sexuality

The common mistake of the religious celibate has been to suppose that the highest spiritual life absolutely demands the renunciation of sexuality, as if the knowledge of God were an alternative to the knowledge of woman, or to any other form of experience.

What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is liveable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is unlivable for some.

Many things shaped my identity as a young boy: a strong selfworth (something that was instilled in all three Barrowman siblings by our parents), my immersion in theatre and music, and my DNA. I was born gay. It's not a choice I _ or anyone else who is gay _ made. If it were, why on earth would anyone choose to be part of a minority, part of a group that in so many cultures and countries, even in the twenty-first century, is regularly blasphemed, hounded and worse?

I refuse to believe all men are pigs and women competing whores.-ANASTASIA

...There's an -or- in -whore- because you always have a choice to respect your body and say no.

Sexuality is the only drive that is in itself hindered, perverted: simultaneously insufficient and excessive, with the excess as the form of appearance of the lack. On the one hand, sexuality is characterized by the universal capacity to provide the metaphorical meaning or innuendo of any activity or object__ny element, including the most abstract reflection can be experienced as __lluding to that_ (suffice it to recall the proverbial example of the adolescent who, in order to forget his sexual obsessions, takes refuge in pure mathematics and physics__hatever he does here again reminds him of __hat_: how much volume is needed to fill out an empty cylinder? How much energy is discharged when two bodies collide?_). The universal surplus__his capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience_is not the sign of preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outwards and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.

One thing I do know about intimacy is that there are certain natural laws which govern the sexual experience of two people, and that these laws cannot be budged any more than gravity can be negotiated with. To feel physically comfortable with someone else's body is not a decision you can make. It has very little to do with how two people think or act or talk or even look. The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of __ormality_. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud__ own views on __ormality_ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud__ work showed, scandalously, just how __lastic_ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual __orm_; but this is in no sense given by Nature.

Departing from Freud__ exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient__ musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as __rmor.

The idea of giving a man a rim job provoked the squeamishness I felt at thirteen when I accidentally stumbled upon my first porn, Women Who Love Big White Cocks. I was repulsed that a woman would put her mouth on a man__ penis. After all, that__ where he pees. I got older. I discovered my sexuality and on countless occasions, put my mouth where a boy peed. He put his mouth where I peed, put his fingers where I pooped, put where he peed where I pooped, and we swapped saliva the entire time. Men forgot that the female breasts that ignited their hard-ons fed them as infants. We didn__ realize that although the meaning changed, our __irty places_ remained the same.

In her view, there were threeoptions for a woman. If you were beautiful, you got married. If youwere ugly, you became a nun. If you were beautiful and stupid, orugly and dishonorable, you became a whore.

The separation of sexuality from procreation in Greek culture helps explain the terrible demographic decay that Greece would suffer during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.

...the controlling of the sex nature builds up a reservoir of strength, and it is this strength that opens the door to the Innermost.

Man often accords the sexual urge a merely biological significance and does not fully realize its true, existential significance - its link with existence. It is this link with the very existence of man and of the species Homo that gives the sexual urge its objective importance and meaning. This importance only emerges into consciousness when man is moved by love to take on himself the natural purpose of the sexual urge.

No one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: _there__ a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet." JG Ballard, 2004

I don't switch much, don't really want many people to fuck me, because there's a whole code, unwritten but no less rigid than if it were chiseled in stone, about how Tops Must be, how Butches Must Be, and it does not include taking off one's pants. It does not include admitting to one's own desires, only quietly serving the desires of others. It certainly does not include taking a break once in a while to inhabit some other gender, role, or sensibility, even for half a delightful, sweaty hour, in the company of someone who feels like a mirror of me rather than a complementary piece I can fit myself against.

The moral high ground proved to be one hell of an aphrodisiac...

Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)