults, but I'm not sure that he is who I would choose to fall in love with. Steven's sheer masculinity was part of the attraction, I am sure. But did Disney cartoons and Star Wars impose an ideal upon me at an early age? There was no doubt that Steven was, utterly, a rogue. I don't find such a theory, when applied to my sexual orientation, either offensive or unlikely. Neither would I be offended if it became settled science that my sexual preferences were shaped by genetics.

  Over and over again, truisms as well as lies were stirring things up, and more was yet to come.

  “Fuck off,” I texted to Gary. As in, please be nice and be my giggling partner again. Nothing.

  Chapter 7 -The age of reverse-mouse

  I'm happy to see Simon when he comes for a visit at Mum and Dad's, but part of me doesn't like it. Again, the sensation was of having skipped a groove in life. Twenty-one years old, a mother, and I still felt like a little kid, hanging around in the lounge while Mum cooked the dinner. I might have wondered whether I would have been bet
ter off in a flat on the dole and living the life of a young adult, but I felt a noble sense of penance from my lot; I'd mucked things up in life, and now I was going to do what it took to get my head back above water.

  Up in my room with the door shut, I didn't have the guts to mention Gay Club. The secret truth was that I had almost no social life, and losing the encounter group had been a blow. What a shame that it had come to this, being dependent on Gay Club and having let everything else fall apart. When you're a child, you are shoved around from one place to another and that becomes your social scene. Making a few friends at school or at Girl Guides seems very involved, but it is relatively effortless. I had no doubt that this continued to be the case for my erstwhile peers who were living large at Uni.

  I had built up the same instincts and life strategies as anyone else, but they weren't very effective now. Drifting along and waiting for chemistry to take its course as part of a social scene is considerably more difficult as an adult. Here I was, a Nowhere Girl, twenty-one years old and with no peer group at all. Even if I could patch things up with the guys, what I had with them was insufficient for a woman in her twenties. I was going to have to do something, to make an effort on my own behalf. Somehow.

  It transpired that things were weren't irreparably damaged, anyway.

  Simon laughed. “You'll probably want to stay away this week. Everyone is up in arms about mouse.”

  That was it? I had thought I was ex-communicated for life. A few words and a laugh and everything was all right again. Oh, of course: Simon would fix it, and everyone would have to start putting up with the brat sister again. I had, perhaps, built the whole thing up in my mind too much, but once again, I had escaped disaster thanks to a family that loved me. Cringe.

  “Whatever,” I replied, ultra-cool.

  “Things have gone up a notch anyway. Have you heard of reverse-mousing?”

  “No.”

  “They now reckon that you can go the other way–from straight to gay.”

  That was interesting. Until now, everyone had forgotten that the original experiment had, supposedly, made the mice gay. Why did all thoughts leap to making gay people straight rather than the other way round? In humans, also, the initial reports were of people being turned gay. One difference was that, historically, there have been systematic efforts to enforce heterosexuality onto people. Straight equals “normal” in a lot of situations in society, and for that reason, no one had considered the possibility of people wanting to be gay.

  “I'm glad I'm not able attend at the moment,” I said. “My take on this is a bit different from theirs.”

  “How so?”

  “Firstly, I'm not buying this for a moment. I don't think the science is there. Yet, they've all accepted it as real. I find that odd in itself. It's as though they've all been caught out in a guilty secret or something, hence the anger. Secondly–and I don't think this would make me popular with your little mates–I don't have a problem with the discovery, if it is true.”

  “Well, it's a bit different for you.”

  “What's that got to do with anything? Pointing out that I'm an outsider is just another way of saying: `You're objective about things.' I would agree that mouse has churned things up and revealed some nasty attitudes that had been masked by political correctness until now. I agree that's an unfortunate aspect.”

  Simon tutted at that. “An unfortunate aspect.”

  “There you go again. I'm being objective about it, and I don't think that makes me wrong. The gay militants that you hang around with–pseudo-militant in their sad little discussion group–have always insisted that you're born gay or straight or bisexual. Therefore, sexual orientation must have a physical basis rather than a social one. This means that it must be genetic, and therefore, expressed through the way someone's brain is wired up, or the chemicals floating around inside their body.”

  “Who says it does work like that?”

  “Well, loads of gay activists, for a start. It could even be a combination of factors. But even if that is the case, surely it could then be altered by altering the factors that determine sexual orientation?” I let that idea sit for a moment. “However–and I think that this is part of what has got everyone so wound up–they've never had to be specific before. The majority of the most vocal activists have always said that you're born straight or gay and that nothing can change that fact. Okay, but what is the basis for that determiner? They've never had to explain how it worked.”

  I'd been considering this a lot, and now, I had the floor. Standing in my bedroom. Underneath a Radiohead poster.

  Now in full flight, I continued, “And this brings us to the unmentionable alternative: That it isn't physically determined from birth. Perhaps it is psychologically determined and affected by social factors.”

  This made Simon wince a little. He shook his head.

  “You don't like that? Well, Simon, that doesn't make any difference. It could well be true.”

  We both knew that this was a very difficult area for the gay community. If true, the social environment could shape a person's sexual orientation. It was a major taboo, particularly for gay men. Both explanations opened up the floodgates, leading to the worst thing that a gay person could hear: that there was something wrong with being gay, that it was something to be cured or prevented. From an early age, boys are told to “be a man” about things. “Boy's don't cry,” they are told. And do you know why? Because if they did cry, they might end up growing up to be a poof.

  I never understood the idea of homosexuality as being effeminate. I'd met quite a few gay people, because of Simon, and a lot of them seemed very masculine. For one thing, the act of getting into bed with another man seemed, to me, very manly in itself.

  Every gay man seemed to have a recognisable strategy and a place within the hierarchy. Stereotypes crop up for a reason. I wondered where I fitted into all of this. Did I play a part that an outsider would be able to identify? Young Woman Who Gets Away With Murder? Stop it, brain. Would I ever escape from my attraction to Hyper Masculine Rogue? I said, stop it!

  Simon didn't fit into any of the standard personae, and I think that this limited his ability to get on with (or get off with) other gay people, apart from his sad, sexless circle of similar blokes. He was a lovely looking young man, but Nice Young Man didn't seem to chime with gay people. As far as I knew, he had done it, in terms of a couple of shags here and there. But why did I think that he would have been on about his fourth long-term relationship by now if he was straight? He was a bit boring, but a lovely person, and basically, a great catch for some lucky female.

  It wasn't for Nowhere Girl, stuck at home with a kid, to tell Simon how life should be lived, but I wanted to hear tales of him piling out of the pub with his mates. Hear about it? I wanted to be with him, laughing away, egging him on to ask out the latest guy of his dreams. If only I could enforce a “no more Gay Club” rule on all of us. Gay Club was a nice, comfortable situation that was holding us back. And what did they really get out of it? I bet a discussion like the one Simon and I were having would have been verboten at their discussion group.

  “How would you feel if this were about you?” asked Simon, breaking the thoughtful silence.

  “I'd be fine with it,” I replied, already having the answer up my sleeve. “Perhaps my sexual orientation comes from biology. Or, perhaps it's psychological. I don't care. I do suspect it's a combination of biology and psychology.” I was on fire and on point. Then my mum shouted and called us for tea, which made me whither somewhat. Simon didn't even smirk. Good old Simon.

  ***

  Later that week, a horrible woman in The Guardian reported that she had put herself on the mouse. Reverse-mouse, in her case. I say that she's horrible because she's got it in for men, a species that I have some affection for. As ever, she felt that all of her problems had been caused by men. As ever, it seemed to me that all of her problems were self-created or entirely in her own head.

  The
article was called “Mouse Works–I Am On it!”. “I've had it with men,” her essay began. Fairly standard for her. She felt that reverse-mouse had given her a glorious stepping off point from which she could say goodbye to men forever.

  If it works, it will be a glorious day of celebration for the men, I thought.

  Her and another woman were taking insulin together as part of her plan. Her story, and her experiment, I had to admit, were intriguing.

  She described sitting across from her friend after they had both taken the stuff, which they had baked into cookies. I was surprised that she was willing to oppress herself into undertaking something as domestic as baking a cookie, but great change requires great sacrifices.

  She noticed the first effects after about half an hour. Initially, she became aware of a change in her partner's appearance.

  Her skin looked soft and beautifully luminescent. Before, I had secretly shared society's view that my old friend was overweight, but now, her body looked full and intriguing. What a wonderful world–that of the woman's body–that we could now explore together. I reached out with a hand and stroked her face. What a soft and lovely thing it was. I asked her how it felt, but for her, the effect was not as pronounced. This, I concluded, may have been because it was our first time reverse-mousing.

  I reached over and kissed her and felt something I had never managed to feel with a man. She backed away. It was obviously too soon for her to explore this side of her feelings. “What does my body feel like?” I asked her. She reached across and grabbed my breast. Oh, what a feeling! Intriguingly, she reported that, to her, it felt very much like one of her own and “sort of rubbery”. The physical part was obviously taking longer for her accept. We may have to up the dose for our next experiment.

  Hmm… I thought to myself. Could it be that you are a conflicted lesbian, Julie, and your friend isn't one? It would certainly explain a lot of your problems, including–according to your constant reports on the matter–getting little or no enjoyment out of sex with all of the “useless men” that you have been with.