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February 14, 2006

Running After A Hat

Written not by me in response to "I Am A Gay Man" on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

"Is this the New Puritanism? I'd like to think I'm reading your most recent letter incorrectly, but it appears that what it's implicitly enjoining is a Victorian decorum about sex - all discussion of others' sexual habits to be made in respectful murmurs, always mindful of the psychological anguish that might be incurred by a derisive or dismissive comment.

No thanks. Our sexual antics have been one of the chief sources of human amusement time out of mind. Is there a richer field of anticlimactic disappointments, crushing humiliations, and farcical miseries? It's intimate blend of messy physical reality and mental ecstasy is the primary evidence for the thesis that God has sense of humor. From the earliest Greek playwrights, through Rabelais, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, to contemporary authors like Philip Roth and Martin Amis, the absurdities of sexual desire and sexual congress have been a mainstay of our theatre, novels, and films, not to mention the enduring oral tradition of office cooler humor.

Continue reading "Running After A Hat"

And now any such jibes which happen to be directed at homosexual behavior are to be banned under the blanket prohibition afforded by the cant phrase 'homophobic'? Sorry, but that's one manifesto I'm not signing on to.

Sexual tolerance means affording equality before the law to every citizen regardless of his sexual peculiarities. Surely it doesn't mean that where one finds some other person's sexual interests amusing, repellant, or unintelligible - whether foot fetishes, transvestitism, grotesquely large breasts, infantilism - one must needs keep all jokes to oneself in order to avoid causing discomfort?

As a heterosexual, I'm not troubled by any comic potential which may be inherent in the various forms of heterosexual congress; I won't construe jokes drawing on our quirks as prima facie evidence of hatred or intolerance. Here's hoping that your brave new world of sexual tolerance will not end up being as humorless as that of the fanatical Islamists whom you claim to find so dour.

'There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic--eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing--such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.' G.K. Chesterton"