Split sexuality

A “recent” study (I’m using the term loosely here as the study was performed 15 years ago but is circulating again in the mainstream media – slow news day much?) from the University of Georgia found that, when shown gay porn, homophobic men tend to get raging stiffies.

I’ll give you a moment so you can process this bombshell….

The fact that bigots and homophobes have a certain level of attraction to dude sex isn’t exactly anything new, as any Republican can attest to. Mark Foley tried to flip through some pages, George Rekers hired himself a rentboy when he wasn’t busy driving self-hating gay men to suicide, and Larry Craig went trolling for peen in an airport bathroom, because there’s nothing hotter than doing it in a stall next to a 300-pound Midwesterner dropping a deuce.

But the thing is, this isn’t really a phenomenon peculiar to gay men: the plains of sexuality are littered with hypocrisy and double-talk. It’s a phenomenon I like to call Split-Sexuality: a quirk in the system that causes someone’s entire personality to reverse itself the moment they’re between sheets with another person.

It’s the only explanation I can think of so far for the drastic divide, the “wide stance” if you will, between what a person publicly claims to find arousing and what they secretly nail in the privacy of their bedrooms/hotel rooms/public lavatories. How many bossy, take-charge men turn into submissive bottoms in the bedroom? How many demure housewives are hiding sex dungeons behind their white picket fences? How many of my former Jesuit high school teachers have messaged me on Facebook offering to pay me $500 to poop in their mouths? (Hint: six.)

The problem with this, if it isn’t abundantly clear already, is that when you start oppressing what is natural, you wind up with something decidedly unnatural. A person’s bedroom personality is, to a certain extent, more representative of their true personality than whatever they portray when they know people are watching. When you start suppressing yourself out of a sense of duty or to come across as “normal,” you end up with homophobia, self-hatred and, in extreme cases, suicide.

One thing I’ve always believed firmly is that sex is not complicated; the people trying to figure it out are. Sex is supposed to be fun, but more often than not, people just end up using it as a blank canvas on which to project their own insecurities… not that there’s anything wrong with that. But sex in practice isn’t meant to be cerebral; it’s meant to be an act of two people sticking things in other things until they cum. When you start shoehorning arbitrary promises into the mix, it’s not going to be fun. If that’s too complicated, think of it this way: if it doesn’t hurt anyone and it gives you a boner, just go for it and leave everything else out of it.