In the Room the Bottoms Come and Go

I'm reading Jeffrey Escoffier's history of gay porn, Bigger than Life (Running Press, 2009), and it's a good, informative read, but things keep catching my attention. Like this, describing the filming of a famous early hardcore feature, Boys in the Sand:

There was no top, no bottom -- indeed those rigid distinctions had not yet evolved among gay men ... [98]

Then, a few lines down on the same page, about the same film and the same period:

An old friend was present when the casting was being discussed and said to Poole, "I've got the perfect person for you. He's blond, six feet tall, and handsome. He's got a nice dick, a beautiful ass, and he does everything."

"He does everything." This is a nod to the fact that there were tops and bottoms in those days, though the terminology was somewhat different. A real man was a penetrator only (what would now be called a total top), while a queer was penetrated. In fact, the usual line among orthodox post-colonial Foucauldians is that sexual versatility is a modern and probably cultural imperialist development, while the active/passive dichotomy is traditional, indigenous, and natural. Of course, just like today, the boundary between those categories was highly permeable. In Barry Reay's New York Hustlers, which I discussed here a couple of months ago, he describes a gay male milieu built on a rigid distinction between Queers and Trade, while admitting that occasionally Trade got into being penetrated by Queers, but it still didn't mean the penetrated Trade were closeted Queers, only that being "pedicated ... merely enlarged his sphere of enjoyment and did not make him ‘queer.’"

I've noticed myself that as a post-AIDS development, the "top" is a fairly unstable category, held together with spit and tissue paper. I've been informed by several self-identified tops that they refuse to be penetrated because they don't want to contract HIV. (I haven't been able to get out of them why they think other men allow these "tops" to penetrate them; I suspect the question is too threatening to entertain.) An identity built on fear is not a very reliable one; I suspect that at least some of these "tops" will get drunk from time to time and allow what they never allow, probably without a condom. You don't have to be an essentialist to believe that refusing to be penetrated for fear of HIV is not the same as genuinely not enjoying or wanting the experience -- just like refusing to have sex with other men for fear of Hell doesn't make you straight.

But I digress. Here's another passage that snagged me, this time a quotation from Edmund White's States of Desire.

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled -- or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? [quoted by Escoffier, 118]

One reason I didn't get around to visiting San Francisco until I was nearly 50 (and even then it was because a friend bought me a plane ticket -- otherwise I might never have made the trip) was precisely that I wasn't all that attracted by the "particular dreams" it represented. When I've visited gay neighborhoods closer to home I haven't felt their siren call, because I've never wanted to be surrounded only by other gay men. That was why I chose to be openly gay -- admittedly, in a relatively gay-friendly college town -- because being isolated from straight people was never my "particular dream." I wanted straights to make room for the gay people who already lived beside them, not to let them have a gay-free environment. Besides, when I saw the spaces that gay men constructed according to their own dreams, I realized that once again I was a misfit, and I wasn't going to try to assimilate.

The final quotation (for today, at least). From the New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1971, quoted on page 117:

What distinguishes San Francisco from any place else is the style with which porn is marketed, its practitioners' attitude towards it and the tolerance most square citizens display concerning the whole question. The basic assumption, it would seem ... is that a "mature adult" is entitled to get his kicks any way he can, provided decent citizens don't have to witness the process and nobody gets hurt.

What stuck to me in this one was "decent citizens." Of course, if there's one thing we have learned in the last forty years, it's that "decent citizens" always keep porn, sleaze, and homosexuality at arm's length, and never avail themselves of these products, services, and practices -- right? Stop laughing. But it's amazing that this assumption is still so common. What is known, though it's hardly news, is that many "decent citizens" need the Red Light District out there so they can sneak away to it when they crave release from the straitjacket of "decency." One of the many problems with Scott Herring's "slumming" model is that he pays too little attention to the people who live in the slums: they're still the Other for him, no less than they were for the respectable folk he wrote about with such smug disdain.

What progress we (that is, gay people or GLBTQ+π if you prefer) have made is the emergence of respectable, "decent" Homo-Americans, gay people who also present themselves as above the sleazy, gives-us-a-bad-name behavior of some ghetto homosexuals. You won't find them gyrating drunkenly in backless chaps on a Gay Pride Float, or cruising around toilets and highway rest stops. Until they themselves get caught doing it, of course.

Escoffier has more sense than the Homo-Americans, of course; I'm not including him with the likes of them. He recognizes, chronicles, and even celebrates the parts of our history that many gay people would prefer to forget. It just seems to me that at times he leaves the dividing wall up from the other side.

In the Room the Bottoms Come and Go

I'm reading Jeffrey Escoffier's history of gay porn, Bigger than Life (Running Press, 2009), and it's a good, informative read, but things keep catching my attention. Like this, describing the filming of a famous early hardcore feature, Boys in the Sand:

There was no top, no bottom -- indeed those rigid distinctions had not yet evolved among gay men ... [98]

Then, a few lines down on the same page, about the same film and the same period:

An old friend was present when the casting was being discussed and said to Poole, "I've got the perfect person for you. He's blond, six feet tall, and handsome. He's got a nice dick, a beautiful ass, and he does everything."

"He does everything." This is a nod to the fact that there were tops and bottoms in those days, though the terminology was somewhat different. A real man was a penetrator only (what would now be called a total top), while a queer was penetrated. In fact, the usual line among orthodox post-colonial Foucauldians is that sexual versatility is a modern and probably cultural imperialist development, while the active/passive dichotomy is traditional, indigenous, and natural. Of course, just like today, the boundary between those categories was highly permeable. In Barry Reay's New York Hustlers, which I discussed here a couple of months ago, he describes a gay male milieu built on a rigid distinction between Queers and Trade, while admitting that occasionally Trade got into being penetrated by Queers, but it still didn't mean the penetrated Trade were closeted Queers, only that being "pedicated ... merely enlarged his sphere of enjoyment and did not make him ‘queer.’"

I've noticed myself that as a post-AIDS development, the "top" is a fairly unstable category, held together with spit and tissue paper. I've been informed by several self-identified tops that they refuse to be penetrated because they don't want to contract HIV. (I haven't been able to get out of them why they think other men allow these "tops" to penetrate them; I suspect the question is too threatening to entertain.) An identity built on fear is not a very reliable one; I suspect that at least some of these "tops" will get drunk from time to time and allow what they never allow, probably without a condom. You don't have to be an essentialist to believe that refusing to be penetrated for fear of HIV is not the same as genuinely not enjoying or wanting the experience -- just like refusing to have sex with other men for fear of Hell doesn't make you straight.

But I digress. Here's another passage that snagged me, this time a quotation from Edmund White's States of Desire.

San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled -- or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? [quoted by Escoffier, 118]

One reason I didn't get around to visiting San Francisco until I was nearly 50 (and even then it was because a friend bought me a plane ticket -- otherwise I might never have made the trip) was precisely that I wasn't all that attracted by the "particular dreams" it represented. When I've visited gay neighborhoods closer to home I haven't felt their siren call, because I've never wanted to be surrounded only by other gay men. That was why I chose to be openly gay -- admittedly, in a relatively gay-friendly college town -- because being isolated from straight people was never my "particular dream." I wanted straights to make room for the gay people who already lived beside them, not to let them have a gay-free environment. Besides, when I saw the spaces that gay men constructed according to their own dreams, I realized that once again I was a misfit, and I wasn't going to try to assimilate.

The final quotation (for today, at least). From the New York Times Magazine, January 3, 1971, quoted on page 117:

What distinguishes San Francisco from any place else is the style with which porn is marketed, its practitioners' attitude towards it and the tolerance most square citizens display concerning the whole question. The basic assumption, it would seem ... is that a "mature adult" is entitled to get his kicks any way he can, provided decent citizens don't have to witness the process and nobody gets hurt.

What stuck to me in this one was "decent citizens." Of course, if there's one thing we have learned in the last forty years, it's that "decent citizens" always keep porn, sleaze, and homosexuality at arm's length, and never avail themselves of these products, services, and practices -- right? Stop laughing. But it's amazing that this assumption is still so common. What is known, though it's hardly news, is that many "decent citizens" need the Red Light District out there so they can sneak away to it when they crave release from the straitjacket of "decency." One of the many problems with Scott Herring's "slumming" model is that he pays too little attention to the people who live in the slums: they're still the Other for him, no less than they were for the respectable folk he wrote about with such smug disdain.

What progress we (that is, gay people or GLBTQ+π if you prefer) have made is the emergence of respectable, "decent" Homo-Americans, gay people who also present themselves as above the sleazy, gives-us-a-bad-name behavior of some ghetto homosexuals. You won't find them gyrating drunkenly in backless chaps on a Gay Pride Float, or cruising around toilets and highway rest stops. Until they themselves get caught doing it, of course.

Escoffier has more sense than the Homo-Americans, of course; I'm not including him with the likes of them. He recognizes, chronicles, and even celebrates the parts of our history that many gay people would prefer to forget. It just seems to me that at times he leaves the dividing wall up from the other side.

Eaters of Dust

While looking for something else (Isherwood's A Single Man, I think, or Frank Moorehouse's The Everlasting Secret Family) in the university library stacks, my attention was caught by a few small books at the end of a shelf. They were recent literature in English from West Africa, mostly Nigeria, and with the typical insouciance of a promiscuous reader I grabbed a handful and took them along. I haven't read enough African writing (though still more, I'll wager, than most random white Americans), and these were published in Africa for African readers, rather than in England or the US as exotica for white or African-American/Afro-British readers in search of roots.

One of the books I picked up was A Matter of Identity by Toni Duruaku, which turned out to be a play about a young man and women sent by their tribe into the realm of the Ancestors to be given directions for the future of Africa. The other was Iheanyichukwu Duruoha's novel Eaters of Dust (Ikeja: Longman, 2000), about the end and aftermath of the horrific Nigerian-Biafran Civil War of 1967-1969. I'm not sure what I expected, but Eaters of Dust turned out to be pretty complex.

The narrator, Nduweze, "barely seventeen" (4), is a mess boy in the Biafran 10th Battalion Training Depot 3 in Usi, formerly the Usi Grammar School. His childhood friend Chima, a few months older, is batman to the formidable and reckless Captain Ebenezer Odogwu, known as "Bazooka", so he has been to the front, unlike Nduweze, who's spent the war in his home town. "While others fought and died in the war fronts, I cooked for the sergeants in the rear. Though I was a cook, I managed to acquire all the military discipline and learn how to kill a man with my bare hands" (5). He quarrels frequently with his mother, his father having disappeared on a trip to Lagos; they don't know if he's alive or dead. As the novel opens, Ndu is watching refugees on the highway, fleeing from the advancing Federal troops. Orders come down to evacuate the depot, but it turns out to be too late. Captain Bazooka commandeers a passing car to carry off his personal plunder, then kills the car's owner in cold blood and drives away, abandoning both his wife Maria and the devoted Chima. Nduweze must flee with Chima into the forest, and returns to his mother's house.

Chima goes off looking for his master Bazooka, to return the Bible he left behind him. Ndu has a series of adventures and misadventures in the confusion that follows. He abandons his army uniform so he won't be shot on sight as a rebel, and spends a lot of time running around either naked or trying to keep a small cloth wrapped around his private parts. In addition to his ability (never actually used) to kill a man with his bare hands, we are informed that his penis is large enough to inspire comment from other men. (The novel is blunt about body functions, and Ndu dutifully informs the reader about cleaning his anus after each bowel movement. Reunited with Chima later in the novel, when both are again on the run, Ndu invents a tale about having gone out at night for a shit and then being scared away from the depot by gunfire. Chima asks him teasingly, "‘Have you cleaned your anus?’ I smiled and said, ‘Yes, of course.’" [174].) At the same time, Ndu complains when he sees his reflection in a mirror (47):

... my eyes [were] sleepy and my lips large and soft. I have baby-boy cheeks and I think I look very innocent and feminine. I knew I would be the last man to make a good soldier, not by a long shot anyway.

He feels smothered by his bossy mother's authority, and thinks he needs to do something to become a man. But not to worry, Ndu, looks can deceive. Baby-faced youths have carried out some major massacres. The riot cops in Seoul look cute and boyish, even pretty, but you wouldn't want to encounter them on a dark street.

The Federal troops occupy Usi and take over the depot to quarter themselves. The people of Usi scramble to find jobs with them, first selling them water, then building tents for them around the grammar school; the boys have already been dragooned to bury the dead scattered around the grounds. A number of Ndu's friends have survived the war, and much of the novel involves their relations with each other, with a lot of banter about girls and school. Ndu tells us that he did well in English class, because he used (famous Nigerian novelist) Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a crib.

Before long, though, the father of the man murdered by Captain Bazooka come looking for his missing son. One of Nduweze's friends, Cosmo, is found wearing a shirt taken from the dead man's body, and is accused of the killing. Tortured and beaten, he will be executed if the real murderer isn't found. In the end, Nduweze and Chima come forward as eyewitnesses, and justice is perhaps served. (Chima refuses the reward of "thirty Nigerian pounds" offered to him by the dead man's father, and the contrast with Judas Iscariot is clearly deliberate, though unsettling -- Bazooka makes a bizarre Christ figure.) Ndu travels to Lagos and finds father still alive.

Okay, that's the story. But the book contains a subplot that I hadn't expected. When the Nigerian Feds occupy Usi, Nduweze goes to the depot to try to make some money selling water to the soldiers, as many young men are doing even though carrying water is women's work. There's not a lot of food around; famine in Biafra attracted international attention, as it would a few years later in Bangladesh, and the occupiers have a lot of money to spend. Biafran money was virtually worthless by the end of the war, and several characters in Eaters of Dust are shown lugging around bags of it. The Hausa-speaking Feds must communicate in pidgin with the locals, and their dialogue with them is noticeably different from the (presumably Igbo) dialogue between Ndu and his friends and relatives.

In the yard at the depot, trying to find someone to buy the water he carries, Ndu observes:

There were many girls with hardly clothes on and their newly formed breasts shook as they sang and giggled. They were selling their water fast. I felt jealous because I knew these soldiers would soon start squeezing their breasts. I wished I were a girl. I continued singing nevertheless [126].

"I wished I were a girl"? That got my attention; Ndu knows what it means to be a girl whose breasts a soldier would squeeze. If the reader doesn't know, it's spelled out a few pages later in an exchange between Ndu and his friend Boy Shankar, who's helping a soldier build a tent (138):

‘...One could do anything now to get money. If I were a girl I wouldn’t mind selling myself.’
‘And since you aren’t a girl?’
He coughed. ‘Well, that’s why I am doing this.’

Ndu, meanwhile, has found himself a softer gig. After getting knocked out in a fight involving his friend Cosmo and a soldier, Ndu wakes up in the quarters of the camp Sergeant Major, W. O. I. Adamu Sambo, "a man of medium build, slightly pot bellied and with a face pitted with spots. He had a Mandarin type of moustache. He was looking at me with interest and when my eyes met his, he smiled. I seemed to like him because his smile was tender and reassuring, and he had a nice set of teeth" (128f).

He smiled back like a child, held my arm and squeezed it. Then he started rubbing the top of my hand, saying, ‘I like you Nduu and you go be my friend-okay?’ I nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
‘You go like to stay here with me?’ he said. ‘You go work for me and I pay you big money?’
Without thinking, I said, ‘Yes.’
‘Where is yor fada and yor moda?’
‘My fada dey for Lagos but my moda dey here.’
‘Now, you go work for me. Is dat clear?’
I nodded. ‘What kind of work I go dey do?’ I asked.
‘To wash my cloth das all! Musa will press. You hear?’ I said ‘Yes.’
‘What of food? I go dey eat here?’
‘Yes, everything, you must eat. We have everything.’ [130]

And a few pages later (148):

Our eyes met and held for an instant. Then I turned my face away.
‘You be like woman,’ he said.
I smiled like a little girl.
‘How I be like woman?’ I asked.
‘Your face and your body ……’
I continued eating and began feeling sorry for myself. Perhaps, he was right; I hadn’t gone to war like others and I looked feminine. Yet this view crippled my psyche because it explained all my ambition to subdue my mother.
Then he said, ‘You like me?’
I hesitated before I answered.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I like you.’
He shot out his hand, held my ear and smoothed the back of it; and then he held my hand and scratched it.

Plenty of explicit gay overtures there. Lest the reader suspect that I am imposing my cultural-terrorist Euro-American gay agenda on an innocent homosocial text, however, there's more. Ndu must fight off another Nigerian soldier who tries to rape him while Sambo is away, which indicates that others around them see their relationship as probably sexual. Then Ndu's old friend Sunny Bruzz shows up and meets Sambo, who takes a shine to him as well, giving him an expensive flask. Sunny asks Ndu, "Do you sleep on the same bed with him?" Ndu hesitates before lying: "No. I sleep on the floor" (159).

Whether Sambo and Ndu do any more than sleep together is left unclear. But when a sentry questions Ndu whose laundry he washes (164):

‘Bedsheet? Hah-ha, I know am Adamu Sambo na vey well bature. Play with people everybody. Him don play with you?’
I put on an embarrassed look, trying to help myself and again he said:
‘Him don play with you?’
Turning my face away from his, I said no.

Ndu had lied to Sunny about sleeping on the floor, so maybe he's lying here too. Ndu frets privately (166):

What was the special attraction Sunny Bruzz had which made Sambo start to like him? Apart from Sunny’s masculine shoulders and rock-like muscles, there was nothing attractive in him. As I had told you, his teeth were not complete, the right lower molars were missing. So why on earth would Sambo start to like him?

Well, I can see the special attraction Sunny Bruzz might have for Sambo. But this complicates the erotic dynamics of the situation. Many readers might argue that Sambo is attracted to Nduweze because of his girlishness, giving a pseudo-heterosexual cast to their relationship that reassures those trying to argue that there's nothing queer going on here, just manly soldiers bonding in the absence of women, one is the pitcher and the other's the catcher, blah blah blah. But Sambo, as the description I quoted above indicates, is not a particularly masculine figure, and for all that he's drawn to Ndu's effeminacy, he flips roles when he meets the butch, muscular, womanizing Sunny. Nothing seems to come of their flirtation, though, and Ndu later boasts to Chima, "Take it from me. I am that man’s best friend; the only cock that crows in his room. So be reassured" (189). Oh, I am, Nduweze, I am. Nevertheless, "I loved Chima, my spirit always yielded to his and I longed to yield to him more and more like a woman" (194).

In the end, however,

Seven days after I came back from Lagos, I had met Grace, a mulatto from Sapele, and we had fallen in love. Grace was not only beautiful, she was hard working and ambitious – and above all she was kind, soft and ripe. ... I had never touched her; in fact I had thought she was only being kind to me, having seen me so torn and haggard like a beggar, emerging from the ashes of Biafra. Then just the night before, she had whispered to me through the window -- 'Ndu, Ndu.' I had gone quickly to meet her. Quietly she had taken me by the hand, had led me into an unfinished brick house and had moved her hand up and down my spine. There, to my greatest surprise, something had happened. Exploding in my loins, a sudden fire filled me with lust. Clawing and grunting, she had made love to me. In the end, though exhausted, I had seen a whole esplanade of lush and strange sensation open to me; an experience that promised consummation. I had felt redeemed [210].

Well, maybe. This passage is a reminder of the symbolic function of "manhood"; maybe we're supposed to read Nduweze's attraction to Sambo (which is made explicit before Sambo makes his first move) as a symbol of his youth, incomplete manhood, displacement, failure as a warrior, need for a father figure, etc., all of which is left behind when a woman, "clawing and grunting," makes a man of him at last. Maybe, though it doesn't change the fact that an erotically-charged relationship between two males (and implicitly more, given Sunny's intervention and the sentry's knowingness), recognized as such by everybody in the novel, takes up about a third of the story. It's enough to undermine the widespread claim by many African cultural nationalists that sex beween males is a foreign import polluting pure African society -- even if there weren't plenty of other evidence to undermine it, from the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's novel The Interpreters [1965], featuring a conflicted black American expatriate who makes out well with the local youths and now Rudolf Pell Gaudio's study Allah Made Us [Wiley, 2009], about "sexual outlaws" in Nigeria. Far from being something alien to Nigerian society, sex between males appears to be common enough to merit no more than coarse joking when it rears its head. And the words "gay" or "homosexual" never turn up in Eaters of Dust; the novel shows how unnecessary and diversionary it is to obsess about such labels.

Eaters of Dust

While looking for something else (Isherwood's A Single Man, I think, or Frank Moorehouse's The Everlasting Secret Family) in the university library stacks, my attention was caught by a few small books at the end of a shelf. They were recent literature in English from West Africa, mostly Nigeria, and with the typical insouciance of a promiscuous reader I grabbed a handful and took them along. I haven't read enough African writing (though still more, I'll wager, than most random white Americans), and these were published in Africa for African readers, rather than in England or the US as exotica for white or African-American/Afro-British readers in search of roots.

One of the books I picked up was A Matter of Identity by Toni Duruaku, which turned out to be a play about a young man and women sent by their tribe into the realm of the Ancestors to be given directions for the future of Africa. The other was Iheanyichukwu Duruoha's novel Eaters of Dust (Ikeja: Longman, 2000), about the end and aftermath of the horrific Nigerian-Biafran Civil War of 1967-1969. I'm not sure what I expected, but Eaters of Dust turned out to be pretty complex.

The narrator, Nduweze, "barely seventeen" (4), is a mess boy in the Biafran 10th Battalion Training Depot 3 in Usi, formerly the Usi Grammar School. His childhood friend Chima, a few months older, is batman to the formidable and reckless Captain Ebenezer Odogwu, known as "Bazooka", so he has been to the front, unlike Nduweze, who's spent the war in his home town. "While others fought and died in the war fronts, I cooked for the sergeants in the rear. Though I was a cook, I managed to acquire all the military discipline and learn how to kill a man with my bare hands" (5). He quarrels frequently with his mother, his father having disappeared on a trip to Lagos; they don't know if he's alive or dead. As the novel opens, Ndu is watching refugees on the highway, fleeing from the advancing Federal troops. Orders come down to evacuate the depot, but it turns out to be too late. Captain Bazooka commandeers a passing car to carry off his personal plunder, then kills the car's owner in cold blood and drives away, abandoning both his wife Maria and the devoted Chima. Nduweze must flee with Chima into the forest, and returns to his mother's house.

Chima goes off looking for his master Bazooka, to return the Bible he left behind him. Ndu has a series of adventures and misadventures in the confusion that follows. He abandons his army uniform so he won't be shot on sight as a rebel, and spends a lot of time running around either naked or trying to keep a small cloth wrapped around his private parts. In addition to his ability (never actually used) to kill a man with his bare hands, we are informed that his penis is large enough to inspire comment from other men. (The novel is blunt about body functions, and Ndu dutifully informs the reader about cleaning his anus after each bowel movement. Reunited with Chima later in the novel, when both are again on the run, Ndu invents a tale about having gone out at night for a shit and then being scared away from the depot by gunfire. Chima asks him teasingly, "‘Have you cleaned your anus?’ I smiled and said, ‘Yes, of course.’" [174].) At the same time, Ndu complains when he sees his reflection in a mirror (47):

... my eyes [were] sleepy and my lips large and soft. I have baby-boy cheeks and I think I look very innocent and feminine. I knew I would be the last man to make a good soldier, not by a long shot anyway.

He feels smothered by his bossy mother's authority, and thinks he needs to do something to become a man. But not to worry, Ndu, looks can deceive. Baby-faced youths have carried out some major massacres. The riot cops in Seoul look cute and boyish, even pretty, but you wouldn't want to encounter them on a dark street.

The Federal troops occupy Usi and take over the depot to quarter themselves. The people of Usi scramble to find jobs with them, first selling them water, then building tents for them around the grammar school; the boys have already been dragooned to bury the dead scattered around the grounds. A number of Ndu's friends have survived the war, and much of the novel involves their relations with each other, with a lot of banter about girls and school. Ndu tells us that he did well in English class, because he used (famous Nigerian novelist) Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart as a crib.

Before long, though, the father of the man murdered by Captain Bazooka come looking for his missing son. One of Nduweze's friends, Cosmo, is found wearing a shirt taken from the dead man's body, and is accused of the killing. Tortured and beaten, he will be executed if the real murderer isn't found. In the end, Nduweze and Chima come forward as eyewitnesses, and justice is perhaps served. (Chima refuses the reward of "thirty Nigerian pounds" offered to him by the dead man's father, and the contrast with Judas Iscariot is clearly deliberate, though unsettling -- Bazooka makes a bizarre Christ figure.) Ndu travels to Lagos and finds father still alive.

Okay, that's the story. But the book contains a subplot that I hadn't expected. When the Nigerian Feds occupy Usi, Nduweze goes to the depot to try to make some money selling water to the soldiers, as many young men are doing even though carrying water is women's work. There's not a lot of food around; famine in Biafra attracted international attention, as it would a few years later in Bangladesh, and the occupiers have a lot of money to spend. Biafran money was virtually worthless by the end of the war, and several characters in Eaters of Dust are shown lugging around bags of it. The Hausa-speaking Feds must communicate in pidgin with the locals, and their dialogue with them is noticeably different from the (presumably Igbo) dialogue between Ndu and his friends and relatives.

In the yard at the depot, trying to find someone to buy the water he carries, Ndu observes:

There were many girls with hardly clothes on and their newly formed breasts shook as they sang and giggled. They were selling their water fast. I felt jealous because I knew these soldiers would soon start squeezing their breasts. I wished I were a girl. I continued singing nevertheless [126].

"I wished I were a girl"? That got my attention; Ndu knows what it means to be a girl whose breasts a soldier would squeeze. If the reader doesn't know, it's spelled out a few pages later in an exchange between Ndu and his friend Boy Shankar, who's helping a soldier build a tent (138):

‘...One could do anything now to get money. If I were a girl I wouldn’t mind selling myself.’
‘And since you aren’t a girl?’
He coughed. ‘Well, that’s why I am doing this.’

Ndu, meanwhile, has found himself a softer gig. After getting knocked out in a fight involving his friend Cosmo and a soldier, Ndu wakes up in the quarters of the camp Sergeant Major, W. O. I. Adamu Sambo, "a man of medium build, slightly pot bellied and with a face pitted with spots. He had a Mandarin type of moustache. He was looking at me with interest and when my eyes met his, he smiled. I seemed to like him because his smile was tender and reassuring, and he had a nice set of teeth" (128f).

He smiled back like a child, held my arm and squeezed it. Then he started rubbing the top of my hand, saying, ‘I like you Nduu and you go be my friend-okay?’ I nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
‘You go like to stay here with me?’ he said. ‘You go work for me and I pay you big money?’
Without thinking, I said, ‘Yes.’
‘Where is yor fada and yor moda?’
‘My fada dey for Lagos but my moda dey here.’
‘Now, you go work for me. Is dat clear?’
I nodded. ‘What kind of work I go dey do?’ I asked.
‘To wash my cloth das all! Musa will press. You hear?’ I said ‘Yes.’
‘What of food? I go dey eat here?’
‘Yes, everything, you must eat. We have everything.’ [130]

And a few pages later (148):

Our eyes met and held for an instant. Then I turned my face away.
‘You be like woman,’ he said.
I smiled like a little girl.
‘How I be like woman?’ I asked.
‘Your face and your body ……’
I continued eating and began feeling sorry for myself. Perhaps, he was right; I hadn’t gone to war like others and I looked feminine. Yet this view crippled my psyche because it explained all my ambition to subdue my mother.
Then he said, ‘You like me?’
I hesitated before I answered.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I like you.’
He shot out his hand, held my ear and smoothed the back of it; and then he held my hand and scratched it.

Plenty of explicit gay overtures there. Lest the reader suspect that I am imposing my cultural-terrorist Euro-American gay agenda on an innocent homosocial text, however, there's more. Ndu must fight off another Nigerian soldier who tries to rape him while Sambo is away, which indicates that others around them see their relationship as probably sexual. Then Ndu's old friend Sunny Bruzz shows up and meets Sambo, who takes a shine to him as well, giving him an expensive flask. Sunny asks Ndu, "Do you sleep on the same bed with him?" Ndu hesitates before lying: "No. I sleep on the floor" (159).

Whether Sambo and Ndu do any more than sleep together is left unclear. But when a sentry questions Ndu whose laundry he washes (164):

‘Bedsheet? Hah-ha, I know am Adamu Sambo na vey well bature. Play with people everybody. Him don play with you?’
I put on an embarrassed look, trying to help myself and again he said:
‘Him don play with you?’
Turning my face away from his, I said no.

Ndu had lied to Sunny about sleeping on the floor, so maybe he's lying here too. Ndu frets privately (166):

What was the special attraction Sunny Bruzz had which made Sambo start to like him? Apart from Sunny’s masculine shoulders and rock-like muscles, there was nothing attractive in him. As I had told you, his teeth were not complete, the right lower molars were missing. So why on earth would Sambo start to like him?

Well, I can see the special attraction Sunny Bruzz might have for Sambo. But this complicates the erotic dynamics of the situation. Many readers might argue that Sambo is attracted to Nduweze because of his girlishness, giving a pseudo-heterosexual cast to their relationship that reassures those trying to argue that there's nothing queer going on here, just manly soldiers bonding in the absence of women, one is the pitcher and the other's the catcher, blah blah blah. But Sambo, as the description I quoted above indicates, is not a particularly masculine figure, and for all that he's drawn to Ndu's effeminacy, he flips roles when he meets the butch, muscular, womanizing Sunny. Nothing seems to come of their flirtation, though, and Ndu later boasts to Chima, "Take it from me. I am that man’s best friend; the only cock that crows in his room. So be reassured" (189). Oh, I am, Nduweze, I am. Nevertheless, "I loved Chima, my spirit always yielded to his and I longed to yield to him more and more like a woman" (194).

In the end, however,

Seven days after I came back from Lagos, I had met Grace, a mulatto from Sapele, and we had fallen in love. Grace was not only beautiful, she was hard working and ambitious – and above all she was kind, soft and ripe. ... I had never touched her; in fact I had thought she was only being kind to me, having seen me so torn and haggard like a beggar, emerging from the ashes of Biafra. Then just the night before, she had whispered to me through the window -- 'Ndu, Ndu.' I had gone quickly to meet her. Quietly she had taken me by the hand, had led me into an unfinished brick house and had moved her hand up and down my spine. There, to my greatest surprise, something had happened. Exploding in my loins, a sudden fire filled me with lust. Clawing and grunting, she had made love to me. In the end, though exhausted, I had seen a whole esplanade of lush and strange sensation open to me; an experience that promised consummation. I had felt redeemed [210].

Well, maybe. This passage is a reminder of the symbolic function of "manhood"; maybe we're supposed to read Nduweze's attraction to Sambo (which is made explicit before Sambo makes his first move) as a symbol of his youth, incomplete manhood, displacement, failure as a warrior, need for a father figure, etc., all of which is left behind when a woman, "clawing and grunting," makes a man of him at last. Maybe, though it doesn't change the fact that an erotically-charged relationship between two males (and implicitly more, given Sunny's intervention and the sentry's knowingness), recognized as such by everybody in the novel, takes up about a third of the story. It's enough to undermine the widespread claim by many African cultural nationalists that sex beween males is a foreign import polluting pure African society -- even if there weren't plenty of other evidence to undermine it, from the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's novel The Interpreters [1965], featuring a conflicted black American expatriate who makes out well with the local youths and now Rudolf Pell Gaudio's study Allah Made Us [Wiley, 2009], about "sexual outlaws" in Nigeria. Far from being something alien to Nigerian society, sex between males appears to be common enough to merit no more than coarse joking when it rears its head. And the words "gay" or "homosexual" never turn up in Eaters of Dust; the novel shows how unnecessary and diversionary it is to obsess about such labels.

Sexual Orientation And Its Discontents

A couple of months ago I wrote here that there might be “a flaw in the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ that needs to be thought about some more.” The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that my gentle suggestion was a riot of understatement.

I’ve been critical for a long time of what is called “sexual orientation research.” Some years ago I was invited to review a book called Gay Science (Columbia, 1999) by Timothy F. Murphy, a Professor of Philosophy in the Biomedical Sciences, Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. I never finished the review for some reason, but among other problems I noticed that although Professor Murphy recognized that “sexual orientation research” was a broad category that covered many different kinds of study, including Evelyn Hooker’s classic 1950s study comparing the psychological adjustment of gay and straight men, he was really only interested in research on the biological causes of sexual orientation, mainly homosexuality. (Many people forget that heterosexuality is a sexual orientation too, just as they forget that men are a “gender” and whites an “ethnic group.”) He was not much concerned about possible negative social effects of such investigation, that might lead to attempts to eliminate gay people from the population. (Abortion of “pre-gay” fetuses, genetic manipulation to prevent our conception, “sexual reorientation” therapy for those of us who escaped earlier eugenic interventions, etc.) What worried him was that “sexual orientation research” might be suppressed by people concerned about such negative effects. Even though Murphy recognized many of the fundamental flaws in the research, he always wrote as though abandoning any specific thread of “sexual orientation research” amounted to suppression of the whole field, and was a threat to Science itself.

This is the kind of scientific fundamentalism that makes me want to issue mischievous satirical calls against science, but not just now. What I want to point out now is that there is not, as far as I can tell, any research actually being done on the causes of “sexual orientation.” As the American Psychological Association explains it,

Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

But all of the current research on “sexual orientation” that I’m aware of is actually about biological sex and gender identity. I’d go so far as to say that it was meant to eliminate the concept of sexual orientation altogether, if it weren’t so obvious that the scientists involved are completely unaware of the distinction: they simply assume that “sexual orientation” equals biological sex. This can be seen in the infamous research of the gay neurologist Simon LeVay, who found that gay men have the hypothalamus of a woman in the body of a man. (I almost wrote “straight woman” there, but LeVay evidently assumed heterosexuality as the baseline.) Since LeVay’s research was published, to great publicity, other studies have purported to find that lesbians have masculine ring fingers, that gay men and straight women respond similarly to male body odor, and so on. Michael Bailey, the even more controversial professor of psychology at Northwestern University, told CBS News in 2006 that “feminizing of the brain” was involved in the genesis of gay men (and “masculinizing” in lesbians). He attributed this to hormones, not to the genes.

Which brings me to Marc Breedlove, also a participant in the CBS News report. Breedlove, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Michigan State University,

explained that male rats, including one he showed [Leslie] Stahl called “Romeo,” will mount any rat that comes their way. In the mating process, the female performs something called lordosis, where she lifts her head and rump.

If Romeo goes after a male, Dr. Breedlove says the male will seem profoundly indifferent.

But Breedlove says he can change all that. He gave a female rat a single shot of the male sex hormone testosterone at birth. Now grown up, she will never perform lordosis.

But a male rat did. He was castrated at birth, depriving him of testosterone.

"So you created a gay rat?" Stahl asked.

"I wouldn't say that these are gay rats. But I will say that these are genetic male rats who are showing much more feminine behavior," he explained.

It’s big of Professor Breedlove to point out that his lordotic rats are not gay. But a few other things need to be pointed out. One is that none of this is new. Researchers have been playing around with rats’ hormone levels since at least the 1930s. That work was summarized and discussed as long ago as 1951, when Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach published Patterns of Sexual Behavior (Harper & Brothers). (There’s a good recent account of this in Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body [Basic Books, 2000], especially Chapter 8, “The Rodent’s Tale.”)

But the underlying notion of receptive males as female-like is even older. In his book Roman Homosexualities (Oxford, 1999), Craig Williams retells a fable by a first-century Roman poet called Phaedrus. As Williams translates it (page 211),

The other man asked what principle it was that had brought tribads and soft men into being. The old man explained, “That same Prometheus, the creator of the pottery race that is broken as soon as it comes up against its fate, had spent a whole day fashioning the private parts that modesty hides under clothes, making them separately so that he could later attach them to the appropriate bodies. After receiving an unexpected invitation to dinner from the wine-god Liber, and having flooded his veins with a good deal of nectar, he stumbled home late at night and in a drunken stupor attached the maiden's organ to the male sex and male organs to women. And so it is that lust now enjoys its depraved pleasure.”

For some reason Williams (who’s evidently as confused as his scientific counterparts) comments that “Phaedrus’ soft males … were mistakenly given a pseudo-vagina by Prometheus.” In the fable, they were given a real vagina, and the anus (which both males and females have) is not a “pseudo-vagina.” The hormonal theory of sexual receptivity in males is basically just an updated version of Phaedrus’ fable.

Lordosis is not part of the human behavioral repertoire anyhow: excited human females do not try to shove their rumps into the faces of males with whom they want to copulate. (Imagine what a pop concert would look like if this were the case.) Nor do gay men. Yet pushers of “sexual orientation research” keep bringing it up, probably because it’s visually striking and fits the stereotype of gay men as feminized.

A more important point is that this behavior has nothing to do with “sexual orientation,” if that term refers to a pattern of sexual desire for persons of one sex or the other. Feminized male rats will permit mounting by females or other males, and “normal” male rats, as Breedlove says, “will mount any rat that comes their way” regardless of its sex.

In an article published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1997, neuroanatomist and psychiatrist William S. Byne pointed out (page 75) that

In the paradigm of the neuroendocrine laboratory, the male rat that shows lordosis when mounted by another male is considered the homosexual. But it is important to note that lordosis is little more than a reflex, and that the male that displays lordosis when mounted by another male will also display the posture if its back is stroked by a researcher. We cannot infer much about the sexual motivation of the male that exhibits this posture. Ironically, however, the animal that does display sexual motivation – the male that mounts another male [Breedlove’s “Romeo”, for instance] – escapes scientific scrutiny and labeling as does the female that displays lordosis when mounted by another female.

Suppose, though, that it were proven that some human males had been exposed to “female” hormones, causing them to want to be penetrated by other men. These would be the men explained by the research of LeVay, Breedlove, Bailey, and others. But what about the men who have sex with these receptive men, particularly men who prefer to penetrate men instead of women? Contemporary researchers not only can’t explain them, they don’t even seem to be aware that they exist. According to their model, there are no homosexuals or heterosexuals, just tops (penetrators, assumed to be male) and bottoms (the penetrated, presumed to be female). “Straight” men should know that they can penetrate as many men as they wish without becoming gay – they only need to be alert to any emergent desire to present their bottoms to anyone, male or female. But woe betide any penetrator who feels those stirrings in his rear end – he may have a “predisposition” to be gay. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee wrote in The DNA Mystique (Freeman, 1995, page 136),

A claim about predisposition after the fact … has the rhetorical advantage of being both unfalsifiable and irrefutable. No experiment could disprove the existence of such a predisposition, for the outcome of “proof” of its own cause. By employing this sort of circular argument, genetic predisposition can be invoked to explain any behavior ….

These researchers have often been criticized for making assumptions about the sexual orientations of their subjects, but what can they do? There is no way to measure “sexual orientation.” Some of the researchers have fallen back on inviting their subjects to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale, which is like classifying subjects’ intelligence by asking them to guess their IQs. Some administer a version of Kinsey’s sexual history interview (which is interesting, considering how often I’ve heard that Kinsey’s protocol is obsolete and no one nowadays knows how to take a history by his method). But a sexual history is not a “sexual orientation.” LeVay, whose subjects were all dead, assumed that any male whose records said he had contracted AIDS through sexual contact must be homosexual, and that any male whose records showed that he had contracted AIDS through drug use must be heterosexual. Again, it’s hard to say what else he could have done, but it doesn’t speak well for “sexual orientation research” that such work passed peer review.

So there you have it: “sexual orientation research” is not about sexual orientation at all, but about one’s role in sexual activity. These researchers have a revealingly crude and mechanistic conception of human sexuality that reduces males to plugs and females to jacks. Their work has no bearing on the love and desire for people of their own sex that many gay people confidently claim they were born with – about that we’re as ignorant as ever. Strangest of all to me is that the GLBTQ+π supporters of this research, who in my experience are desperately insistent that we are “normal” except for what we do in bed, and are eager to appease bigots by condemning gender nonconformity among gay people, have bought into a scientific model which asserts that we are essentially and by nature gender non-conformists. A gay man in drag, a lesbian with cigar and tuxedo, are according to the LeVays and Baileys simply acting as Nature wants them to. But not to worry. The internal contradictions of the scientific model ensure that it’s unlikely to go anywhere.

Sexual Orientation And Its Discontents

A couple of months ago I wrote here that there might be “a flaw in the concept of ‘sexual orientation’ that needs to be thought about some more.” The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that my gentle suggestion was a riot of understatement.

I’ve been critical for a long time of what is called “sexual orientation research.” Some years ago I was invited to review a book called Gay Science (Columbia, 1999) by Timothy F. Murphy, a Professor of Philosophy in the Biomedical Sciences, Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. I never finished the review for some reason, but among other problems I noticed that although Professor Murphy recognized that “sexual orientation research” was a broad category that covered many different kinds of study, including Evelyn Hooker’s classic 1950s study comparing the psychological adjustment of gay and straight men, he was really only interested in research on the biological causes of sexual orientation, mainly homosexuality. (Many people forget that heterosexuality is a sexual orientation too, just as they forget that men are a “gender” and whites an “ethnic group.”) He was not much concerned about possible negative social effects of such investigation, that might lead to attempts to eliminate gay people from the population. (Abortion of “pre-gay” fetuses, genetic manipulation to prevent our conception, “sexual reorientation” therapy for those of us who escaped earlier eugenic interventions, etc.) What worried him was that “sexual orientation research” might be suppressed by people concerned about such negative effects. Even though Murphy recognized many of the fundamental flaws in the research, he always wrote as though abandoning any specific thread of “sexual orientation research” amounted to suppression of the whole field, and was a threat to Science itself.

This is the kind of scientific fundamentalism that makes me want to issue mischievous satirical calls against science, but not just now. What I want to point out now is that there is not, as far as I can tell, any research actually being done on the causes of “sexual orientation.” As the American Psychological Association explains it,

Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

But all of the current research on “sexual orientation” that I’m aware of is actually about biological sex and gender identity. I’d go so far as to say that it was meant to eliminate the concept of sexual orientation altogether, if it weren’t so obvious that the scientists involved are completely unaware of the distinction: they simply assume that “sexual orientation” equals biological sex. This can be seen in the infamous research of the gay neurologist Simon LeVay, who found that gay men have the hypothalamus of a woman in the body of a man. (I almost wrote “straight woman” there, but LeVay evidently assumed heterosexuality as the baseline.) Since LeVay’s research was published, to great publicity, other studies have purported to find that lesbians have masculine ring fingers, that gay men and straight women respond similarly to male body odor, and so on. Michael Bailey, the even more controversial professor of psychology at Northwestern University, told CBS News in 2006 that “feminizing of the brain” was involved in the genesis of gay men (and “masculinizing” in lesbians). He attributed this to hormones, not to the genes.

Which brings me to Marc Breedlove, also a participant in the CBS News report. Breedlove, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Michigan State University,

explained that male rats, including one he showed [Leslie] Stahl called “Romeo,” will mount any rat that comes their way. In the mating process, the female performs something called lordosis, where she lifts her head and rump.

If Romeo goes after a male, Dr. Breedlove says the male will seem profoundly indifferent.

But Breedlove says he can change all that. He gave a female rat a single shot of the male sex hormone testosterone at birth. Now grown up, she will never perform lordosis.

But a male rat did. He was castrated at birth, depriving him of testosterone.

"So you created a gay rat?" Stahl asked.

"I wouldn't say that these are gay rats. But I will say that these are genetic male rats who are showing much more feminine behavior," he explained.

It’s big of Professor Breedlove to point out that his lordotic rats are not gay. But a few other things need to be pointed out. One is that none of this is new. Researchers have been playing around with rats’ hormone levels since at least the 1930s. That work was summarized and discussed as long ago as 1951, when Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach published Patterns of Sexual Behavior (Harper & Brothers). (There’s a good recent account of this in Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body [Basic Books, 2000], especially Chapter 8, “The Rodent’s Tale.”)

But the underlying notion of receptive males as female-like is even older. In his book Roman Homosexualities (Oxford, 1999), Craig Williams retells a fable by a first-century Roman poet called Phaedrus. As Williams translates it (page 211),

The other man asked what principle it was that had brought tribads and soft men into being. The old man explained, “That same Prometheus, the creator of the pottery race that is broken as soon as it comes up against its fate, had spent a whole day fashioning the private parts that modesty hides under clothes, making them separately so that he could later attach them to the appropriate bodies. After receiving an unexpected invitation to dinner from the wine-god Liber, and having flooded his veins with a good deal of nectar, he stumbled home late at night and in a drunken stupor attached the maiden's organ to the male sex and male organs to women. And so it is that lust now enjoys its depraved pleasure.”

For some reason Williams (who’s evidently as confused as his scientific counterparts) comments that “Phaedrus’ soft males … were mistakenly given a pseudo-vagina by Prometheus.” In the fable, they were given a real vagina, and the anus (which both males and females have) is not a “pseudo-vagina.” The hormonal theory of sexual receptivity in males is basically just an updated version of Phaedrus’ fable.

Lordosis is not part of the human behavioral repertoire anyhow: excited human females do not try to shove their rumps into the faces of males with whom they want to copulate. (Imagine what a pop concert would look like if this were the case.) Nor do gay men. Yet pushers of “sexual orientation research” keep bringing it up, probably because it’s visually striking and fits the stereotype of gay men as feminized.

A more important point is that this behavior has nothing to do with “sexual orientation,” if that term refers to a pattern of sexual desire for persons of one sex or the other. Feminized male rats will permit mounting by females or other males, and “normal” male rats, as Breedlove says, “will mount any rat that comes their way” regardless of its sex.

In an article published in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1997, neuroanatomist and psychiatrist William S. Byne pointed out (page 75) that

In the paradigm of the neuroendocrine laboratory, the male rat that shows lordosis when mounted by another male is considered the homosexual. But it is important to note that lordosis is little more than a reflex, and that the male that displays lordosis when mounted by another male will also display the posture if its back is stroked by a researcher. We cannot infer much about the sexual motivation of the male that exhibits this posture. Ironically, however, the animal that does display sexual motivation – the male that mounts another male [Breedlove’s “Romeo”, for instance] – escapes scientific scrutiny and labeling as does the female that displays lordosis when mounted by another female.

Suppose, though, that it were proven that some human males had been exposed to “female” hormones, causing them to want to be penetrated by other men. These would be the men explained by the research of LeVay, Breedlove, Bailey, and others. But what about the men who have sex with these receptive men, particularly men who prefer to penetrate men instead of women? Contemporary researchers not only can’t explain them, they don’t even seem to be aware that they exist. According to their model, there are no homosexuals or heterosexuals, just tops (penetrators, assumed to be male) and bottoms (the penetrated, presumed to be female). “Straight” men should know that they can penetrate as many men as they wish without becoming gay – they only need to be alert to any emergent desire to present their bottoms to anyone, male or female. But woe betide any penetrator who feels those stirrings in his rear end – he may have a “predisposition” to be gay. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee wrote in The DNA Mystique (Freeman, 1995, page 136),

A claim about predisposition after the fact … has the rhetorical advantage of being both unfalsifiable and irrefutable. No experiment could disprove the existence of such a predisposition, for the outcome of “proof” of its own cause. By employing this sort of circular argument, genetic predisposition can be invoked to explain any behavior ….

These researchers have often been criticized for making assumptions about the sexual orientations of their subjects, but what can they do? There is no way to measure “sexual orientation.” Some of the researchers have fallen back on inviting their subjects to rate themselves on the Kinsey scale, which is like classifying subjects’ intelligence by asking them to guess their IQs. Some administer a version of Kinsey’s sexual history interview (which is interesting, considering how often I’ve heard that Kinsey’s protocol is obsolete and no one nowadays knows how to take a history by his method). But a sexual history is not a “sexual orientation.” LeVay, whose subjects were all dead, assumed that any male whose records said he had contracted AIDS through sexual contact must be homosexual, and that any male whose records showed that he had contracted AIDS through drug use must be heterosexual. Again, it’s hard to say what else he could have done, but it doesn’t speak well for “sexual orientation research” that such work passed peer review.

So there you have it: “sexual orientation research” is not about sexual orientation at all, but about one’s role in sexual activity. These researchers have a revealingly crude and mechanistic conception of human sexuality that reduces males to plugs and females to jacks. Their work has no bearing on the love and desire for people of their own sex that many gay people confidently claim they were born with – about that we’re as ignorant as ever. Strangest of all to me is that the GLBTQ+π supporters of this research, who in my experience are desperately insistent that we are “normal” except for what we do in bed, and are eager to appease bigots by condemning gender nonconformity among gay people, have bought into a scientific model which asserts that we are essentially and by nature gender non-conformists. A gay man in drag, a lesbian with cigar and tuxedo, are according to the LeVays and Baileys simply acting as Nature wants them to. But not to worry. The internal contradictions of the scientific model ensure that it’s unlikely to go anywhere.