$16.95
ISBN 1894498070
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(02/25/04)
The hardest thing is honesty. Telling others, especially others we desire, what they want to hear is so tempting. Telling ourselves what we want to hear is what keeps us sane. Our bravest crusade is to assault our own walls, breach our own defenses, observe ourselves without the benefit of corrective lenses.
Author and editor Greg Wharton is best known for his fiction anthologies exploring the erotic appeal of meat, ghosts, feet, obsession, and danger. In The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, he displays equally impeccable taste selecting personal sexual essays. Wharton's thirteen gay / bisexual / transgendered male contributors' confessional revelations explore the relationship between queer desire and queer identity -- what turns them on versus what makes them tick -- with defiance, anger, humor, nostalgia, regret, and satisfaction, but always with honesty. The courage that these merciless self-examinations must have required gives them a power and authority inspiring to any reader, regardless of gender or orientation.
Observing straight gender molds from the outside is one of Wharton's writers' most valuable accomplishments. "Queers are the gender educators of this world," notes Michael V. Smith in "Visibility." Smith, a Vancouver 'zine editor, nudist drag performer, and novelist, tells how the best part of coming out for him was the ability to trash gender stereotypes. He could "Use colorful adjectives. Be polite. Admit my fears in public. Be kind and sensitive...There's nothing stopping straight men from any of these things, except a cultural myth that men are one thing and women another."
Similarly, the authors examine queer male culture from the perspectives of the controversial subgroups on its margins: the interracial lovers, the open-relationshippers, the age-gapped, the risk-takers, the gender-dysphoric, all the oft-time receivers of horizontal hostility. In "There Is No Because: Some Thoughts on Interracial Dating," Marshall Moore, after admitting to incurable Southern-bred verbosity, nails it down in four words: "Attraction isn't a choice." He observes how interracial couples are subject to their own set of sexual expectations:
"As a very young, very slender, very blond and not very masculine white boy with a conservative-looking, older black boyfriend in a suit, I must be the one with my legs in the air. Whether it was true or not."
Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco's "In Difference" rages against banality -- "the ending of queer as perverse outcast and the beginning of queer as commodity...fully implicated in normalcy." He decries "wedlock modeled after the patently disastrous heterosexual contract" and combines vivid metaphor with startling observation in his deconstruction of queer sexuality's greatest controversy: "Discreetly, we feast on the exposed carnivorous flowers, a feast that dare not speak its name, unless the name is heterosexual, then 'barebacking' is simply called 'sex.'"
The longest essay, Michael Rowe's lyrical "My Life as a Girl," has the graceful style, the dramatic structure, the narrative drive of a superb short story. Rowe, an award-winning essayist, journalist, and horror aficionado, was born "two spirited:" "There was a little girl in my head, and she lived in a secret place behind my eyes." Deeply moving, engrossing, involving, Rowe takes you on an intimate voyage through his gender-dysphoric existence: schoolyard taunts, his "big sister" babysitter savior, male lovers, modeling, writing, wrestling with the option of physical modification, crisis, resolution. His poignant outsider-wanting-in observations illuminate the female gender traits disdained by both the ultra-macho seventies gay male testosterone backlash and by straight male culture, where: "It may be natural to fuck a girl, but God help you if you act like one, or wish you were one."
In tones ranging from scholarly to literary to casual, TLTDNSIN seasons its incisive discourse with enough graphic sex accounts, the practice behind the theory, to qualify in the erotica category. There's public sex, private sex, anonymous sex, relationship sex, quickies, and marathons. True to Wharton's stated goal of diversity, there's even monogamous sex.
Speaking of quickies, Felice Picano's "The Etiology and Lost Art of 'The 'Quickie'" springs from a two male/two female quartet's Birthday Club dinner tradition of relating their most spontaneous, outrageous, and briefest sexual encounters. Picano recounts being attacked in the NYC subway by a pair of identical-twin male "trouser-marauders," who expertly manipulate him to orgasm through his clothing, then vanish at the next stop. His wildest quickie? 4 AM on New Year's Eve in the middle of Tenth Avenue during a snowstorm!
Even Royston Tester's scholarly treatise "(very) Trying Monogamy" alternates rigorous analysis with sexual abandon:
"Quite effortlessly, as he pressed his lips harder against mine, he slipped his tongue into my mouth, and simultaneously his slender arrowdick into my ass. I've never forgotten it. His Andalucian bull's balls thwacking at my crack."
Rationalizing desire may seem as impossible as choosing attraction. But, queer or not, if you look into these luminous writers' mirrors with them, you won't ever view gender or sexuality quite the same way again.
