Dancing gays - author's experiences at gay-lesbian dance - column

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by D. Keith Mano

HERE I AM, passing for homosexual at a Columbia first-Friday gayLesbian dance. Haven't felt quite so uncomfortable since Playboy made me wear drag down Main Street in Provineetown. Earl Hall-center for the other campus religions as well-is just about sold out on a bitter, sleety night. I'd shove through this mob, but I'm afraid someone might think I was getting fresh. My genderal compass is demagnetized: a clergy conference or two aside, I've never been around so many men whose motto was "Vive la similarite." There are Lesbians also (about one for every three dozen gay males) and all that wasted female talent can depress me. These young people seem particularly bright and intense. It's a national disaster that they've climbed out of the gene pool. 'But, worse yet, someone might recognize me. I'll be barred from the Columbia football locker room.

My first article assignment for NR, 16 or 17 years ago, was "Coming Out at Columbia." Gay people, back then, were maneuvering to secure lounge space on campus-after all, a considerable precinct had already been set aside (and segregated, liberal-style) for the black faction. At that time I wrote: "As goes Columbia-by 1980 there will be a gay lounge in every college in the -land." Not what you'd call a vatic breakthrough, that prediction. "By general consensus GPC [Gay People at Columbia] has improved the historically poor morale of gays on campus." Morale, this winter night in 1989, would seem to be just fine. There is some sense of cultural status now. Gayness, through those years, has been pretty generally acknowledged as a strange, but ineluctable, glitch in the human condition.

Being gay is both hard and dangerous. I gaze out at the floor and remind myself that there are two heartbroken parents for each dancer, just about. That for each-even in this hipper, more supportive time-there was a traumatic "coming out" experience: when be and he and he looked at himself and saw someone who could never accept the social and biological norm. I doubt, moreover, if most heterosexuals realize just how frantic and perilous gay life can be, even without sexually transmitted disease. The bar scene, for instance, has always been harrowing and bizarre. Last August I asked my unisex hairdresser why he was so listless. Oh, he had been cruising in a dark warehouse by the river last night. This gay leather gang beat him up-he escaped, barely, by jumping into the Hudson. But they wouldn't let him shinny out. So he spent six long hours draped over a log in mid river. And had to walk across the West Side Highway at 5 A.M. Nude. Do you part your hair on the right or on the left?

In that complex syndrome known as homosexuality there has been, since day one, a powerful strain of lence-derived from self-hatted, frustration, something. Whereas heterosexual S&M fantasies almost never lead to serious physical damage (why maim a useful partner?), homosexual S&M can be positively vicious. Read the popular gay magazine Drummer, and your neck hair will get an erection. Personal advertisements, many hundreds of them, offer and beg for: fisting, piercing, branding, catheter play, scrotum filling, even castration (while they simultaneously insist on "safe sex" and "nonsmokers"). There is also considerable fascination with the "daddy" figure: an older man to dominate or be dominated by. "Need master daddy who will put me in diapers." "Want to worship dad, but also dominate him." This phenomenon (I can imagine no heterosexual parallel) has not been extensively studied. It is commonplace, in psychoanalytical literature, to encounter the strong, disabling mother. The weak or absent father has apparently inspired a savage, active Oedipal antagonism that deserves at least as much attention.

This daddy, meanwhile, is forcing himself to socialize. I smile at, then sit beside an attractive Oriental youthwhose pupils instantly sphincter down to BB shot. His face isn't inscrutable at all: "Uh-oh, here comes another old rice queen" is written right across it. Our talk will be both polite and excruciating: mere conversational velleities feel charged with sleaze. And, to me, that would seem the most unfortunate aspect of homosexual metabolism. Every interchange between men (as between hetero men and women) is both heightened and diminished by some sensual resonance. Male-bond relationships-sexually neuter, competitive, buy-me-another-round convivialcan never be pure for gay men.

I look toward the dance floor again. Gay men seem, yes, taller. (I've read somewhere that hormones associated with growth and those associated with homosexuality are similar. Maybe, a little late for me, height is being bred out of the genetic material.) Tall and quite trim: natty-waisted. Gay men, I suspect, take better care of their physical plant-for them sexual success is more dependent on looks. Hetero men can be vain, but they don't advertise their equipment as conscientiously. While women (in America at least) display the way gay men do, it is thought improper for a girl to notice male equipment. Hetero men, therefore, do not develop mating stances. On the dance floor even "discreet" gay men have loud body language: chest out, arm open, contrapposto. In fact, homosexuality and narcissism are interwoven. This dynamic is circular, of course-but gay men, I reckon, are gay in part because other gay men alone will respond with enthusiasm to the way they look. No matter who his love object may be, a gay man really wishes he could seduce and conquer himself.