Journey to the In-Between - Page 5

Zeb's Whole Body

Well, if I'm a heterosexual queer, I know one thing: I'm not the only one. No matter how strange your experience is, no matter how unique it feels, you're not the only one having such an experience.

As it turns out, a friend of many years—let's call him Zeb—has made a similar journey, though how he did so he's never said. Nearing 60, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was due for surgery any day. Afterward, he'd no longer experience ejaculations, and, in all probability, would be incapable of an erection. My friend was freaked out about having cancer, but not disturbed about the sexual consequences of the prostate surgery. When I brought up the subject as gently as I could, Zeb, who's never been afflicted with delicacy, said, "I don't worry about that, Mike. I don't fuck with just my dick. I fuck with my whole body."

Fucking with your whole body is a graphic description of what I, being of an abstract bent, have called in-betweenness. Fucking with your whole body involves fucking with your whole psyche, not just a pet piece of it.

At most levels and expressions of Western culture, how sexuality is framed, defined, and presented is confined and misconceived. In heterosexually "straight" thought, sexuality tends to be dealt with only as part of something else—one element of a relationship, one element of a marriage. Lesbians, homosexuals, bisexuals, and gender-benders of all sorts—the queer spectrum—have tended to approach sexuality with far more imagination (forced to, no doubt, because they're defined by their sexual activity). By "imagination" I don't mean this or that kinky act. I mean a recognition that the sexual act is psychoactive, psychotropic, psychedelic, opening us to states of being unattainable by other means. In this view, sexuality isn't only something one does; it's someplace one goes: as Oshima said, a realm.

Put another way, sexuality is a means of communication in which what's communicated is sensory and imaginal, not easily transferable to the verbalizations of "relationship" or verbalizations of any kind. Zoe put it most succinctly: "Sex is a language. I speak it."

 

 

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