sexuality

As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.

The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn__ publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan__ future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, __he poor homosexuals__hey have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.

Girls like me smiled politely and always did the right thing. Girls like me definitely didn't sneak away at night to do things that would crush their fathers. And if they did, girls like me knew how to keep it to themselves.

[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)

Our sexual fantasies are often redundant and intense, like many other ideas involving ourselves. Most people approach sexuality limited to the idea that they should imitate other people, art (e.g., romantic literature) or movies (e.g., pornography). In this way, vicarious events and even fictions become a point of reference that we can actually feel. We judge actual people in our real lives against fictional events and unrealistic concepts. As such, real lovers seem inferior as a result.

If there's a place you should be able to put yourself first, it's in your own sexual fantasies.

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ...

He says black, I say white and we do grey

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.

She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had one, two, three orgasms, one after another. She imagined everything she had never imagined before, and she gave herself to all that was most base and most pure.

She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.

Toward the end, a band that had a young fellow from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania__ remember on account of him saying it two or three times and laughing every time that he did__layed a song called 'All She Gets from the Iceman is Ice.' It made the grown folks, most of them anyway, howl laughing. I don__ think I ever seen Mama laugh so hard. When it was about over, the sheriff come up and made them stop playing it, but he was grinning, too, so I figured he was just making them stop as part of the show.

It is as though they simply cannot contemplate the notion of a short, slight man who dresses and moves like a popular (mis)conception of a homosexual being attractive to millions of women.

So it is in our HEART, not in our sexualness, that we human beings think and decide how to live - even if the decision is to indulge in venery of whatever sort. A man sees the complementarity of woman and man not through the eyes of lust but in his heart. Jacob's lust for Rachel distracted him from perceiving the virtue of Leah, a virtue to complement or complete his. It's in his heart, not through the lust of his eyes, that a man sees or learns to see the complementation of woman and man. If a man is 'homosexual' or has little lust toward attractive women, this is no obstacle to his perceiving woman as his complement or helper.

Shouldn't we at least be asking whether the transcending of venereal desire that marriage requires of a mostly or entirely 'heterosexual' man who marries for the sake of love, friendship, and raising a family isn't more or less the same as the transcendence required of a man whose venereal desire is 'oriented' mostly or entirely toward men but who restrains these drives, and who marries for the sake of love, friendship and raising a family? Of course, men with little venereal desire for women can't proceed towards marriage driven by such desire. For them, marriage must develop from friendship. But wouldn't it be better if all marriages developed from friendship?

So when a 'heterosexual' man learns to appreciate the noble woman of Proverbs 31, regardless of her looks, he is transcending his sexuality, not EXPRESSING it. Jacob labored fourteen years for Rachel 'beautiful in form and beautiful of face.' But Leah of the 'tender eyes' (Gen. 29:17) proved a much better and nobler wife. Perhaps a 'homosexual' man - a man whose venereal desires are focused more on men than on women - would not have been distracted by Rachel's looks and could have seen Leah's goodness and nobility from the beginning, as Jacob did not (29:30f). Biblically, the dwindling of such desire is not grounds for divorce (Mal. 2:14-16).

Love feeds on deception.

In my work, I see couples who no longer wait for an invitation into their partner's interiority, but instead demand admittance, as if they are entitled to unrestricted access into the private thoughts of their loved ones