SEVEN
LIFE LESSONS FOR THE LEWD AND LASCIVIOUS
Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
—Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (1949)
Modern cruise ships are floating metropolises with enough activities to keep a twenty-first-century kid with a Red Bull addiction and attention deficit disorder busy forever. But in the first half of the seventeenth century, when a motley crew of British expatriates outgrew their welcome with the Church of England and decided to colonize America, being an émigré on one of those more austere, rat-infested transport vessels—and stuck with a bunch of Puritans for fellow travelers, no less—was dreadfully dull. Imagine what it must have been like as a teenage boy aboard the Talbot, for instance, which set sail from the Isle of Wight in March 1629 bound for the newly founded Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (This was long before the witches arrived, so aside from rumors of folks having sex with pigs, which was nothing new, really, it was still the promised land over there.) As an adolescent male, you’re basically an ambulant sperm factory with an incompetent foreman, but somehow or another you’ll have to get through months on this leaky, oversize bathtub with only psalms and daily gum checks for scurvy to pass the time and keep you from sinning. And that’s easier said than done.
We know from the records that there were at least five such boys in the belly of the Talbot on that journey to the New World, because they’re the main players in a landmark event in early American history. It’s not a tale you’ll find in any public-school textbook, but it belongs in there every bit as much as that of Pocahontas and John Smith (and there’s probably more truth to it, too). When the Talbot finally arrived along with the rest of the “Higginson Fleet” on the banks of Salem the morning of June 19, the most urgent order of business for the fleet master, the Reverend Francis Higginson, was to deal with these “five beastly Sodomiticall boyes [who’d] confessed their wickedness not to be named” while aboard the ship. They weren’t the first seafarers to while away the long hours this way, nor, certainly, would they be the last British schoolboys to do so, but these lustful teenagers were the first recorded sodomites ever to set foot on what would eventually be U.S. soil. (That’s only the written history, of course. There’s no doubt some randy Native Americans beat them to the homosexual punch eons before.) Their feet wouldn’t be planted on this side of the Atlantic for long, however. The details of how it all came to light aren’t clear, but we do know that once the Massachusetts authorities learned of the boys’ gay orgies aboard the Talbot, they were so horrified that they shoved the teens right back onto the ship and returned them to England, along with a message to King Charles that since the unmentionable crimes occurred on the high seas, technically these “beastly” lads should be dealt with at their point of origin.
I was born some 345 years, 10 months, and 17 days after the Talbot first came ashore at Salem, just a few hundred miles south in Nowhere, New Jersey. It’s not entirely clear if I was literally born gay—it’s not as if any of us are rushed into neonatal plethysmography straight out of our moms’ vaginas—but whether I was queer from conception or arrived with a brain genetically predisposed to getting stamped with an irrevocable orientation to penises during my first few years in America, our country’s initial planks of religious scaffolding had by then grown into a fortress of self-righteousness. Many Europeans like to point out that Americans have a “complex” about sex, but remember, if you go back far enough, we’re European. It’s just that our earliest settlers were among Europe’s biggest prudes. Fortunately, the antigay sermons had eased up slightly by 1975. Yet in many ways, I slipped out of fetal solitude that year and into a society playing the same old broken record of thou-shalt-nots that Higginson and company had imported from an overly ecclesiastical Britain in 1629. After all, they might have sent that first wave of sodomites back to England, but the Puritans already setting up shop in the colonies carried all the necessary ingredients for deviant sexuality. And that was enough to keep the pitchforks sharp and the stakes burning for at least four centuries to come.
* * *
America has long had its issues with sex, but few modern countries haven’t. One doesn’t typically think of “gay Paris” in the 1920s, for example, as being a hotbed of oppression for homosexuals. And it wasn’t, if by that you mean the sort of blind hatred toward gays and lesbians seen in other parts of the world (Uganda comes to mind today, with its backward “Kill the Gays” bill on the table recently). But even in cosmopolitan Paris, homosexuals were specimens before they were human beings. If you were a gay man looking for a state-of-the-art solution to your “condition” of sexual inversion, then Paris in the early twentieth century was the place to be. There you’d find doctors singing the praises of a promising new experimental treatment in which your testicles would be replaced with those from the cadaver of a hypersexual straight man. It didn’t work, by the way, and the straight French convicts implanted with their recycled testicles didn’t turn flamboyantly gay either. Luckily, however, they all got human gonads. Over in Spain around this same time, a few renegade doctors were busy grafting monkey testicles onto their gay male patients.* Even more bizarre, they were grafting just a solitary monkey testicle somewhere on the man’s body. Rather curiously, the records don’t say where on his body it went, exactly. “What in the world is that?” I can imagine one of these men hearing while undressing before a new boyfriend years later. “This lump on my back? Oh, it’s nothing really, just one of those monkey balls from when I was young and stupid.”
We now know that these physicians who viewed homosexuality as an endocrine problem were barking up the wrong tree. But at least their approach shows a shift toward scientific thinking about gays and lesbians. That thinking was pretty shaky and obviously inhumane, but nonetheless it was probably an improvement on the long-standing superstition and fear hovering over the subject of sodomites. Not everyone, of course, embraced rationalism; even today, many of us are stuck in the puritanical mud of 1629. But the opportunity to pull oneself out of the residue of such fire-and-brimstone reasoning is available to anyone wishing to reach out and grab hold of the best science of the day. Science won’t tell you what’s moral and what’s not. But by standing up on your own two feet on the terra firma of reality instead of remaining up to your eyeballs in the swamp of dogma, you’ll get a much better lay of the land for navigating the moral landscape. And if you head one day in the wrong emotional direction, you’ll know that more than likely, it’s just the gunk from an overly religious past clogging the inner workings of your moral compass, steering you away from “against what is right.”
A purely scientific approach to sex, however, especially one that trades exclusively in the language of the “natural” and the “normal”—and one in which the word “harm” either never appears or is never properly defined—can send us scampering off to a this-worldly Hell as easily as a religious approach. We’ve seen, for instance, some of the unintended consequences of treating sexual deviance from a purely medical perspective, especially how the practice of pathologizing minorities has in many ways done more damage than good (both to the minorities and to the rest of us). Just look at all those men who went to their graves in Paris with someone else’s family jewels sewn into their scrotums. As we learned in the first chapter, once researchers began to understand erotic orientations to be lifelong patterns of attraction, human beings became distinguishable from one another not just on the basis of, say, skin color, nationality, and social status but also on the basis of their main turn-ons. For most people, this new concept of “orientation” in the latter half of the nineteenth century was an inconsequential development. But it was a change that would strike fear in the hearts of many others forevermore; after all, with experts now separating the “normal” people from the sex deviants, getting exposed as one of those people came with all sorts of problems. It wasn’t just a medical diagnosis; it was a social sentence. As a consequence, modern societies became giant breeding grounds for a whole new oeuvre of shame- and anxiety-related psychiatric disorders. From that point on, being a human being with whatever erotic profile (or profiles) your society happened to hate the most would be like living permanently in Middle America as a Communist during the McCarthy era. Only in this situation, you couldn’t just tear up your membership card to your socially inappropriate club if the stress got to be too much; your membership card was your brain.
If you were one of those homosexual specimens trying to avoid notice back in Paris, on your trail would be investigators such as Professor Charles Samson Féré. This no-nonsense heterosexual was a physician who’d been inspired by Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion. While his colleagues were busy swapping testicles in labs along the Seine, Féré set out to develop a fail-safe method for detecting gays and lesbians who were concealing their homoerotic tastes. Kurt Freund wasn’t even a twinkle in his mother’s eye and that wacky erection-detection machine of his just some state-of-the-art piece of equipment for the faraway Jetsonian future. So all that Féré could do to find out who was gay and who wasn’t, really, was try to work out the physical, behavioral, and psychological secrets of queers. In his Scientific and Esoteric Studies in Sexual Degeneration in Mankind and in Animals, the author shares the wisdom of this new gaydar, circa 1899. “Posture, demeanor, methods of walking,” wrote Féré, “all partake of inversion.” In a subgroup of gay men, he believed that certain bodily traits betrayed the patient’s homosexuality. For instance, “there have been noticed the development of fat in the mammary parts, the large size of the buttocks, and scarcity of [body] hair” (okay, fine, guilty as charged on two of those, but so is my straight brother). And just in case you were wondering, gay men’s penises look the same as straight men’s penises. “A doctor had [dealt with] more than 600 homosexuals,” Féré assures us, “without meeting with a single case of malformation of the genital organs among them.”* Burning the midnight oil on many a lonely online night, I have reached my own sample size of more than 600 gay men’s penises—hard to say precisely how many; I stopped counting once I hit a million back in ’02—and I can confirm Féré got this point right. (Well, more or less. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t seen some real doozies.) Don’t fret, though, ladies, because while you may not be able to tell they like other guys by inspecting their packages, Féré lets his readers in on a little secret about homosexual males, at least those of the more obviously inverted countenance: they find it hard to blow. Now I know what you’re thinking (“Obviously, he hasn’t met my friend Mark,” or some such), but it’s the “inability to learn how to whistle,” Féré clarified, “that is the mark of the effeminate man.”* Four words, Dr. Féré: Clay Aiken, whistling fiend.
Lesbians didn’t escape Féré’s investigations, either. Indeed, he was just as motivated to pull his gaydar dragnet over these more slippery sapphic properties. The doctor was convinced—in a rather Freudian sort of way—that lesbianism was caused by a girl’s obsession with her mother’s breasts in early childhood, and she became jealously enraged upon seeing her father paying special attention to, or even daring to touch, what she considered to be hers alone. This animosity toward her boob-poaching father, claimed Féré, was the impetus for a lesbian’s lifelong disgust for the opposite sex. Still, he figured there must be some biological predisposition for a girl reacting this way. “The sight which [shocks] her is such an everyday affair that one might almost say that there is no child who has not seen it … the acquisition of an instinctive perversion on account of it could only take place as a consequence of a special aptitude for such acquisition.” Nonetheless, for the rest of her days, the girl would now view men as mammary thieves, with her most intense passions directed at bosomy females.† The best gaydar tool for detecting closeted lesbians, therefore, is to watch carefully where their eyes go in the presence of a shapely female. If she stares at the woman’s voluptuous chest, then you can be certain her jig is up.
Most of his thinking about gay men and lesbians, as you can see, was just plain silly, but Féré also spread some pretty pernicious stereotypes about the moral character of homosexuals. Or rather, their lack of any such character, in his view. “It should be remembered,” he admonished his readers, “that inverts have a tendency to lying, are vain, garrulous, and indiscreet. Some pay no attention to the dress or even the cleanliness of those whom they are on the lookout for. The most squalid creatures do not repel them.” Oh, come on, with that last point. We’re not all Lady Gaga fans, for heaven’s sake. In any event, Féré’s words may read to us today like a passage from the Westboro Baptist Church’s monthly newsletter, but bear in mind, this is from one of the most respected physicians and scholars of his day. And in the history of our species, that wasn’t so long ago. Even the gay-friendly Havelock Ellis hailed Féré’s book (which was published only two years after his own Sexual Inversion appeared in English-language bookstores) as “the greatest work on the sexual instinct written in French.” (This leads me to believe that Ellis’s French wasn’t very good.)
Féré also waved his finger in disapproval at perverts of other species, regaling his readers with shameless tales of masochistic stallions, a donkey with a passion for zebras, inverted hens, masturbating weasels, and even pederastic insects. There’s no question that other animals sometimes engage in sex practices that are unusual within the context of the standard mating behaviors of their own species. Humans aren’t the only sex deviants in the animal kingdom. But we are the only ones to stigmatize each other as disgusting perverts. To understand why we’re so unique as a species in this unfortunate way, why so many intelligent people have fought with each other for so long over the very types of issues we’ve seen during the course of this book, we’ll need to rewind the clock far beyond any recorded history, all the way back, in fact, to the time when we Homo sapiens became the insufferably judgmental hominids that we are. In doing so, we may be able to finally comprehend this existential sexual mess that we’ve come to find ourselves in—and why Féré’s penchant for stereotyping sexual minorities is something we still haven’t shaken.
* * *
As a species of primate, we are principally set apart from other animals by our highly developed social cognition. Like a bat’s radar system, which enables it to navigate through a dark cave or to find a crunchy insect to snack on, or like an elephant’s trunk that allows it to do everything from snorkeling under water to nudging the “little” ones along on a family outing, our species’s most distinctive adaptation is our ability to empathize—to think about what’s going on in another mind. It’s intuitive, it’s innate, and basically we can’t help it: we’re constantly trying to get into the heads of others.*
In technical terms, this adaptation is a social cognitive mechanism known as “theory of mind.”† The researchers who coined this term in the late 1970s, the psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff, did so to refer to the fact that minds are, by definition, purely theoretical. A neurosurgeon in the middle of an operation isn’t actually looking at a mind on the table; he’s looking at an organ that produces mental states in its owner. If we were to pore over some batch of fMRI results or recordings from an EEG, the images we’d have before us come from “brain-imaging” devices, not “mind-imaging” devices. That’s to say, regardless of what some eccentric characters out there may try to tell you—or rather to sell you—we can’t literally see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or otherwise directly perceive a thought.* Instead, we can only theorize about other people’s mental states (hence, “theory of mind”). So whether you’re a cognitive neuroscientist in a lab deciphering blood-flow changes in an epileptic’s brain or just a guy on a busy sidewalk trying to make sense of a street vendor’s perplexing behavior, you’re still only theorizing about a mind. Other minds do exist; it’s just that, as with gravity, we can only infer that they’re present on the basis of what we directly perceive through our own sensory organs.†
Now, just because we come with this theory of mind system factory installed doesn’t mean that the specific theories it generates concerning what’s going on in someone else’s head are always correct. Since we can never know everything about a person’s private mental life, more often than not we only get it partially right. And a lot of times, we get it flat-out wrong. Imagine, for instance, that you’re riding on a crowded subway. You’re somewhat oblivious to your surroundings given that you’re busy texting and wearing headphones (perhaps you’re even whistling away to your favorite song, assuming you’re not an effeminate gay male). Seemingly out of the blue, the guy across the aisle—a real bedraggled sort, probably headed to the homeless shelter, you told yourself when he got on a few stations ago—suddenly lunges aggressively at that well-dressed businessman with the charming smile and salt-and-pepper hair whom you also noticed before. With all the chaos (people scrambling to get away, disheveled newspapers sailing from laps, shrieks and cries) you’re not going to pull out your pen and legal notepad from your bag and calmly sketch out a theory about what in the hell is going on; instead, your evolved theory of mind system has automatically, effortlessly kicked into gear. So, tell me, why does the angry unshaven man with the flies circling around him have his hands around this other gentleman’s neck?
If you’re like most of us, your knee-jerk assessment is that the assailant is clearly mentally unstable. But wait, what’s this? A distraught woman clutching her teenage daughter is shouting obscenities at the handsome assaulted executive (actually, he’s a little less handsome now with that broken nose of his). She’s accusing him of—and you can hardly make it out with all the commotion—touching the girl while her back was turned. Ah, so that’s it. The businessman wasn’t so innocent at all, it seems; he’s a practicing frotteurist. With that informative update, watch as your theory of mind transforms the “filthy, disturbed assailant” into a “down-on-his-luck hero” before your very eyes. He may not be a knight in shining armor so much as one in rags of stale urine, but he’s one of the good guys now to you regardless.
The evolution of theory of mind was a huge boon for our ancestors. The more information they had about what was happening on the flip side of another’s skull (his intentions, his desires, his emotions, his knowledge, his beliefs, and so on), the better our ancestors’ “guesses” about why the other person behaved as he had and, even more important, what he was going to do next. (As my graduate adviser liked to say years ago, “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”) Being able to explain and anticipate actions like this was a game changer for a highly social species like ours. And when it comes to how this uniquely human adaptation affected our sex lives, the consequences of being able to think about what others think were massive indeed.
* * *
Consider what your average sexual encounter would look like in the absence of a theory of mind. Here’s the completely “mind-blind” straight male’s perspective, for instance, on entering an everyday domestic bedroom scene: A large object of a uniform pallor, pointy caps at the ends of two compact swellings, is twisting about on the sheets. A pair of thin stalks that balanced the object when it was upright have now drawn apart to reveal the soft pink interior of a woolly black diamond. Something red has poked through a different opening up top; it appears to be a papillate organism moving back and forth through a ragged white gate. Meanwhile, a set of restless blue marbles has settled in place above, and if one looks closely, inside these marbles are black dots exhaling like small resting ravens.
This is nothing at all like what husbands see when they stumble happily upon their ready-to-go wives in bed (at least, I hope it’s not). But without a theory of mind that enables them to perceive the “object” as a conscious human being like them, it’s indeed, horrifyingly enough, something like how a heterosexual man would be processing this sensual scene. Although the most common assumption is that seeing people in the buff or wearing revealing clothing serves to “objectify” them in our minds, the real effect on our social perceptions of seeing a bounty of flesh is quite to the contrary. Or, as it usually is with science, it’s a little more complicated than that. In 2011, the psychologist Kurt Gray investigated what it is, exactly, that we see in other people when they’re not wearing their clothes. In one of several such experiments, Gray and his colleagues had 527 participants, men and women with an average age of thirty-one, take a good long look at photographs of attractive models (also of both sexes). Participants were asked to rate each model on his or her general psychological competencies: “Compared to the average person, how much is this person capable of feeling joy? of planning? of self-control? of feeling pain?” and so on. The models were either completely nude or fully clothed, which was the only difference between them—pose, lighting, and facial expressions were otherwise identical.* Although the nude models were judged to be less capable of what you might call “intelligent thought” (basically, anything involving executive functioning) than the clothed models, they were judged to have a far greater capacity for experiencing physiological or emotional types of mental states (such as pain, hunger, pleasure, fear, desire, rage, and joy). “The idea that [nudity] can lead to both decreased and increased mind stands in contrast to the term ‘objectification,’” Gray explains. “Focusing on the body does not lead to de-mentalization but to a redistribution of mind.” The effect was even more dramatic when the naked models were shown in sexual poses similar to that of the “objectified” wife in our scintillating boudoir episode (you remember her, the one with the “woolly black diamond” for a vagina and the “papillate organism” for a tongue?).
Such a social cognitive distortion, in which the image of another’s abundant flesh blurs his or her intellect in our mind while sharpening our focus on his or her naked feelings, translates to our actual sexual behaviors toward this other person as well. We’re not usually preoccupied with our partners’ math skills or flair for languages as we’re screwing (or being screwed by) them. But we’re highly attuned to what they’re experiencing at a more sensory and emotional level. Far from objectifying our sex partners as slabs of meat, we’re very much aware of the pleasure or pain that we’re causing them. Even a sexual sadist doesn’t view other people as objects. In fact, it’s the other way around altogether. The sadist is able to derive pleasure only through the lens of his theory of mind, in this case by perceiving a mind capable of experiencing the pain he inflicts. His sadistic arousal is inflamed by the very “redistribution” of mind described by Gray; with his erotic target now stripped of any significant cognitive functions, what he sees before him is a tingling, hypersensitive, wide-eyed figure whose entire axis shifts with every cruel touch he makes. For those of us with slightly less frightening sex lives, the underlying mechanism is the same; it’s just that our arousal is titillated by the perceived pleasure we’re inducing in others and not by their pain.
In fact, for a loving couple to be able to synchronize their sexual movements so expertly that their orgasms can be delayed for an hour or more, with one member releasing his or her own restrained passion so that it erupts in tandem with that of the other, requires very advanced social cognition. This isn’t going to be our experience with every erotic encounter we have (really, who has the time), but with some basic practice under our belts, or at least some penis-numbing prophylactics, it’s within erotic reach of most of us. Even our three-minute coital average is impressive when compared with the mad fifteen-second gnashing of genitals in our closest primate relatives. Whether we’ve mastered the Kama Sutra or prefer a quick splash in the gutters on Lovers’ Lane, human sex is almost always an elaborate dancing of loins, an intersubjective ballet of lust. Unfortunately, we can still never really “become one” through even perfect climactic timing. Don’t forget, after all, our sex partner’s mind is there in theory only, an especially sad solipsistic fact that led the poet William Butler Yeats to write so ruefully of the “perpetual virginity of the soul.”
* * *
Theory of mind might not allow us to literally penetrate another person’s subjective existence (maybe it’s for the better anyway—it sounds like something that would take months to clean from the walls), but it does animate that person in a way that shows us such a presence dwells beneath the skin. Once this social cognitive system evolved, it became clear that others were psychological entities like us, with sexual desires of their own. More important, we could see that those desires weren’t always so neatly aligned with ours. The most positive sexual consequence of this psychological innovation is that it enabled us to conceptualize the mental construct of “consent.” It’s a bit nonsensical, for instance, to use terms such as “rape” or “sexual coercion” to refer to behaviors in other species in which a male copulates with a female struggling to free herself, and there are, indeed, many species in which such a pattern is common. The male simply doesn’t have the evolved social cognitive equipment allowing it to think of the psychological harm that it’s causing to the sex “object.” Imagine a monkey in the act of thrusting saying to itself, “You know, actually, wait, I wonder if she’s comfortable with me sticking my penis inside her like this?” By contrast, men who violate females (or other males) this way are indeed rapists. Assuming the other person is giving clear signals (the word “no” is usually a pretty good one), a rapist’s theory of mind allows him to detect the mental state of unwillingness, and yet he continues with the act anyway. This unique ability to ascertain the other individual’s psychological consent was the cognitive key needed for unlocking any coherent form of sexual morality in our species. While human societies are far more different in their attitudes toward sex than they are similar, and the form and degree of punishment for sexual transgressions vary enormously, no known culture on this earth has ever smiled upon rape among its own citizens.
Being able to reason about another person’s thoughts also brought with it a strange, and sometimes disconcerting, mental effect in our species: the feeling of sexual shame. By using our theory of mind to take the mental perspective of someone else, we were able to see ourselves as he or she saw us. That could be a rather unflattering sight when it comes to sex. Just as their attention could turn to someone else’s erotic motives, our ancestors became cognizant of the fact that another person could speculate on their desires. This led to unspoken rituals of sexual deception. It can get quite Machiavellian, but in one of its simplest forms, if you’ve ever had a crush on someone whom you didn’t want to know about it and so you deliberately hid those fire-in-your-pants feelings, you’ve engaged in such theory-of-mind-driven deception.
Related to this is another unpleasant reality: We may desperately want to be seen as sexually desirable to someone else, since that’s how we feel about the particular person, but unfortunately we’re just not his or her type. (Trust me, few know unrequited love better than a gay man.) Yet as the trillion-dollar cosmetics industry attests, that definitely doesn’t stop us from trying. On the other hand, being intensely desired by someone toward whom we feel no attraction at all can also be disconcerting. It’s not merely finding out that someone you don’t really fancy has a harmless crush on you. That may be. But there’s also a distinctively unpleasant phenomenology (or the what-it-feels-like sense) that comes from knowing that your body is inducing an intense degree of sexual arousal in someone you’d actually prefer it didn’t. This is precisely the state of mind that many feminist writers are referring to when they use the word “objectification,” or when they define porn—aptly so—as the “articulation of the male gaze.” Here’s how the author Angela Carter describes this peculiar feeling of being someone else’s erotic target in her short story “The Bloody Chamber” (which is the one for you if you’re a man who’d like to know what it feels like to be a woman but you’re not so committed as to invest in a whole new wardrobe):
I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. [The effect] was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me … the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire.
“There are some eyes,” writes Carter, “that can eat you.” Of course, a person’s sexual subjectivity, as we’ve seen throughout, complicates these matters even more. After all, an exhibitionist revels in this very notion of being consumed by others’ eyes. (And in fact Carter’s own empowered female characters often find their loins stirring unexpectedly at the thought of their trembling “horseflesh” being held and rotated in a man’s carnivorous mind.)
Beyond our own private liaisons, our evolved theory of mind system also enables us to morally evaluate (as we’ve been doing all along in this book) those whose sexual natures differ so drastically from our own. And when this system isn’t held in check by scientific facts, our impulsive judgments of these erotic outliers can be heinously harsh. Much of the trouble in this area stems from the fundamentally egocentric nature of our social cognition. I can no more reliably take the perspective of a middle-aged straight man aroused by the sight of a woman’s genitalia, for example, than I can that of a male hamadryas baboon getting worked up over the amorphous, rainbow-colored swelling on the calloused rear of his female lover. (I mean that, for better or worse. If it’s not perfectly apparent to you already, I’m as gay as they come, a “Kinsey 6,” you might say.) Yes, understanding reproductive biology enables me to think logically and mechanically about such heterosexual cues. But metaphorically speaking, having to slip into either of these male primates’ skins isn’t the most pleasant form of virtual reality for my gay human brain. And as we saw earlier, when we’re blue around the gills, our moral reasoning abilities aren’t exactly at their sharpest.
Let’s flip this example around and see what happens when a completely heterosexual man (a “Kinsey 0” on the zero-to-six scale) is told to imagine having sex with another man. In a 1979 study by the psychologists Donald Mosher and Kevin O’Grady, straight college guys were shown clips from gay male porn and instructed to identify with one of the actors in the film: “[Experience] the emotions that you would have if you were, indeed, engaging in the sexual behavior.” The result, as you’d guess, was disgust, anger, shame, contempt, and greater agreement to such eloquent survey items as “I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would fuck a man in the ass when you could have better sex with a woman”; “You can’t walk into a men’s john these days without some guy looking at your cock or showing his hard-on”; “I’d rather be dead than queer”; and “You can tell a pansy by the flowers and butterflies that he wears.”*
Fortunately for both fashion and gay rights, the 1970s were laid to rest under an orange-and-brown linoleum floor somewhere decades ago. But although their exact contents may be different, the brains of college students today work pretty much the same as the brains of those in 1979, just as their brains worked the same way as those of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who lived millennia before them. Natural selection is an incredibly sluggish business and doesn’t move at anywhere near the lightning pace at which human knowledge accumulates. This is a vital point in the context of this discussion, because until our species evolves a totally new kind of brain, any moral progress made toward the subject of sexual diversity hinges solely on the use of our acquired knowledge to defuse our crueler, instinctive biases.
In the modern world, which is a land where entire lives are tidily reduced to a letter on a string of ciphers (“LGBTQ” and whatever else gets thrown onto such messy sandwiches of community acronyms), it has become more imperative than ever for us to resolve this terrible tug-of-war between our innate judgments and our critical-thinking skills. With human beings carved up into so many sexual “types” (and subtypes), negative stereotypes will spread over them like some invidious algae. If these continue to grow for too long without anyone putting a stop to them, it will become all but impossible for us to make out the actual human being—the individual person—beneath. In fact, that’s exactly how it all evolved to work. Negative stereotypes develop immunity to moral logic because they have an undeniable adaptive currency. Our brains systematically collect and aggregate all the negative information they can about the most salient categories of people in our social environments. Since we can never meet every member of every category, the unpleasant tidbits gathered by our brains come from a very limited sample only. Yet that doesn’t keep these prejudiced organs of ours from automatically and unconsciously—and often against our own better thinking—ascribing these undesirable traits to everyone in that demographic.
Take our heroic homeless man back on the subway, for example. Which of the following was in fact the safer assumption? (And before you answer this, remind yourself how you were traveling at a high rate of speed beneath the surface of the earth in a confined vessel at the time, and so you couldn’t exactly run away to safety as the incident flared up.) Was it that the homeless man had psychiatric problems making him dangerously unpredictable, or that the silver fox in the thirty-five-hundred-dollar tailored suit must have done something nasty to provoke the attack? It’s wonderful, really, that your negative stereotype of homeless people as being mentally unstable was so fantastically wrong in this case, but your negative stereotype was still “right” in the amoral sense of leading you to err on the side of caution for your own selfish genetic interests. (You may be all winks and smiles with the chivalric transient now, but had that mother never screamed about her daughter, you’d still be diligently avoiding any eye contact with him.) As I mentioned briefly in the first chapter, this better-safe-than-sorry function of stereotyping helped our ancestors to make the best split-second decision possible with only limited social information to go on. But it also turned us into ready-made bigots. With our biased attributions made possible by our theory of mind, we simply expect the very worst in strangers.
By stereotyping individuals due to their sexuality—the “lesbian,” the “transvestite,” the “pedophile,” the “fetishist,” the “exhibitionist,” the “masochist,” and so on—we’ve lost the trees for the forest. The reason our knowledge of a person’s hidden sexual desires overshadows everything else we know about him or her becomes clear in the context of evolutionary theory. At their core, of course, adaptive behaviors are those that aid an individual’s reproduction, and so it’s hard to imagine having any more useful, or strategic, information about a person than the nature of his or her sexual desires. Aside from the fact that it tells you I’m not an adventurous person when it comes to Asian cuisine, for instance, I doubt it would interest you to know that I had a humdrum plate of chicken pad thai last night. But if I told you that after dinner I finally lost my heterosexual virginity to a stunning, and unusually patient, given the circumstances, Thai waitress in the restaurant lavatory, I suspect your ears would perk up a bit more. (And on that example, remember what your mother told you: “If it sounds too good to be true…” Unless I get a brain transplant, and therefore I cease to be me, I’m afraid this particular penis will never see the inside of a vagina.)
People have no control over their sexual orientation, but likewise we have no control over the fact that our brains evolved to pay special attention to and systematically accrue information about other people’s sexuality. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, those details are high-dollar knowledge. So let me come clean. The truth is that the “Thai waitress” from last night was in fact a married man sitting with his wife at the next table over. After he made eyes at me for the better part of an hour, we met in the restroom and exchanged a brief but passionate moment in one of the toilet stalls. Oh, I’m still pulling your leg. But you see how sex stirs the social brain. Flitting quickly through your head a moment ago were probably incoherent thoughts such as “Hold on, did the man’s wife know what he was doing?” and “Where was Juan during all this?” The critical takeaway here is that while we can’t undo natural selection and reengineer human social cognition so that we’ve no interest in other people’s sexual desires and behaviors, we have considerably more control over what we do with that information once it’s been revealed to us and how we treat a vulnerably “exposed” person as the result of our knowing. Like fighting alcoholism, the first step in overcoming our sexual bigotry is recognizing that we’re sexual bigots.
* * *
In all of the many case studies I’ve read while working on this book, one that stands out as especially moving is an autobiographical account from a 1957 issue of Psychiatric Quarterly. Written under the pseudonym “Boots” (fitting, given that the man was a rubber boot fetishist, men’s and boys’ were his thing), this letter to the editor of that journal is an eloquent description of a man’s erotic fascination with rubber boots and the perils of having to hide this “devil of a torment” from others throughout his life.* But Boots’s tale is also a celebratory ode to the transformative power of human friendship. The fetishistic author realized that if he were ever to bring his beloved boots out of the closet, as it were, from that point on society would see him as no more than a “weird” pervert. The prospect of forever losing his more nuanced, more positive social identity by letting others know of his unusual sexual desires had long been a source of great unease to him. Boots was quite bright, and whether or not anyone else could see it, he knew there was a lot more to him than the fact that his lovers were born on a production line in Boise. “It is possible for fetishists to be ‘raving mad’ about their fetishes,” he writes, “but outside of an irresistible, compelling obsession for them, be in all other respects as intelligent and sane as the president of the United States” (this was of course years before George W. Bush came around to muddy that claim, but you get Boots’s point). In any event, it seems that while Boots was out searching for used boots one day (he did so under the guise of a hobbyist or scrap-rubber trader), he happened to make a new friend—a “true friend,” he stresses repeatedly. “Normal men cannot comprehend, or fully understand, any odd, unusual feelings of this sort that are entirely foreign to their own natures … However, some persons do exist who possess the rare gift of profound understanding when it comes to sensing the secret sorrows that shroud the lives of many folks.” Boots then proceeds to dedicate page after page to the virtues of this sympathetic new compadre of his, an unnamed figure whom he describes as a “normal, married heterosexual person with an independent business of his own”:
This friend is one who fully fits the best description of a true friend that I have ever come across: “A true friend is one who knows ALL ABOUT US, but still remains our friend.” With a sense of humility, knowing that each man has a weakness of some kind, he accepted the truth of my strange and haunting obsession … he knew I was in many other ways not too greatly different from many other men. My friend did not add to the weight of “my secret cross” by shunning me. He provides my ailment with palliatives to ease my “fetishistic hunger” whenever necessary.
And by this, Boots means that not only was his “true friend” a nice guy and a good listener but he even went out of his way to supply him with the objects he desired most:
Knowing that these cast-off articles of footwear are a peculiar treasure of mine, he collects all he can obtain to give to me as sentimental keepsakes that symbolize my tragic and unreturned love of man for man … [He] does not condemn, ridicule or scorn. My friend is not a psychiatrist, but he has done more to contribute to my happiness and peace of mind than any psychiatrist trying to chase elusive bats out of the belfry possibly could. It is a “peaceful co-existence” between two persons whose sexual emotions are as different as night is from day.
Charles Dickens wasn’t a homosexual boot fetishist (at least as far as we know), but he did pen that immemorial line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I think the same can be said for where we are today as a society when it comes to sex and sexuality. In fact, we’re not altogether unlike the primmer characters in A Tale of Two Cities, many of whom discover that their ethical sensibilities and cherished traditions are being strained or upended altogether by the French Revolution. Our own “Enlightenment” is the unprecedented pace at which the science of human sexuality is now advancing, and with it that gathering storm of data showing that deviance is more status quo than any of us imagined. Like the French monarchy, our sexual morality was built on the unsteady grounds of myths and customs, which can clearly no longer sustain it under the deluge of facts now raining down. There’s no question that we’re presently standing at a moral crossroads and getting soaking wet from anger and confusion in the process; the question, rather, is where to go from here. And we could use a nice solid pair of boots of our own these days to keep from slipping as we step forward. (By the way, if you want to spend some private time with them out in the woods first, have at it, I say.)
Now, if we go in the direction of those still mourning the loss of the “good old days,” which, as we’ve seen, weren’t so good at all for the erotic outliers among us, then we’d be continuing to harm others with our closed minds, fostering their “personal distress,” while heading knowingly into the terminal sunset of an outdated worldview. Going in the other direction may seem obvious enough, but it’s a far rockier road than it appears at first glance, which is precisely why we’ve been idling before it for so long. It’s not just the road less traveled; it’s the road never traveled. Since no society has ever ventured this way before, doing so requires us to lay brand-new tracks for a sturdier framework of sexual ethics and morality, one that those following in our footsteps can trust never to give way beneath them or fall crashing down upon their fragile heads.
To avoid the type of decay that’s rotted away the entirety of that other man-made path, our new value system would need to be constructed of the brick and mortar of established scientific facts, its bedrock being the incontrovertible truth that sexual orientations are never chosen. It must also have walls of iron to protect us from the howling winds sure to arrive as we move along, walls forged by the knowledge that there is no evil but that which comes from thinking there is so. To guide us forward, we must emblazon every star in the sky with the reminder that a lustful thought is not an immoral act. And our handrails would have to be painstakingly carved from the logic that in the absence of demonstrable harm the inherent subjectivity of sex makes it a matter of private governance. Finally, and most imposing of all, we’d each have to promise to walk this brave new path completely naked from here to eternity, removing this weighty plumage of sexual normalcy and strutting, proudly, our more deviant sexual selves.
You go first.