SEXIS WRONG

us—gay men and lesbians with good educations and upperclass
backgrounds or middle-class jobs—are easily placated.
Assimilationist gay activists think in terms of seeking equality.
But what does equality mean in a society that is designed
to maintain wide gaps between classes, genders, sexual
orientations, and races? Trying to reform the systems that
punish people for wanting the wrong kind of sex or people
whose gender expression deviates from the norm is like putting
rotten meat back into the freezer, then defrosting it and
assuming it will now be fit to eat. I want fresh meat, and so
should you.
Not ready to be a queer revolutionary? Go on your merry way,
then. All the more high dudgeon for me to consume on my
lonesome. Oh, dammit, I told the waiter to bring the irony on
the side, not ladled all over it like gravy. Yuck. Dear me, now
the manager’s headed this way, and he says, “Do we have a
problem here?”
There are still far too many deviants
who can’t see beyond the edges of
their own oppression, to see where
all the freaks are connected in a
crazy quilt of sexual repression and
misrepresentation.
It’s a big, big problem. It’s bigger than the one that got away.
Even bigger than the one you had last night at Blow Buddies.
We’re a society in need of a revolution, but the left has been
terrorized into silence on that topic. You don’t need a Weatherman
to know that there aren’t any more Weathermen. The
hard rain Bob Dylan sang about did indeed come, but it fell
only on the people who could not take shelter in the Establishment.
And now, forty years after the war in Vietnam, the
United States is once more embroiled in an illegal war on foreign
soil. The only people who believe in armed uprisings are
the pale-faced crazies who want to kill all of the fags, Jews,
and...oh, you know the whole sick, sad list of hatreds. There
are days when I almost wish they would reinstate the draft,
because it will take something like that to make Americans
desperate enough to learn something about radical politics
and stop watching television long enough to fight back.
But this is just about sex. Sex and gender. Two things that
have nothing to do with war. And if you believe that, you deserve
to be an Army reservist who is getting called back to
Iraq even though he’s already served a tour of duty there, big
boy. Uncle Sam is dressed up as Mae West, but he doesn’t
need to ask if you’re just glad to see him, because he put that
pistol in your pocket. Shoved it in there like a prison convict
named Killer puts it to a check-kiting, bubble-butted newbie.
You don’t want to be a victim doing time in a
military stockade, so you’re going to pick up
your weapon and drill somebody else. Flies
trapped in amber have more free agency.
But let’s get back to our more appetizing main
course of Vaseline and fudge-packing.
The problem is that I don’t even know how to start telling
you what the problem is. The repression of sexuality in this
country goes far beyond the homophobic stigma placed on
butt piracy, muffdiving, and cocksmoking. There’s a connection
between that taboo and the fear of nudity, the prohibition
against talking honestly with children and teenagers about
their bodies, the chipping away at abortion rights, and a multitude
of other expressions of sexual shame and fear of diversity.
That sexual repression is held in place by a multitude of
misogynist attacks on the equality, self-esteem, and safety
of women. There are related, complex, rigid, and punitive
standards for the expression of masculinity and femininity.
Racism and class oppression are intertwined through all of
these institutionalized forms of discrimination and cruelty. A
movement focused on gay rights—or feminism or transgendered
rights or sexual liberation—has far too narrow a scope
to elucidate these links or form alliances based upon resisting
social control.
The problem is that even though they’ve decriminalized sodomy
in Canada and authorized monogamous gay marriage in
Ontario, Canadian customs agents still seize books that depict
anal sex or images of bondage, fisting, or any sort of
sexual fun between two men or two women. There’s almost
no pornography depicting the bodies and desires of differently-gendered
people like me, so they don’t even need to
confiscate it to make my sex life invisible.
At the same time as the Supremes have given their blessing
to oral sex and anal sex and other alternatives to breeder
screwing in the dead-bug position, the Department of Justice
has declared a new war on “obscenity” in this country. You
can have queer sex (in private, with one other person over
the age of eighteen), but you’d better not photograph or videotape
it and sell those representations to other happy practitioners
of buggery. If sodomy is not a crime, just like eating
or sewing, making art about it should be as innocuous as a
photograph that accompanies a recipe or a television show
about quilting.
Our elected representatives continue to angle for ways to
get depictions of sex off the Internet, and that includes information
about birth control, abortion, and how to have sex
without getting infected with HIV, hepatitis, or other STDs.
Agencies that do HIV-prevention work are being accused of
320 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG