“If you want.” I stood up and slipped under the covers. She followed. In the cold, we were agreeably forced to lay wrapped up in one another. I soon felt her hand making its way toward my crotch.
“You know you don’t have to feel like you have to do… anything. You know that right?” I asked her. Letting yourself be touched was one thing. Embracing the impetus to touch new sex organs was a whole different matter. Hell, it took me months being with my first woman before I drummed up the courage to go down. Even the fully-gay take some time to acclimate to the physical requirements.
“I want to feel you.” And she let her fingers walk over me, rubbing my wetness onto my clit, exploring. After a few moments she stopped. “I feel like I don’t know how.”
“No, look. I’m thrilled to have gotten to suck on your tits, at the least. You don’t have to do anything, I mean that. Baby steps.”
“But you…”
“Well I suppose there’s one core difference between men and women. I don’t perform cunnilingus in order to have it performed on me, I do it to make you feel pleasure. If you did, that’s all I want.”
“I did.”
“Then leave it at that. You’ll have more than enough time to try your own hand,” I giggled impishly when I realized what I said, as did she, “…at sex with women. There’s significantly more. But, now, you can’t say you don’t know what to do… because there’s nothing in particular to know, just to feel. You seem to feel it well enough.” I kissed her again, briefly, watching her draw her hand to her mouth as she tasted herself, and then let my head rest against her shoulder, my arm cradling her breasts, and fell asleep as my blueballs subsided, beginning to dream.
The baths again, warm, dry air cooling me somehow, breeze blowing across naked flesh. I curl my toes and step past I, II, III, IV, and now, finally, I can look upon V. I’m supposed to be looking for something, I can feel it, but I’m too entranced to comprehend what it is.
In V, two pale-skinned women half lie on a bed, one upright as if she might stand, pinning her partner against the edge of the mattress. When I’d seen these figures in books they’d always been obscured by the decorations that would adorn the room in the future. Now they are bright and new. The womens’ perky glowing frescoed genitals slide against one another, and I lean into the painting, nudged by curiosity, my feet kicking the basket of clothing standing before the stall, paralyzed with observation, before I wake.
The next morning, having revealed what lay behind that door, as I walked Amber back to Jackson’s apartment, she asked, “Do you think you could coach me, like, remotely?”
“Coach you in what, exactly?”
“The art of lesbianism, I guess.”
“Ha, you flatter me. I am sure there are far better performers of lesbianism out there.”
“Still, you know what you’re doing. I don’t.”
“I’m telling you, you know more than you think you do. You obviously have plenty of instinct about how to touch another human being.”
“Well… I guess that’s good. But I… I want more of girls. I want to know how to get more of girls, and I’d appreciate if you’d tell me how to go about it sometimes…”
I laughed. “Like a Sensei?”
“Pretty much.”
“Ha! I’d be delighted. You have no idea how delighted.”
For the rest of that day, I felt decidedly better about all of my harebrained theories.
Love is depicted with a blindfold round his eyes. But it’s Fate which should be depicted like that.
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
Blackbird
I’d had about a week of being proud of myself for awakening Amber before I returned to the malaise of my unjustifiably disappointing life. I resumed the drinking, accompanied by one gay boyfriend or another, watching hazy lights flash over the Castro, night after night.
One March evening, self-loathing amplified, I called Ben to ask whether he wanted to meet out for a drink. Sure, he would, but he had a new friend he was supposed to go out with later – did I care if a third showed in a bit? A straight girl he’d met on a deal? Of course not.
I met him at Blackbird, another edge-of-Castro bar where the clientele might be straight or gay or open to either. I’d waited at the bar, ordering drinks for us both, looking pointedly at the current iteration of Blackbird’s rotating art selection, a pop-art set of thick canvases painted around the edges as matchboxes, strikingly real. This place has the best art. I was so enthralled with matchboxes that I didn’t see Ben come in. He appeared fully slicked, wearing appropriately tight jeans that suggested he was holstering quite the weapon. The jeans were particularly notable because I’d not seen Ben dressed so brazenly gay before. He hugged me.
“How’s life?” I asked.
“Meh.”
“Why just ‘meh’?”
“Oh, Bacchus, I’m not cut out for this.”
“Cut out for what?”
“This scene. There are so many boys and they’re so pretty to look at, but I just want a husband to sit at home and cuddle.” This perspective must have been at least partly environmental. He sprung from very happily married parents, a harmonious household, with airtight family loyalties. Maybe that was partly the Jewish heritage, or maybe I just don’t know what Jewish heritage really entails.
“Aww, darling. You’ll find one.”
“I don’t know if I will! No one calls later, they just want to hook up. Or, they do call but they’re horribly boring.”
“If that’s ominous you and every straight single female in San Francisco are totally screwed. Guys don’t really call. Not the impressive ones that can get laid without it. Or else they’re just not into me, or whoever. You know there’s a very large community of twentysomething men in the straight world who roll out to bars at night to pluck a drunk girl to entertain them for the evening. And plenty of women who go to bars to be plucked. And neither even bothers giving a phone number, or they do only as posturing. But I know you don’t really go to the Marina. Anyways, I’m glad you’re getting some, at least.” I smiled.
“I don’t see your point,” Ben replied, defeated.
“It wasn’t clear. My point is, are you sure these guys know you want something more than to fuck?”
“I guess I’m not sure.”
“I suppose we could both work on our machinations. But, darling, you are adorable, and brilliant, and hilarious, and, let’s face it, sort of rich. You’re quite the catch. You’ll find someone. It hasn’t been that long yet.”
“I hope you’re right.”
We pittered on for a while then, debating the differences between men’s dating styles and women’s dating styles, the wisdom of the one night stand, the desirability of marriage (his) and the aversion to marriage (mine). He was one of the best people to wax poetic with, although it was only one of the many reasons that I loved him. In short order after the marriage topic we began to debate whether I really trusted men.
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Do you think that’s because – ” he stuttered to a stop, but I knew where he was going.
“Because of what happened?”
“I guess,” he started, “I mean, only women can understand that. With men, it’s different.”
“Different? Wouldn’t you consider rape and ass rape comparable crimes, or do you think one is more significant than the other?” I asked. It was something of a trick question. Roughly (depending on which study you ask) one out of four women in their twenties have experienced rape or “gray rape,” at least some manner of date rape or drunken exploitation. Ben had noted once before that I didn’t seem to trust men much, and he’d cited my own grayish incident as a potential motivation for that distrust. At the time, he’d asked if that was why I’d pursued more women of late. Knowing what had happened to me, it would have been more than socially awkward to claim that girl-rape was somehow less offensive. But, my question was not really my question, as it happened. He t
old me what I wanted to know.
“I think they are comparable, yes. I would guess that the biggest difference is the underreporting.”
“Women underreport too. Case in point.” Anybody just wants to move on and forget it ever happened. But they rarely can.
“But men I think are even less likely to report. Men would just be too afraid to say anything to anybody, ever.”
“Why is that?” I suspected the reply, but didn’t want to corrupt the veracity of his answer. I scanned halfheartedly to check for eavesdroppers, and turned back to the bar, the air around me clinking with glasses and muted conversation.
“Well there’s just this huge stigma in being ass-raped,” he looked up at me and corrected himself, “not that there isn’t a stigma placed on a woman when she’s raped,” he muttered quickly, “but, as soon as a guy was involved, it would essentially make him gay.”
“Do you really believe that? That if a man were forcibly and nonconsensually ass-raped that would make him gay?”
“No, of course not, not really. But that is the perception. Any gay sex makes you gay. Reporting the rape would be like admitting you were gay. Even if just for that one moment, you were gay.”
“Like you asked for it. Yeah. That happens to women too. Some of my best friends seem to have suspected I asked for it. What a perverted perception of forcible sex. I have always loathed that argument: ‘No, I’m sorry, she just looked so slutty I couldn’t possibly have kept it in my pants.’ What egregious bullshit.”
“Just the act itself, that’s all it takes. Gay.”
I held my drink out in front of me and swayed it from side to side. “The stigma of being used transfers across genders, but for women it seems natural. Emasculating a man, making him like a woman, one time, is supposed to make him a woman forever.”
“Mpfh,” he replied.
“Romans could re-masculate, I think. Come back from a scandal. The trick was just getting it right before you kicked it and people started writing about you.” I’d begun to grow tipsy from the Scotch-heavy drink I was finishing, and wandered off topic, toward Rome, as I was wont to do. “But, ok, removing the nonconsensual element: if you were to… submit… as it were, one time, and you liked it, that automatically makes you ‘gay’?”
“If you liked it you’d be gay.”
I didn’t ask him whether he had ever done it, had anal sex with a male. I figured he’d at least gotten close in the months he’d been out. “Says the boy who isn’t ready to write off women. But – ‘if you liked it you’d be gay…’ is that to say that a blindfolded man with his hands tied getting a blowjob from a man that he thought was a woman, enjoying it, would be ‘gay?’ Even if he never found out? Or more ‘gay’ than a married man who wants his wife to fuck his ass with a dildo?”
“Usher,” Ben coughed. I suspected the bartenders had begun to avoid us.
“—All I’m saying is, pleasure is pleasure. A man could enjoy sex with a man once and feel like he’d rather spend his life with a woman, and I don’t think that man should be called ‘gay.’ And it seems straight up weird to me that the same neural impulses, absent any interpretations of propriety, would be enjoyable if provided by one gender but not when provided by the other. Hell, off the top of my head I can think of ten higher order species that have significant, if not a prevalence of, bisexual or homosexual behaviors in their lifestyles— ”
“I don’t believe you. Name them.”
I swallowed, counting off my fingers. “Dolphins, bonobos, macaques, giraffes, bison, antelopes, swans, walruses, gray whales, Guinean cocks, and penguins. Ha! Eleven. Like, pretty much all bonobos are bisexual. You can see pictures of their girl ape on girl ape mating on the Internet.”
Ben frowned.
“Clearly homosexual activity serves some physiological purpose for some species, if only by releasing the stream of brain chemicals that accompany pleasure or companionship, and it appears ours is just one. There’s an anthropologist named Brian Gilley who’s argued that some Native American cultures not only featured same-sex partnerships, they allowed men to choose to play the female gender roles in the culture and considered those men holy. I mean, just – something can’t be deemed ‘unnatural’ if it happens all over nature, no?”
“I never said it was unnatural.”
“Okay then why is everyone not tapping that pleasure outlet? The only explanation I can come up with is that our brains are so powerful at integrating social pressures as physical reactions that we perceive a difference in sensation even though there is no real difference in the touch itself. But why would we do such a thing to ourselves? This is why it upsets me so to hear you say that if a dude liked stimulation by another dude once he has to be fucking ‘gay’ forever. He’s not ‘gay’ and he’s not ‘straight,’ he’s something in the middle. To what extent do you think the one-timer’s being gay is what you feel, and to what extent do you think that is what you think you should feel because everyone else tells you you should?”
“Hmmm… the latter, I guess.” Tipsy was undoubtedly shaving pieces out of our logic.
“I guess they’re kinda the same,” I admitted.
“Yeah, true. Well that’s the origin of it I think, the stigma, because everyone always drew the line at getting fucked in the ass, like that was when you did something wrong.” It was an interesting statement to hear, because I’d imagined anal sex and fellatio with a male partner would launch one into the modern “homosexual” category in precisely the same way. But then, I thought, I knew a gay boy or two who got plenty of play in his frat house under the presumption that getting blown (and sometimes moving on from there) didn’t make one gay.
I continued, “telling ourselves the same thing for long enough tends to make it true.” Indeed, everyone drew the line at getting fucked. Whether in the ass or elsewhere was irrelevant. With two women, though, there are circumstances where both parties can be equally active at once. The Romans didn’t even know what to call that (just how to draw it), so didn’t bother calling it anything. Two thousand years later society still defines women by passivity. And that conclusion was inherent in Ben’s assertion, I thought. “If you could get fucked, you were a woman, right?” I asked.
He just looked at me uncomfortably.
“You can say it. I know you’re thinking it.”
“That is sort of the thing about it. It stigmatizes you because it makes you a woman.”
“Oh honey… preaching to the choir. Imagine actually being that gender. Imagine being the group that falls naturally to the passive in societies organized around fighting wars – the societies that have dominated this planet for millennia, I suppose for as long as warlike cultures have been replacing peaceful ones – so, for most of human history. So sad that peaceful personalities are evolutionary losers on that macro level.” Evolution, like Roman society, was a societal explanation that gained significant favor upon my intoxication.
I rambled on. “But, there you have it, yes, it makes you a woman. My point is just, so what? Yes, for millennia people have said women are somehow lesser, and both of us can see the reasons why they would, because why would men write rules and norms and histories that elevated the other sex, having obtained societal power through physical strength? Social power means not only political power, but the power to define social norms, so when men have all the social power, why would they set those norms according to anything but the male? Of course women don’t play as well when all the games are made up, ruled off, and officiated by men! I think a part of people, or at least of you, knows, from experience, that women are in every instance as capable as men of doing anything men do, though I will give you that on the whole men are physically more powerful. But, some women are more physically powerful than some men, few though they may be. In the face of lesser physical power, though, somehow, people ignore the talents of women. Women are infinitely more communicative, organized,” I was vaguely aware that I’d begun to rant, “although some men are communicativ
e too, and perhaps some equally small number of men are as good at absorbing and remitting the environment around them as most women generally are. I will say, however, that I don’t notice near-psychic or psychic ability in men, generally, like I do in women.”
“Well of course both sides would have their talents.”
“Right, of course, as every person is talented at something where other people are not. But the boy talents somehow got tagged with this higher value. Men can do some things well that women usually can’t, women can do some things well men usually can’t, there are some exceptions, of course. Seeing equal merits in the genders, in all people, but viewed from a female perspective, I prefer the female talents. I’d rather be able to read through a poker face than lift a heavy object. Fuck, I would really rather someone else handle the heavy lifting as a general matter. I also credit my lie-detection abilities to my gender, however improperly.”
“You know when people are lying?”
“Often, I’m sure not always. Don’t you know every once in a while – like, don’t you find people obvious sometimes?” He nodded, and I continued. “I have a very strong feeling one way or another based on the way people look, the color in their faces, the tone they use when they speak, the pulse on their necks, about whether they’re lying. But how could I know how my lie-detection ability compares to the lie-detection abilities of the people around me?”
“Well, to be clear, all men are liars. You can’t trust anything they say.”
I was prepared to believe that.
“Ben?” At the silky voice we both turned, and Ben got up to give a hug, while I sat in awkward, stunned silence.
She was dressed simply – a silky black top to match the silky voice and silky black hair, and somehow the greenish eyes popped forth, pools of Caribbean lit through the darkness. It was brighter here than it had been at Trigger when I flubbed my approach, but her eyes lit in precisely the same way, and the pulse came again.
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