Two Four One: Gallery

There is a question that occurs to me tonight: what are we permitted to desire?

Of course, asking that question immediately leads back to another, more basic one: permitted by whom?

I think the answer is, simply enough, social media. Social media has become the gallery of hooded figures passing judgment on us all. Cancel culture, call-out culture--- whatever the term, social media has become an externalized superego, the external voice of social shame. Twenty years ago, what you did in public could be judged by your friends, certainly, and by the relatively few people who physically saw you. You weren't yet judged by an audience of potentially scores of thousands.

It's possible that a generation ago, guilt meant more than shame. How you judged yourself meant more than what strangers thought--- if only because there were so few strangers who were aware of you or who were physically close enough to see anything you did. And now we've displaced the right to issue judgments to the people who view your social media.

Right now, most of us have some kind of social media presence. Not so much here, mind you, but at places like Twitter or FB, places designed for interaction. Judgment has become much more externalized. Social disapproval, social exclusion--- all that has become much more weighty. There are more voices in your ears telling you that what you think, what you desire, what you do and are is unacceptable and shameful.

Tonight's question is simple: what are we permitted to desire? And more--- how are we allowed to articulate that desire? 

When you look at a potential partner, a potential lover, what are you allowed to want? Here in the age of the gender wars, can you say that you want anything specific? Can you say that you like a particular set of physical or social qualities? Age, height, weight, eye colour, hair colour--- are you allowed to have preferences? Are you  required to justify your preferences? Are you even allowed to justify your tastes? Can you even express desire without being told by angry, unknown voices that you have no right to feel anything at all?

I've said this before, but it feels much harder now than it did twenty years ago to even talk about desire. Once upon a time, discussing fantasies and sharing memories of past adventures would have been part of any enjoyable date, of any courtship ritual. Who can do that now? The ghosts in the gallery are there waiting to call you out, to cancel you--- and they needn't actually be lurking on your smartphone or your laptop. They're on the devices of everyone around you. They're sitting invisibly at your shoulder, waiting for you to make that first mistake.

The ghosts in the gallery have no clear set of standards for judging you. Their point is that doing anything at all is wrong. Being there is wrong. Any choice excludes and marginalizes, they'll say. Any courtship is coercive. Any social time spent together is an imposition on someone's time. Any sexual preference--- positions, places,  fetishes ---is wrong. Physical desire itself is wrong, and certainly coercive to discuss. Pleasure is not just seen as a zero-sum thing demanded of someone else, pleasure is regarded as suspect all on its own, as a concept.

To write about sex and pleasure, to write about courtships and explorations--- that's no longer acceptable. The voices in the gallery can tell you with derision and vitriol that talking about those things makes you complicit in oppression.  Feeling desire is something that must be suppressed, and discussing it must be cancelled. So the gallery voices say.

And right now no one is defending the idea of desire.

Two Four Zero: Median

There's a phrase that I've been noticing these last few months: "mediocre white men". I'm not sure where it began, though my own reading is that I first saw it applied to authors--- and then to figures in politics and corporate life. The initial usage, I think, was based on the idea that women writers, professionals, politicians were being ignored and overlooked in favor of less talented people whose claim to success was largely that they were male. There is also the idea that mediocre white men are likely to be angrily defensive and entitled about success. I've seen this as a mock prayer meme at Twitter and elsewhere: "Oh Lord, give me the boundless self-confidence of a mediocre white man".

I'm not commenting here on the political usage, or even on the usage inside professional life or the literary world. What I will comment on is how the term has been extended into social--- sexual ---life.   I've been seeing the term--- "mediocre white man" ---appear at Twitter in tweets where women discuss their love lives and the men they're with or have been with. It seems that most male performance is rated as "mediocre", and male attempts at introduction and seduction are laughingly dismissed as mediocre.

I'll admit that the word terrifies me. I was brought up to believe that any grade, any rating, any judgment of my own performance that was less than outstanding was a failure and was totally shameful. And I was brought up to believe that a mediocre grade was worse than a failing grade. Not that, say, a 50/100 on a math exam was ever acceptable, but a 75/100 was somehow more shameful. Being a failure was bad, but just being someone in the middle of the pack was somehow worse. Call that one of the reasons why I've always shied away from things I knew I wouldn't be good at. Success was mandatory--- that's a given. But the real fear was ending up just being one of the faceless, nameless people who were just getting by, who weren't worth noticing.

There are a lot of things in that description that I still have to unwind. Let's just say for the moment that I am terrified of being judged 'mediocre'. Failing outright seems less shameful. If I took a girl to bed and experienced systems failure, if I couldn't achieve and maintain an erection, I'd be angry at myself, certainly, and there would probably be stammered apologies. But I'd have a Plan B. I'd know that I had a chance to redeem myself. If we had sex and the girl sneered at my performance as 'mediocre', I'd flee the bedroom and maybe the city. There's no coming back from having her tell all her friends (and maybe everyone on Twitter) that I was merely 'mediocre'.

Once upon a time, in a darkened bedroom in another city, a young companion and I were talking about how we came to our particular sexual interests. I confided in her that sometimes I thought that I found S/M attractive not just for its class markers (French novels, elegant chateaux, expensive accoutrements) but because it was something where I understood the criteria for judgment. I knew how to construct narratives and scenarios, I knew how to use blindfolds and candle wax and ice cubes and riding whips. I didn't have to be judged on my body or its performance. She had the grace not to say anything one way or the other about my flesh. She did kiss me and tell me she loved the stories I told, the stories I made her part of.

These days, here in the age of the gender wars,  here as a gentleman of a certain age, I'm increasingly terrified of being dismissed as mediocre. And I'm not sure what the criteria are. I'm not rich, I'm not at the top of my profession, I'm not someone with any social presence or value. I've spent a long time thinking that I was a reasonably proficient lover. I'm good at intelligence work, at ferreting out information. So I've applied that to books and films and blog entries to find out what skills I need to hone.  I'm not sure that's good enough now, and I'm not sure that it was ever good enough. I'm finding it harder and harder to think that I wasn't lied to all these years, that I was never any good and could never be any good.

I do not know how to avoid being tagged as a "mediocre white man". I don't know what the rules are, or what the criteria for judgment are, or how to avoid judgments that would keep me from trying ever again. Not ever trying again could very well be the best course. That's certainly something to consider.

Two Three Nine: Carriage House

I was at coffee this morning when I thought of someone from my past. I'll call her Ms. South Brooklyn--- the last place I recall her living. I haven't heard from her in a decade, and she must be in her mid-thirties now. She was once a fine writer, and she planned to finish a degree at Columbia and become a writer--- fiction, essays on culture and politics. I really have no clue as to what she's doing now. In some ways it's easiest to assume that she was abducted by aliens.

I'm not sure why I'm thinking of her today. It may be that I'm reading Susan Choi's new "Trust Exercise", and some of the scenes with precocious teens in an elite performing arts curriculum reminded me of Ms. South Brooklyn in her reminiscences of her own teen days. She told wonderful tales of her past, told them both to me and to readers of a 'zine she published long ago.

The heroine of "Trust Exercise" thinks at one point of the boy she's been obsessed with since freshman year in high school. His family is moneyed, and their house in upscale Atlanta has a detached carriage house. Ms. South Brooklyn told me once that she'd had a boy she was obsessed with in her mid-teens who'd lived in a well-off suburb (Silver Spring?) of DC in a reno'd mansion with a carriage house. Ms. South Brooklyn would go down by train from her father's house in Pennsylvania to her mother's place in Baltimore, and she'd make a point of breaking her return trip to dash out to Maryland and see the boy.

The boy himself means nothing, really.  He used to be on the phone with Ms. South Brooklyn all night, having the long, complicated conversations bookish teens had in those days. They'd do phone sex, of course, but they'd also spin out plans for running off together to northern Italy or Tokyo. He means nothing to the story. What matters is the carriage house.

The boy refused to live under the same roof as his parents, and so he stayed in the carriage house. Ms. South Brooklyn would visit him there. I'll assume it was more-or-less clandestine, with the boy's parents (parent, maybe--- I think divorced parents are a given here) kept nominally in the dark. They'd sit and drink wine by candlelight and read one another's poetry and stories. They'd have sex on the sofa--- on the sofa far more often than in the boy's bed. She told me that she'd spend a day walking through the little carriage house topless in skinny jeans or tiny running shorts, that being topless like that made her feel far more daring than being naked or wrapped in a bedsheet or a post-shower towel.  She recalled standing bare-breasted at the windows of the carriage house and looking out at the trees and the street and wondering if she'd have the nerve ever to go outside like that with a wineglass. I don't know if she ever did that. I know that in late high school she took up sleeping naked in order to feel more "European" or "sophisticated", but being topless always made her feel far more sexual than being naked.

In a better world, she'd have told me many more stories of her days of exploration and discovery. She'd have told me how many of the autobiographical stories in her 'zine were actually true.  She became very political while at Columbia, and I suspect that her interests these last ten years have all been about social issues and socialist organizing than about erotica. That's why I'm noting her stories here. They were lovely things, and full of alluring images. Imagining her topless in just a pair of  faded skinny jeans or cut-off short shorts, standing at a French window or walking in late-summer sunlight under trees in the carriage house garden--- that's lovely. She makes a lovely character for stories or films. And so I do want her stories archived here, archived against some kind of distant future.

Now I will note that she told me other amazing stories, too. She told me a couple of versions of something that happened just after high school. She was staying at her mother's and had discovered a hipster vinyl store and become a regular there. There was a boy who worked there who became the one who recommended most of the music (ambient, often Scandinavian, electronica)--- mid or late twenties, tall, lanky, with just a touch of a West Indian accent ---on whom she developed a major crush. She told me that once she made a point of planning an encounter with him.

She went into the store on a morning where heavy rains were keeping most people home specifically to seduce him--- thank him, she said. She told the story in more than one version, of course. The rain was a constant in both versions. Heavy rain, with her caught by it just enough to make her auburn hair messy and wet and for her white singlet to show under her summer blazer that she was bra-less. In one version, no one at all was on the street on in the store other than the boy she fancied, and she thanked him on her knees in an empty aisle and then sat on a work table with her jeans off and wrapped her legs round him while he took her. In the other version, the boy was there with a co-worker who smirked and waved the two of them into the little store office where she went down on him, although the boy was a bit too nervous to risk full-on sex.  Two versions, and I'm not sure how much credence to give to either. Easy enough to see either version as a film in my head, and I'd like to hope that one of the versions was true.

For reasons that anyone can figure out here in the current political climate, erotica may be the last thing people think about. With the republic collapsing into authoritarianism and social advances being undone, tales of sexual adventure don't seem important at all. But it is hard to give up the thought that tales of discovery and pleasure and adventure do matter and that they're worth archiving for future dreams.

Two Three Eight: Coffee

I do ask myself sometimes--- what do I want in a relationship? How do I see relationships working? I suppose that comes up most often on weekend mornings. My usual weekend morning begins with walking downtown to one of the coffeeshops near the river with a book and my notebooks. I'll sit and watch couples and try to imagine their stories. I've always tried to imagine the stories of lovely girls at other tables, to ask myself who they are and what they're doing and what brought them out so early.  I do it with couples, too. Who are these people? What did they do last night? What brought them out this early? What are they talking about? How long have they been together? What's the nature of their relationship?

The ones I may envy most are what I've always called Laptop Couples. A couple in their mid or late twenties, there at a table with their laptops or tablets, talking to one another over coffee, looking up to trade stories from whatever each has on screen. Twenty years ago they might have been at the same table, but with sections of the Sunday New York Times rather than devices.  With straight couples, the guy is inevitably stubbled. The girl is in short shorts or leggings and a rumpled man's shirt. I somehow imagine both in reading glasses.

Are they married or living together? I'd like to think of them as partnered rather than married. I'm old enough to remember when living together had a certain edginess about it, and that still gives a hint of spice to relationships I imagine. Though sometimes I imagine them as simply dating for a while, and becoming used to spending weekends together while going back to their respective flats on Sunday nights.

Laptop Couples do inspire my envy. That's how I'd love to spend a weekend morning with a lover. Flat whites or chocolate cappuccino, buttered croissants or coffee cake freshly warmed. The girl in one of my dress shirts and black leggings or tiny running shorts. Each of us surfing the web or reading on our e-book apps, the two of us exchanging stories we've found or commenting on what our Twitter feeds are showing that morning. Sometimes I imagine early-morning Mimosas, too. I imagine her asking me about clues in the crosswords she's doing or telling me about a book review she's found (a new Susan Choi novel, a new Sally Rooney short story). We'd grin at each other and pass stories back and forth: have you seen this? have you read this column, this blog? We'd still be thinking of waking up together, of walking together down to a cafe.

It's a quiet image, and one that focuses on things I care about: reading, conversation, a sense of one another's presence, the soft haze of a morning-after. I've dreamed of being part of a Laptop Couple for a long time. It does sometimes leave me empty when I watch couples interacting with a quiet ease over their MacBooks.  Coffee and a book all on my own--- I am used to that. But I miss the idea of a Young Companion who'd share a morning and what's out there over the aether with me.

Two Three Seven: Reminiscence

I read a week or so ago about the Nineties electronica musician Moby--- a long string of mocking and hostile pieces about his just-released memoirs. I hadn't thought of Moby in years and years. I recall liking a song he did called "South Side". I liked the video, too--- Gwen Stefani made a great appearance in it. But I hadn't heard anything he'd done in...well...easily a dozen years. Likely more. But his memoirs have just appeared, and he was attacked all across social media.

It seems that Moby had some sort of relationship with the young Natalie Portman when she was eighteen and he was twenty years older. He described it as "dating". She responded that they hadn't "dated", that he was just some creepy older man who'd hung around her.

It also seems that he dated the young Lana Del Rey a few times, and she spent time mocking him as just another middle-aged white man who was too moneyed, too creepy, and too old. At some point she laughed at him and told him that when the revolution came, he'd be amongst the guillotined. I had to laugh at that, of course. The young Lana Del Rey telling me she'd have me guillotined? That's an unexpectedly hot image. LDR threatening me with the guillotine? I'd count that as a successful dating moment.

What bothers me is the sheer rage out there about age differentials. So many women on social media were savagely angry at Moby for daring to feel desire for someone younger. Any attention from anyone older, they insisted, was by definition creepy and disgusting.

My own tastes run to Young Companions. That's been true since ever I was in my later twenties. It's true now and it'll be true when I'm eighty. That won't change.

Now I have been lucky. I've known a fair number of lovely girls who've found my age to be either irrelevant or a plus. I've been fortunate about that. I have no idea how many girls out there are members of what a friend at McGill in Montreal used to call the Secret Tribe. I'm all too aware that it's a niche thing.  Nonetheless, I've had young companions in my life, and I hadn't been exposed to any of the anger and disdain showered on Moby. Girls have said yes or no, gone out with me or not, slept with me or not. But none of them ever looked at me with anything like the hostility and contempt in the tweets and blog entries about Moby and Ms. Portman.

I did phone a couple of the girls I knew when they were beginning undergraduates.  Both were a bit exasperated. Both told me that if I'd been repulsive or creepy when they first met me, I'd have been made very, very aware of it. One made it very clear that I'd been her choice exactly because of my age, that she expected me to do certain things--- teach her things, bring her places, make her feel daring and wicked ---and that it was my age that enabled me to do them with her. Both reminded me that they'd known me since the early Noughts and that they were still speaking to me, which should be a clear sign that I had some value then and now.

That should've made me feel better, but somehow it didn't. It wasn't that I didn't believe them. They're both fiercely bright and straightforward and  self-aware, and I should've been proud that they thought of me even now as a good memory. I'm somehow not, though.

It's probably some complicated cocktail of vanity, self-loathing, and fear for the future. I've had lovers who were amused and intrigued by my age and the things that went with it. That's luck--- it really is.  And right now I'm terrified that my luck will run out, that the niche girls I've met and loved all these years will vanish. I'm terrified that any time I speak to a lovely girl at the next table or the next barstool she'll recoil in disgust. I'm terrified that from now on, my touch will be regarded with derision and contempt.

I can't imagine life with the ability to flirt and play, the chance to move through the rituals of romance and seduction. But in some access of sexual hypochondria, I can't imagine that my presence and touch aren't as appalling as the women attacking Moby believe. I don't know what to do about that except give up any belief that I might have value to niche girls, any belief that I might be a valued lover.

Two Three Six: Interlocutors

I ran across an article the other day lamenting that men, because they have no male friends or social support networks, rely on their wives and girlfriends and partners to keep them emotionally stable, that they burden and wear down their significant others with their psychological needs. A persuasive article, mind you. And it made a real point--- masculinity as defined in contemporary North America leaves no real place for men to develop support networks amongst themselves.

I've said that before at this site. A North American male--- straight, white ones certainly ---past about twenty-four or twenty-five is socially discouraged from maintaining any close male friendships.  Having close male friends past that point leaves one open to accusations of being closeted gay or else a man-child who can't commit to a "real" relationship. You know the term I use: either a Peter Pan or a paederast. And so men throw all their psychological needs onto their girlfriends or partners--- one more weight for the women in their lives to carry.

The article made very good points. There's no denying that. Still, though--- it is disheartening. Dispiriting, anyway.

I sat at my office desk reading the article and felt vaguely guilty. Vaguely empty, too. Truth to tell,  I can't think of any male friends with whom I'd discuss anything personal or emotionally deep. There are a few people with whom I'd trade stories over drinks--- tell tales from books I'd read, bring up odd   bits of information on line, talk about films ---but none with whom I'd discuss anything approaching within cannon-shot of intimate. If I told any stories about myself, they'd be the kind that fall into the category of once-upon-a-time about places gone or adventures in my university days.

So there's that much truth in the article. There's no one I'd invite over for drinks, no one whom I'd call and suggest going anyplace. If I made a list tonight of people I'd count as friends, there's not one who's been to my flat, not one whose home address I know. I have female neighbours who run back and forth between apartments--- cooking, having drinks, sitting outside and talking 'til midnight. That's just not something I can do.

The article also made me vaguely ashamed of ever thinking of long conversations with girls who've been friends-and-lovers. I read the article and found myself deciding not to send emails or make phone calls or send texts. For much of my life friends-and-lovers and I spent long nights on the phone, talking and flirting and having  extended, complicated, random conversations about anything and everything. Looking back, I feel somehow guilty. I feel guilty about being an emotional burden, or about taking up someone's time or emotional energy.

I'd always thought that one of the key reasons for having a girlfriend, a lover, a partner was that you'd have someone to be part of those late-night talks. I'd always thought that being able to have an interlocutor, a confidante, a late-night voice was a key part of a relationship.  Late-night conversations made so many things better, offered a sense of belonging, a sense of comfort and safety and value. Sharing confidences, sharing stories, offering support and belief--- those things were so much of why you wanted a lover, a partner, an affair. I treasured those conversations, and now I feel ashamed of them. Nowadays those long late-night talks sound more and more like an imposition, like a burden and an emotional drain. Asking for time at all sounds like coercion.

So here we are: unwilling now to contact anyone, to call or write or text or do anything that could be construed as asking for anyone's time or energy.  I find that I can't do that, and I can't contact anyone, especially someone who's a friend-and-lover. I won't be a burden, and asking  for time, advice, support, sympathy--- that's no longer acceptable. Unburdening oneself is a burden to others; sharing one's intimacies is an imposition. I can't--- won't ---do that.

Two Three Five: Identities

Now's here's a complicated and odd tale I heard today--- a long email from an old friend in a distant city. She has a long-term friend there, someone male, someone of a certain age, someone whom she's known professionally and quasi-romantically for years. Quasi-romantically meaning that she's slept with him a few times over he years. I've never met him, though I've heard her mention his name before.

She'd written me about him back a couple of years ago to say that she was amazed, that her friend had taken her to a very expensive restaurant, ordered the kind of wine I'll never be able to afford, looked at her with grave intensity, and told her that all the time he'd known her, all the way back to high school, he'd had a Secret Life. She was amazed. She prides herself on her gaydar, and while the circles she moves in socially have a substantial number of gay men, she'd never guessed that her friend was among them. Well, he told her about all the byzantine details of his Secret Life: adventures, encounters, older (and moneyed) lovers when he was quite young, haut-gay clubs and parties. She didn't know the name, but I'd have said it was all very like early Andrew Holleran, very "Dancer From The Dance" (the Seventies novel that was tagged as "The Gay Gatsby"). Great stories, apparently. She was entranced by it all, and spent hours on the phone late at night listening to his memories, commiserating with him about older men he'd loved and lost as a boy, sighing over his memories of a time thirty-odd years ago when being gay still had an air of the forbidden.

There was just one small thing, she told me. She'd found out this week that...well...he'd been lying all along, that he'd never had a life amongst the gay demimonde. She wasn't clear that he'd ever been gay or had a gay (or bi) life at all. As best she could tell, it was all a complete imposture.

The question she had was...why? Why had he done it? Was he hoping she'd introduce him to a chic gay world he'd been too afraid to join on his own? Was it some ploy to get her (or other girls) to sleep with him to, well, reclaim him for the Home Team?

My own understanding is that he's gone to ground: blocked her number, vanished from social media, disappeared from the places she thought she might find him. That's almost as strange as the imposture. My friend and I have both known people who pretended to be rich, or Ivy-educated, or British, or artists. We've certainly known gay men who pretended (even now, in the Year Nineteen) to be straight. But this was new.  I'd known girls who pretended to be lesbians to ward off unwelcome male advances, but that's only tactical and temporary, not like creating a whole life, complete with named lovers. And I'd never run across anyone male pretending to be gay when they weren't, even in the here-and-now.

I've always been a fan of literary impostors (Fr. Rolfe, Kurban Said, Sir Edmund Backhouse), but I don't understand quite what his pay-off would've been. Party invitations? He already had those professionally. Entree to chic events? He had those, too. A baroque way to leverage presumed gayness to get girls? That would just be awfully complicated. Some weird fetish about imaginary gay sex? That would be even more complicated, although he did spend lots of time telling her all about the details of encounters and adventures back into his early teens. Maybe it was just boredom and frustration with a  haut-bourgeois life edging its way into his fifties.

Maybe--- maybe ---it was a life he'd longed for, or one that he'd created and come to believe. That happens, I suppose, with lots of complex impostures.  There's a question--- how far did he take the imposture? Did he ever take a male lover? Was there ever someone on his arm--- and if so, did his companion know or suspect what was happening?

My friend told me that she thought I could tell her something, that all those biographies and thriller novels I read about people who've taken up masks and new lives would give me some clue as to why her friend had done this. She's hurt as much as anything else, hurt and puzzled and halfway afraid that her friend is having some sort of dissociative breakdown.

My own questions here are probably self-evident. How did he craft the stories? Where was he getting the names and places? And, too...how did my friend find out? How and when did she see through the imposture? I'd really like to know that. Did he tell her? Did she find out on his own? Did friends of them both reveal something to her? What gave the game away?

I am perplexed  by it all, and saddened for my friend. If you're out there anywhere over the aether, read this and tell me what you think. Why this imposture? What does it mean? What would the backstory be? I'm hoping someone out there has thoughts on this.