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.

One Four Four: Counterfeits

It's not my intention to get involved in the Trans Wars. Oh, I do enjoy watching the Social Justice Cult dissolve into internecine battles between trans* and radfem factions. However not? I spent all those years reading about internal feuds and factional bloodletting inside political groups.  I love the dark comedy of it all, the Running Dogs of the Revisionists ranting against the Left Deviationists, the endless streams of over-the-top abuse, the ever more arcane demands for purity of thought.  As much as I enjoy all that, mind you, I don't want to get involved. It's all too bitter for me. It's not that I don't know that I'm a villain anyway. You know the string of accusations: white, male, cis-and-cis-presenting, straight, and of course over thirty. And, yes, I do enjoy calling the trans* faction the Asterisk Thieves. Mocking that asterisk is something I won't give up. Nonetheless, I don't want to join in any of the faction fights.

Oh, I suppose I come down on the side of it all that says biology and architecture matter. I support anyone's right to live out the lives they want, to present themselves as anything they want. I certainly support anyone's right to full social and political rights and to be free from violent attacks. But I won't give up thinking that architecture matters.

All of which leads to what I think of as Authenticity Fetish. It's not enough to just choose to do something, or to present yourself as something. You can't choose to be something--- that's not authentic.  There has to be some deep, inner reality that the visible self projects. It's not enough to say you've chosen to present yourself a certain way, to play out a role in social life. You have to be a real whatever. Think of the anger that's deployed against girls who had LUG affairs by radical lesbians. Think of the anger deployed against anyone who says they moved between gay and straight in whatever direction--- you have to be real! Choice and whim and fashion aren't allowed. You have to admit that you are something; it's not enough to do something. You can't be just trans and present yourself in a way that feels comfortable.  You can't just be male or female and wear the mask that makes you feel comfortable in your social life. You can't just present; you have to be a real woman or a real man. You can't wear a social costume; you have to be authentic.

Whenever the Asterisk Thieves hold forth about their own authenticity, I sometimes hear their disdain for anyone who's not authentically trans. I hear their contempt for people who cross-dress but don't see themselves as "really" another gender. The word "fetishist" gets thrown around with anger and derision--- used with contempt for people who aren't authentic, who present as they do for sexual reasons. It's the same kind of contempt you sometimes hear used in gay circles about people who are bi--- you're not real, you can't sit with us unless you're committed to what you really are.

That takes away the meaning of "transition", too, doesn't it? You can't have a story of metamorphosis of becoming someone new. You have to assert that you're just expressing who you really are. You don't get to have a new self or a new life.

Authenticity Fetish, I call it. The need to reject anyone who isn't really something, who puts on and takes off social poses. The need to assert that you're really something, that you aren't just doing a social presentation that you enjoy.  And it's not something I understand. It seems that it's not enough to say that you intend to live as if--- you have to assert that you're already, always, and ever some underlying thing.

I won't get involved in the wars.  But the need to insist that you're really something or demand that others are really something is a fetish all its own. We're creatures who know how to create masks and stories, but it's not enough to strike a pose. You can't admit that architecture and biology  matter but say that you intend to present in a pose you like. That's not enough. No one's allowed to just strike a pose. You must be Authentic. Whatever you have to deny, whatever you have to demand from others.

Ninety-Three: Characters

I do think that I'd have to craft any erotica that I might write into some very specific forms.

The erotica I'd write would have to have an s/m storyline, as much for the element of ritualized sex as for the s/m itself.  I'd want there to be an sense of the very formalized about the story line. There would be a sense of cool (or even cold) formality and ritual. The characters would be able to look at what they were doing with a kind of stylized distance, a kind of abstraction. There could be romance, and even longing, but there'd always be a sense of distance. My characters would have read about the things they hoped to do long before they ever did any of them, and they'd always see themselves as being part of a story.

The characters would be age-disparate. There's never any question about that. The girl who's the heroine would always be much younger than the hero. However not? The hero would always be me, at least in some ways. The heroine would be a much younger, though she'd always be fiercely bright and well-read. Even as an undergraduate girl, as a co-ed, she'd understand the literary references implicit in the affair. It would be important that she knew those things, that she was aware that s/m existed, that she knew what any affair with the hero would involve.

My heroine would be young, yes--- perhaps just barely into her twenties. But she'd have lived inside books all her life, and she'd be visualizing herself as a character in a novel or a film. She'd have read enough to know what her older admirer wanted from her. The word "predator" wouldn't frighten her at all.

There's a moment that I'd insist on seeing, by the way. Imagine that early-autumn night in the city, and imagine her there on the stoop of a brownstone, holding hands with the hero, kissing him,  and knowing what's waiting upstairs in his apartment. She puts out her cigarette and stands and pulls him up by his hand. "Show me," she'd say. "Show me." That's very much what I'd want--- a girl who's willing to explore, who's prepared to overcome any fears with the desire to try new things, to just dive into experience. That would be important--- that she'd be willing to go up those stairs as an adventure.

He is older--- that's a given. How much older? Well...enough to make their affair suspect in most people's eyes. Enough of an age difference for their affair to be transgressive. But it's important that he not see her as a child or as simply a plaything. He admires her courage and her intelligence as much as he loves her long legs and sharp, visible hipbones and ribs. Whatever he wants to do with her, he wants her to be part of it, to know that she sees herself as a character in so many stories.

I can think about what's likely to happen upstairs--- silk blindfolds, silk bindings, riding whips and candle wax. I can think about those things. But what matters is that the girl who's the heroine walks up those stairs because she wants to see new worlds and new experiences, and that the hero knows that his own role in the story demands that he offer her up formal, ritualized experiences.

It's no less important that they talk, that the affair demands long conversations late at night. The story can be very explicit, but to the two principals, it's also about long conversations, about stories and dreams spun out late in the night. It's important that they know that each of them is creating backstories for what's happening.  For every kiss on a bare hipbone, for every new position and every enacted ritual, there must be long, intricate conversations. They'll be deeply enamoured of one another, deeply in lust and in love. But they'll be all-to-aware of what they're doing together, all-too-aware of being part of something very formalized.

I'm not sure at all if this makes any sense. The story I'd want to tell would be very passionate, but a passion that's mediated through literary references, through an awareness of all the books and films that my characters have experienced.  My characters would approach one another through their own knowledge of those things. Is that erotica, no matter they might do in bed? That's a question that I'll open up to any readers--- does self-awareness blight erotica? What are your thoughts on that?

Anyway... It's hard to imagine erotica that isn't about two people who want to experience new things, who are aware of so many things in books and films that they need in their own lives.  Erotica for me requires a kind of distance, an awareness of sets and setting, an awareness of what sets and props the characters have chosen--- brand names, despite anything Remittance Girl may have said. My characters would always want to be part of a literary world that embraces everything they do with one another.

Erotica for them has to be about be about dreams rather than flesh...or at least about something formal that's more than the mere collision of flesh.

I do wish I new how to write all of this down--- to shape a story around the characters I've seen in my mind's eye all these years.

Thirty-Four: Frames

I was watching girls in bikinis down by the pool last evening when it did occur to me that I was feeling a sense of exasperation and annoyance watching them. I thought at first it might be a hostility born of sour grapes. After all, they weren't with me, and I'd have felt very much the intruder if I'd gone down to the pool. I'm not likely to fit in to a poolside scene, and there was no chance I could speak to them. But when I thought a bit more about it, it did occur to me that something else was happening as well.

I was watching the bikini girls from the window by my writing desk, and it did strike me that the window was part of it all. I could see the girls swimming and sunning and laughing together, see them drinking bottled beers and chilled gin drinks. I was exasperated and annoyed that they weren't topless in the sun, or skinny-dipping in the pool, or drunkenly kissing one another. I was annoyed that, as flimsy as their bikinis were, no one's top came off when she dived into the pool. There's no reason why any of those things should happen in real life...though those things would've happened in almost any film. I was annoyed that what I was watching wasn't playing itself out the way it would have in a film. The window was a frame for what I was watching. Sitting at my desk and looking out through the glass was exactly like watching something on a television screen. They were framed in the window, centered there as a scene.

Social programming, I suppose. Anything seen in a frame, anything seen on or through what might be a screen, isn't daily life. It's supposed to be scripted and edited. It's supposed to be a story told to entertain or excite or amuse the viewer. Too many years of living inside books and films have left me much less able to distinguish what I see on a television or laptop screen from what I see framed in my window.  The bikini girls weren't real-life girls who live near my flat, they were characters in a film, and one that I was exasperated with for its poor writing.  It wasn't just sour grapes that they weren't with me. It was that I was watching a flawed film, a film that couldn't hold my interest. I suppose I see far too much of life that way.