wanted: pragmatic and patient woman for child-bearing opportunities
We tell stories to make sense of our lives and experiences, stories that seem all the more urgent and vital when they claim to account for our sexual identities. Those stories are more intriguing again when they appear to change, mid-flow. Which leads me to this story in today’s Times, titled The day I decided to stop being gay:
A handsome young dad entered with a small, fair-haired boy at his side. The man took a seat and hoisted the wide-eyed child proudly on to his knee. The first haircut, I speculated inwardly, as an unfamiliar fatherly glow and feeling of mild envy swept over me. I could not tear my attention away from the mirrored reflections.
From time to time, the dad leant forward as they waited and whispered close to his son’s ear, tenderly kissing his fair head. Touching stuff. [...] I think my life changed at that moment. That’s love, folks. Simple really. A proud dad, an adored little boy and a beautiful display of dependence and responsibility. It was the epiphany I had needed and I emerged with a dashing new haircut and a desire to procreate.
Never has being straight been so simple.1
There’s a logic in this story which seems to suggest that heterosexuality is intrinsically paired with the desire to reproduce and protect: that fatherhood = straightness. Ignoring the persistent presence of happily straight, childless men, there’s perhaps nothing culturally unconventional about that idea until you notice what’s absent. To put it crudely, anyone notice the vagina missing in that formula?
It’s a form of being not-gay where desire for women and women’s bodies appears only obliquely, and seems to revolve around the late life discovery that women might be interesting people, too.2 It’s not that dislocations of desire and identity are necessarily a problem: queer theory has been arguing from it’s inception that sexual object choice can have little to do with your chosen sexual identity. The desire for X does not necessarily define you, irreversibly, as Y; or, more explicitly, the desire to suck the occasional Z does not prevent you from chasing Q. Indeed, you might be up to your Q in Z every weekend but consider yourself Y.
In fact, this kind of thinking leads you to the moment where the whole oppositional logic of straight versus gay (where you have to be one or the other) starts to crumble. So it’s not an issue of sexual hypocrisy – we’re just complicated mammals. Complicated, horny mammals. As Eve Sedgwick once argued – with rather more clarity – queer thinking emerges in part in as a response to real ambiguities and struggles of “gay / lesbian politics and identities: e.g. there are women-loving women who think of themselves as lesbians but not as gay, and others who think of themselves as gay women but not lesbians.”3
All of which is why the rhetorical frame frame of “I once was gay but now I’m straight” (sung to the tune of Amazing Grace, one presumes) makes little sense to account for someone who still desires men, and talks about that desire in terms of a lifelong temptation to be resisted. Call it the curse of the sub-editor, but the headline makes almost no sense for the story of someone who lived as a gay man, desires men and wants a relationship with a “pragmatic and patient” woman in order to fulfill his own dreams of fatherhood.
Why does any of that matter?4 Because to depend on stories that stopped making sense some time ago – aren’t relevant, can’t describe our lives – leaves us pointlessly struggling to straighten the gay guy who – for whatever reasons – wants to have children, and may have to wait for some time to find a pragmatic and patient womb willing to take him on.
- Lacanian theorists now wishing to discuss adult manifestations of the mirror stage should take the first exit on the left. [↩]
- To which you might reasonably respond, it took until you were in your mid 40s to work that out? Boy, what a catch – stand back, ladies. etc. etc. [↩]
- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (New York, London: London Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 25. [↩]
- Apart from in proving that the only people who really care about queer theory are queer theorists. [↩]