THE HOLOSENSUAL ALTERNATIVE

1. HOMOSEXUALITY

It is only recently that I have started thinking radically about 'homosexuality'. Partly because of my own history: I was never attracted by men as such, yet ended up hanging about urinals, simply because it was the most exciting thing I could find to do at the time. Some sexual behaviour (especially in societies where masturbation is devalued) is not so much pleasurable as the seeking of relief of tension.

My first and probably only love was for a woman who electrified my nipples - yet I decided to 'come out' at the age of 39, just after I dumped a man who had imposed himself upon me (living in a bubble of unknowing) for 7 years, whom I did not 'fancy', and with whom I had only the curtest kind of sensual activity - what the French call sexual hygiene. I then discovered that there were men (all far away, in London and Paris), who haunted pubs and bars rather than bleak urinals, and who attracted me with their beards and body hair - because I have always loved furry animals! To my astonishment, I found that some of them fancied me for my John-the-Baptist thinness. Since I had had certain autistic traits (including headbanging) and had known neither father nor siblings, this sudden and late exposure to the mysterious masculine proved heady indeed. It was at the time that 'gay' people were leaping out of 'the closet' to parade arrogantly down the high streets of Europe and North America, waving bundles of pink dollars. (Needless to say, I never joined them. How can one be proud to be 'gay' if one is ashamed to be human ?)

I was never easy with the term 'homosexual'. For a start, I have never felt easy with 'gay' men, apart from one or two whom I like(d) as people. Indeed, not with men in general, with whom I seem to have so little in common, hating sport and bars and gossip, and being anti-competitive. But I do feel easy with women. I like their conversation. Before 'coming out' I approached a Gay/Lesbian Help-line wondering if I could somehow meet sympathetic 'lesbians' with whom I would not be required to play the games that 'straight' men are expected to play with women. My query was met with utter incomprehension and some merriment.

My only female pin-up was (and is) a beautiful portrait of George Eliot, sneered as as 'horsey' in her time. But, to me, almost any horse is more beautiful than almost any human!

False categories corrupt our lives, along with false memories, false national histories/myths, false emotions and identities invented for us - or for us to fill. But even false categories might usefully be split into categories in order to invalidate the original category. Thus 'homosexuality' might be split into emotional and physical. I, for example, could, on the basis of my long-term behaviour, be labelled physically 'homosexual' and emotionally 'heterosexual'. Or, to put it crudely: men for physical pleasure and women for conversational pleasure.

But the main problem with the terms homo- and hetero-sexual is that they ride rough-shod over one of Freud's only true aperçus: that humans are polymorphous-perverse, and have innate access to a spectrum of sexu-sensuality, rather than being pre-destined to fixed 'normal' or 'abnormal' behaviour. Our sexual and sensual tastes are formed by a number of influences, most of them cultural. This is most obvious in the sense of smell. What to modern middle-class noses smells unpleasant may to mine or a camel-herder's smell homely or delicious.

From my own early personal history, I feel easy with women, especially older women, but I don't want to penetrate their pussies or even suck their nipples. Though cunnilingus might be even tastier than having a sweaty scrotum pressed against my lips.

Neither do I want to penetrate any man's rectum (the very sight of an anal sphincter would guarantee deflation); nor, indeed, be penetrated - except (rather rarely) by my own prostate massager, a late and rarely-used discovery in my life. (Best bought via eBay.)

This perverse, catch-all term 'homosexual', which is no more useful than the words 'foreigner', 'stranger' or 'beyond the Pale', has come to imply and include buggery. Thus it has influenced or encouraged men to think that male-for-male affection = buggery, and so seems almost designed to destroy wholesome and widespread male to male sensuality. Indeed, the word was invented at just the moment that wholesomeness (a word almost unused today) began to vanish from the 'Anglosphere' with the Second Wave of Puritanism of the mid-19th century, which coincided with the rise of Prussia.

'Homosexuality' is simply an unscientific category which hints at almost any kind of perverse behaviour from mutual masturbation to the penetration of animals. It is a 'weasel-word' implying much but defining nothing, rather like 'paganism', 'heresy' or 'un-American Activity'. Indeed the German term 'vom anderen Ufer' (from the other side) is just as adequate a term, but more poetic and down-to-earth.

The great Gore Vidal (the most godlike member of my own 'endangered fecies' of philosophical polemicists) favoured the term 'same-sexist' which is certainly an improvement, but still a term of limitation, a category.

Like another catch-all term - 'love' - it cannot be projected backwards into time, or sideways into other cultures, because within the vagueness of the term is a plethora of modern attitudes and assumptions. (To say that Ancient Greek men were 'homosexual' (or 'same-sexist') is completely anachronistic and shows utter ignorance of the structure of ancient Hellenic society, a society permanently at war.)

According to Wikipedia, "the first known appearance of homosexual in print is found in an 1869 German pamphlet by the Austrian-born novelist Karl-Maria Kertbeny, published anonymously, and arguing against a Prussian anti-'sodomy' law. Ten years later, Gustav Jäger used Kertbeny's terms in his book, Discovery of the Soul (1880). In 1886, Richard von Krafft-Ebing used the terms 'homosexual' and 'heterosexual' in his book Psychopathia Sexualis, probably borrowing them from Jäger." Krafft-Ebing's book was so popular among both layman and doctors (everyone loves to read about Strange Behaviour!) that this categorisation became widely accepted despite being (or more likely because it is) an extremely crude Manichæan division of humanity which still, ludicrously, holds sway, despite the obviousness of a whole spectrum of sexual, meta-sexual, para-sexual and asexual behaviour and tendencies revealed by sociologists, anthropologists, biographers and auto-biographers.

Worse still, the term 'homosexual' is often used in European and American cultures to encompass a person’s entire social identity, which includes self and personality, in a sad little solipsistic package. Happily, however, Michel Foucault started a ball rolling by arguing that 'homosexual' as a quasi-identity did not exist before the 19th century; that people instead spoke of "sodomy", which referred to buggery and probably not fellatio - even though the 'Sin of Sodom' was patently that of inhospitality (such as is widely practised in Western Europe today). People spoke of acts rather than behavioural category - or, as it has now become, categorical behaviour. Buggery was a crime that was of course usually ignored when performed by a man on a woman, but sometimes punished severely when performed by a man on another man, consentingly or otherwise. (The matter of consent, interestingly, is not reported historically, though male-on-male rape must have been pretty common in times of war and Crusade.)

The important 'homosexual' sub-text or sub-strate in Roman society has been discussed by John Boswell. He reveals that all sorts of 'homosexual' and homosensual behaviour went on in Imperial times (at least), without requiring a finger-pointing adjective to define it or those who indulged in it.

In most discussions about 'homosexuality' even now, the elephant in the room is prudishly ignored: who does what to whom, and who gets what from doing or, on occasion, being done to ? With a wholesome term like 'buggery' (despite the smear on Bulgarians) you know where you are. Those who suffer from the categorisation 'bi-polar' or 'Asperger' or 'immigrant' know exactly what I mean. As do those who bridle at being referred to as a 'community' - e.g. The Gay Community - which simply means a group of people on whom are slapped a label, like Jew, Gypsy, Anti-social, Atheist, Unbeliever, Young Person - or immigrant. Who or what is served by lumping people from Colombia, Cambodia, Kurdistan, Croatia and Canton altogether as immigrants - or homosexuals ? Michel de Montaigne had similar feelings:

Nous sommes Chrestiens à mesme titre que nous sommes Périgordins ou Alémans.
We are Christians only in the same way that we are Perigordians or Germans.

...Or colour-blind.

We like categories. They are easier to manage than actual people. Categorisation is a prerequesite for modern state-supported capitalism in which 'the individual' is claimed to be paramount, but individuality discouraged if it questions the all-penetrating system. Penetrative sexuality is the capitalist, industrial model. If it is not consensual through persuasion, it is forced, smash-and-grab. Capitalism hates gentleness, douceur - which is why it hates cannabis. It has mastered and subdued sensuality by making it almost entirely sexual, and so we are all (but most especially women and homosexual men) now considered to be providers of erotic capital as well as erotic consumers .There is no money to be made out of happiness - only through false promises. Businesses can make money by appealing to testosterone and the promise of ill-defined orgasm - which of course turns out to be disappointing, or ephemeral, or both.

In society at large, two forces have been at work to veil what 'homosexuality' might actually involve: Victorian prudery, and men's shame at being either passionately affectionate and nuzzly, or passively used as a female substitute by (mostly 'lower-class') men. Where ignorance is the norm, misconceptions arise, conclusions are jumped to, and 'homosexuality' was largely assumed necessarily to involve 'disgusting' behaviour, particularly buggery. This is still the case, and is why men who define themselves as 'homosexual' in, for example, Muslim countries, are severely penalised, even executed. Yet male on male affection, meta-sexual mutual admiration, like that of female for female, has been the norm in those societies for hundreds if not thousands of years.

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The Sodomitic Assumption may well have been influenced by the masculinising (investigative, penetrative) force of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, with the Molly-houses of England and Europe where boys (adolescent or younger) dressed as girls and were penetrated (a very new thing in Europe), the mechanisation of the Industrial Revolution, and the re-militarisation or aggressive masculinisation of Europe along Prussian lines from the 1850s onward. This was the period when men's dress changed from the gloriously extravagant to the universally drab, and the British/Prussian Stiff Upper Lip was adopted - to some extent even by the French. This is the period when meat-eating became an obsession, necessitating abattoirs as the ever-grasping and, if necessary, revolutionary bourgeoisie began to establish its stranglehold of aspirational - and national - uniformity. It is also the period when counter-tenors disappeared, and when sensual intimacy amongst men turned ritually violent (rugby) and ritually silly (freemasonry, stag-parties) - for men bond by doing intimate and or silly things in what is perceived as 'brotherhood'. Adolescent circumcision is the paramount example.

To back up this assertion I would contrast Byron's To Thyrza with Shakespeare's Sonnet XX. Byron laments the loss of a male lover, and knowing full well that public opinion condemns homosexuality, unbravely chooses not to reveal the gender of his subject. Shakespeare displayed affection for a "Master mistress", also a male, but sublimates the desire. This was not necessarily due to disapproval of his own homosexual urges and fear of public ridicule and exile from society, since affection for male from male was celebrated in Elizabethan society, and portraits of beautiful young(-ish) men abounded throughout Western Europe, notably by Holbein, Cranach and their Italian contemporaries. Two flamboyant monarchs of the period - Henry VIII of England and François I of France (they met with great pomp and ceremony on the Field of the Cloth of Gold) were renowned for their beauty. Crucially, Shakespeare's affection, fictitious or genuine, unlike Byron's, does not seem to involve a physical relationship but rather a strong emotional (or what now might be described as 'spiritual') bond between two men.

Since the two-edged sword of "gay liberation" was first wielded in the United States, the militarisation of sensual male bonding has increased alarmingly. "Gay" men now have the right to join the military machine of the most aggressive empire in history, and are proud to do so. This is not a return to the hand-to-hand combat between Spartans and Athenians, but the incorporation of former outcasts into totalitarian power. The military has always attracted the aggressively feeble-minded, and man-loving men are now notable for their mindlessness, when not so long ago they situated themselves either among the intellectual élite (Wilde, Gide, Proust, Verlaine, Genet, Lorca, Keynes, Cavafy, Strachey, etc.) or amongst the sandalled anti-industrial protesters such as Edward Carpenter and proletarian socialists. For "homosexuality" to be, effectively, nationalised is a horrible irony, when manloving men prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism, on their mutual appreciation, affection, Elective Physical Affinity, not on their desire to penetrate each other's anus.

Amongst the vulgar, solipsistic razzmatazz of 'Gay Pride', there is little mention of how wonderful it is for a male lover of masculinity to be able to sink into a receiving, happy, generous maleness. In the United States "gay" militarists are, alas! now parading their willingness and ability to be licensed and programmed killers.

The criminalised act of buggery was certainly used throughout the ages as a form of birth-control. But most 'heterosexuals' would balk at calling it 'natural', especially now that much more sophisticated methods are available, despite the robot-ravings of the Vatican.

Being an unbelievably late developer, it wasn't until my 69th year, after decades of wandering in what I can call only the dreary and depressing Gay Wilderness of repressed affection and the Ejaculatory Imperative, I discovered - if categorisation be demanded - homoseNSuality - a natural proclivity for same-sex fondling and sensual affection (or affectional sensuality) which surely existed from 'the dawn of time' - a behaviour rather than a 'practice' which has been overwhelmed by the false masculinisation of, and compulsory role-adoption in, male-for-male affection, which surely involves kissing and hugging and appreciating another's gentle masculinity.

HomoseNSuality (or HOLOsensuality) very definitely does not have to include penetration, though it certainly does include fellatio, a perfectly natural urge, and mutual nuzzling of the whole body from top to toe. Male penetration of male cannot be called 'natural', because of - quite simply - the Shit Factor. Most (if not all) mammals avoid their own shit. Shit on your cock can be a turn-on for only a very few. Despite the position of the prostate in men, the anus was designed to excrete, not, like the vagina, both to receive and expel. (For contrary views, read the comments on this.) Nor has any culture has codified the eating of excrement, but several have placed high value on the consumption of semen to strengthen and invigorate.

Buggery seems to have passed pretty well definitively from crudely birth-controlling 'heterosexuals' to those who pride themselves in being 'homosexual' - even though, on gay contact-sites, you will find a significant number of men who classify themselves as Fellatio or J-O (=jerk-off=masturbation) Only.

Are men who bugger other men really attracted to their anal sphincters and buttocks, or are they, in fact, somehow frightened or repelled by women, and use other men as substitutes ?

Are these 'active' men perhaps attracted by the sheer passivity of those they bugger, feeling some kind of temporary empowerment as a result ? And what of the passive partners ? Prostate and sphincter stimulation by another man's penis can produce intense pleasure, and combines powerfully with pleasure-in-passivity. But if only around 5% of the population engages in 'homosexual activity', probably (from my own experience) only half or less engage regularly or necessarily in buggery, so it is best regarded as the activity of a very small minority of the population, not as an automatic ingredient of 'homosexuality'

We have never learned what Oscar Wilde and 'Bosie' (Lord Alfred Douglas) 'did' - the very important legal detail of who did what to whom. Was it buggery ? His foolish slander suit was brought against the Marquess of Queensberry because the latter stated publicly that he was a 'sodomite'. If neither he nor the contemptible Bosie were involved in anal penetration, then Wilde was a martyr - for a non-cause.

From his Diaries, it would seem that Roger Casement did little more than admire and probably fellate the impressive organs that he notes. This was at the beginning of the 20th century. It seems unlikely that Edward Carpenter went in for buggery or being buggered, given his general open, wholesome (if limited) attitude to the Good Life.

Jean Genet did not go into details, either, but it is to be assumed that in the prisons he was indeed buggered and got quite a kick out of it. Once he became a celebrity, given his background and intelligence, who knows what was done by whom to whom!

André Gide was more up-front, and was not buggered on the beach at Sousse, but - like myself, on the same beach, 60 years later (not yet having read L'Immoraliste ) - gently masturbated a solitary fisherman on a balmy night by a quiet, silvery sea.

The rumbunctious alcoholic, Paul Verlaine almost certainly was the physically-passive partner in his relationship with Rimbaud. But Paul Verlaine was also enthusiastically heterosexual. His two collections of poems Femmes and Hombres are graphically revealing of his feelings and actions in the sexual sphere, but not so much in the sphere of affection.

Recently, there has been a remarkable tendency for French males to turn "bi-" because they feel they are missing out on getting fucked. And so it goes…

2. PORNOGRAPHY & PÆDOPHILIA

Until now, it is only in pornography that we get detailed accounts and images of sexual activity, usually in stereotypical form. Since they are mostly fantastic and feed fantasy, sexuality becomes a grotesque and literally depressing and/or addictive behaviour largely and crudely devoid of individual inspiration. Fantasy, I believe, has come to feed our behaviour, and this is why penetrative pædophilia erupted in the 20th century. As Peter Brooke observed on his website at www.politicsandtheology.org.uk, this must be so, because in all the diatribes and fantastical calumnies against the Catholic church since the Reformation, there was no mention of pædophilia.

Even before that, the accusations of the Inquisition against Cathars and other 'heretics' included fornication with devils (incubi and succubi) but not with children. Roma have been accused of child-substitution, Jews have for a thousand years been accused of the sacrificial murder of Christian children, but neither group was accused of child-rape. These calumnies have long ceased, but now pædophilia has become a serious issue for the Vatican - perhaps because of an historical process of "chickens coming home to roost", perhaps because Catholic priests fit the current pædophilia-craze just as lonely spinsters were the natural target for the similar witch-craze of the 15th and 16th centuries. The theocracy does not know how to handle it - not, I believe, because pædophilia did not exist before, but because it was generally 'Platonic' and did not involve penetration - except, of course, when it was incestuous. (Or of course, unless all the little boys and girls who were penetrated were murdered before they could speak out, which seems unlikely.) Intra-familial rape has occurred since the beginning of time, and continues to this day, but the bogeyman-image of the pædophile is not the 'wicked uncle' or step-parent, but the Lurking Stranger in the bushes or outside the school gates. The image of the pædophile has at least partly merged with that of the serial killer who prowls the Yorkshire moors or metropolitan park.

The word 'pædophile' was adopted, perhaps even devised, precisely because it meant something different to what we now picture. Etymologically it simply means anyone who loves children (the Greek word paidi usually refers to boys but could also be used for girls). So everyone, one might like to think, is a pædophile - except of course those who might get pleasure out of torturing or other wise maltreating children. Specifically, though, the pædophiles were using the term to refer to anyone who might find children sexually attractive with no implication that they would be engaging in actual sexual relations with them. The word 'pederast' (more correctly pæderast was reserved for those who were engaged in actual sexual relations (the word used in the popular press at the time was the perfectly adequate 'child molester'). French 'gays' are unhappy with the formerly-common word pédé, which has largely been replaced by the English term. And the English term has, appropriately, become a term of abuse in the Anglosphere, meaning not sissy or pansy - but 'pathetic', 'contemptible'.

I had a friend in Paris who was a self-confessed pædophile, who only ever cuddled boys of a certain age - an unfortunate age for him - 13/14 - for they very quickly found girlfriends and left his arms - or what would now be called his clutches. They exploited him shamelessly - and not only them, but their conniving parents also! The last I heard he was still living with the last of his 'victims' who must now be in his late forties and has cost my friend very much indeed, not just financially. It seems to me that homosexual pædophiles are men whose arrested sexual-emotional development has stopped at the age of their 'victims'.

I put victims within quotation-marks because I, aged from 10 to 18, would have greatly welcomed a mature man to help me break out of my anti-sensual background and to learn to revel in my body. In the 1980s I wrote occasionally for a very staid political magazine in Northern Ireland, called Fortnight, but was soon sacked, cast into outer darkness, for expressing this thought, which is shared by most man-seeking males. Without mature sexual/emotional input, they must work out their own path through the sensual/sexual minefield, often painfully, without help from other than their callow contemporaries and the genitalised culture of consumer-sexuality.

It would seem that serious genitalisation and of course penetration generally has increased dramatically since the Enlightenment - and the ghastly Marquis de Sade. Despite the protests of those who stand up for freedom of expression, pornography (another vague term and difficult topic), while it does not corrupt the young, can certainly corrupt adolescents and adults in its more extreme forms. Pictures can give ideas. Ideas can become desires. Desires can become urgent. And urgent desires can be enacted according to the ideas and fantasies. Hence the pornography of consumerism - though, obviously, all pornography is consumable.

The young, on the other hand, are corrupted by the sexualising (and de-sensualising) of everything in the age of mass-communication, and by the 'soft' pornography, that is doled out daily in the gutter press in picture and in text. This is one reason for Muslim conversion in the West. If I, as an old, freethinking atheist, can be disgusted by (for example) underwear advertising on billboards (not to mention what I don't see since I have never had television), I can understand that thousands of others also can.

3. ORGASM

But it is not only the word 'homosexuality' that is vague. So also is the word 'orgasm'. Whereas in women it happens (privately) or it doesn't (mostly doesn't), men ejaculate - but still may not experience any kind of mind-blowing orgasm. Ejaculation is not necessarily the same as orgasm. Indeed, the Don Juan Condition may be due to precisely this disjunction. I would go so far to say that the whole thrust of civilisation depends on the discontinuity between ejaculation and orgasm in men, and the consequent, contingent neuroses.

I am one of those who have ejaculated without any orgasm. Indeed I have very rarely achieved anything more than yet another feeling of "so what ?". This is why my ridiculously late discovery of another man who feels like me - literally. Our 'only' activity is 'mere' kissing, licking and mutual nuzzling of groins and perinea and armpits, which lasts for hours, very pleasantly, with little drinks and nibbles and spacious, flowy music. We both remarked that we felt that we had been wanting to do this sort of thing since we were little children. But it was of course taboo. And is still taboo in this strange world. We do not ejaculate, and the non-ejaculation is much better, indeed much more satisfying than the ejaculations we have had. There is a lesson in this, psycho-socio-biological, which would be worth learning in the morass of emotions, imperatives, goals and taboos that surround simple sensuality in 'advanced' cultures, especially monotheistic ones.

The metasexuality which my friend and I share is what would have been called Chastity in mediæval times, whether performed by both sexes or just one. For the important thing was penetration - so anything else was "just" affection. Maybe even Caritas + Castitas. So monasteries had a lot of bed-hopping, for reasons of warmth, comfort and gentle affection - plus a lot of mutual masturbation, I'm sure. But even that would have been regarded as a minor sin in the circumstances - more a lapse of discipline - until and unless it got out of hand, so to speak.

As indeed it did, to judge from the images of sin on 12th century churches. But those carvings far more often feature acrobats and entertainers as performers of 'unnatural' behaviour, along with animals playing musical instruments, drunkards, calumniators and gluttons. Representations of pædophilia do not exist at all. Images of buggery are extremely rare, which strongly suggests that the practice was rare. And male exhibitionists very often have simian features, which is a slur against Muslims (from Barbary where the apes are) as much as against concupiscence.

And so we return to pornography - of a very curious kind: the illustration of sin as sin, and not as titillation. Would that modern pornography had this aim, and was as ingenuous and as ingenious as the sculptures of the 12th century.