Sexuality is as wide as the sea
About 1992 I put a newspaper clipping up in my bedroom. It was a pull quote from a Brett Anderson interview: “I’m quite fey, and there’s nothing I can do about it”. I doubt if the quote was true of me, but perhaps it wasn’t the least brave thing to do, at a time when fear and shame ran through every aspect of my life like lettering through a stick of rock. It was also partly a riposte to my mother who had previously stuck up the headline “Don’t Dream, Do”.
(This is a long-delayed third of three essays on the trinity of race, gender and sexuality. It is a bit more personal and less definite. Trigger warnings: sexual topics. Strong language. Personal revelations. Death. Lyrics, including Billy Bragg lyrics.)
In 1968 George Harrison wrote his first great song, While My Guitar Gently Weeps:
I look at you all, see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor, and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps....
Its lyrics probably reference Brian Epstein's homosexuality:
I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you
(At the time “inversion” was jargon for homosexuality.) Epstein, the “fifth Beatle” and a close friend of George's, had died of an overdose in 1967, while the Beatles were on retreat with the Maharishi. The language reads awkwardly today, but the song’s tone is of puzzlement, uncertainty and mystery, not condemnation.
Sexual mores have moved from the repressive traditionalism of the 1950s, through a period of uncertainty and contestation, to a new consensus. One central idea of the new consensus is sexual identity: your sexual desires are related to the kind of person you are, gay and straight for example. Sexual identity is, if not fixed, at least a deep aspect of personality. In particular this means it is impossible, as well as unjust, for society or the state to police sexuality. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”
There is not really much evidence to back this idea up. Scientists who study human sexuality don’t really know where sexual desires comes from. Genes or environment? Well, probably both, but even the ability to predict sexuality (a bit better than chance!) from your genes doesn’t really mean being gay is genetic — just as the ability to predict voting behaviour doesn’t mean being Republican is genetic. The same scientists distinguish between behaviour, identity and underlying attraction, and usually measure sexual orientation on a scale rather than as a set of fixed categories. Sexual behaviour varies over the life course, and so on.
This argument, which has hardened into a dogma, becomes most toxic when it is applied to transsexuality and in particular to teenagers who believe they are transsexual. (Transsexuality is strictly about gender not about sexuality, but getting into the technical weeds of gender theory misses the point. It is part of the same structure of political allyship: it’s the T in LGBTQ.) Anyone who knows teenagers knows that they are not very secure in their identities and that they are easily swayed by their peers. The academic papers on sudden-onset gender identity dysphoria are examples of an absurd but sadly necessary research genre: stating the absolutely bloody obvious to an audience which is determined to pretend otherwise.
The best defence of sexual toleration is not a theory about what sexuality is, but the liberal idea that each of us is best placed to work out, as I think Henry James put it, the terrible logic of his own life.
I told my mum I was gay and it was her fault. (In the 1990s Freudianism was still kind of legit.) “You’re not gay,” she said with utter certainty, and sent me to stay with my brother in London. He showed me how to make a pizza using mozarella, sliced tomatoes and a frozen pizza base from Sainsbury’s. “If there weren’t any women around, I’d fuck men; if there weren’t any men, I’d fuck sheep,” he said.
This was relevant, since I was at a single-sex boarding school. The school was horrible, but recently I found my diary from then and it was oddly uplifting: alongside long descriptions of how miserable I was, there was a top ten list of places I’d rather be. All ten of them started off “in bed with…”.
“Sexuality,” sang Billy Bragg, “strong and warm and wild and free.”
Sexuality,
Your laws do not apply to me.
Today it could probably get me a job. In another astonishing social science revelation, it turns out that sexuality follows the law of demand: when you lower the price of something, you get more of it. In particular, the number of people identifying as gay or bisexual has grown much faster than the number of people behaving that way. Gay identity has also become associated with left-wing politics, and it is particularly popular among US Ivy League undergraduates. Along with declaring one’s Native American ancestry.
I went to university and became my college LesBiGay rep, as it then was. I went to clubs with a Master’s student. She was an uncompromisingly militant lesbian. Hired to give a topic lecture in sociology, she talked on Homocult (NSFW, oh so very NSFW), the radical organization who liked to épater la bourgeoisie with slogans such as “Babies: first we fuck them, then we eat them” — a mocking reference to heterosexual fears of gay pedos. Definitely influenced by Brett Anderson, I wore pink plastic bangles, bright metallic lipstick, and a tight khaki T-shirt with a red Communist star. I looked genuinely androgynous and, as I was twenty, probably pretty good. Perhaps also kind of unthreatening: anyway, one night when we came back to her digs after too many pills and/or too much wine, I found her sprawled invitingly on her back, on the mattress she’d made up for me. “People change,” she said laconically.
And Derek Jarman, just dead, said: “Sexuality is as wide as the sea.”
The logic of the link between sex and identity has led to a proliferation of identities, as people try to turn their individual feelings into a source of community. For sure, this is aided by the desire for a slice of the diversity pie, and probably also by the toaster-fucker dynamics of the internet:
The internet makes it easier to cooperate, that’s the problem
The price has been a certain loss of focus. As people have unkindly said, “demisexuality” — when you’re only interested in sex under very specific circumstances and with the right person — sounds, from an old-fashioned point of view, a lot like “being a woman”. On the official side, the Pride festival hosted by small towns like mine has become strangely unmoored from its adjectives. Gay pride? Trans pride? Could it just be Norwich Pride? It doesn’t explicitly say. This is good from a corporate, bring-the-kids point of view. It all feels a bit disconnected from actual, you know, fucking.
One reaction has been the call to repoliticize Pride: “Pride is a protest!” reads a poster in a shop window near me. This is like winning a football match, then demanding a rematch so you can win again.
I had come out at school, in a meeting of the Debating Society. Anxious to do well, I wrote down my speech — not just the words, but every “um” and “er”. I thought planning the hesitations would lend it more impact.
It had an impact all right. On the bus, a bunch of boys looked at me coldly, and one of them said “I bet he has to wear Pampers to stop the shit running out.” Another time, as I was walking with a friend, one of two kids coming past spat at us. My friend caught the phlegm in his hand and threw it, in a single movement, back on to the guy’s uniform as he walked past.
These incidents did not affect me much. What was really bad? The evening when I walked into the common room and found my whole cohort silently waiting for me. The person who had organized this, a genuine psychopath, launched into his accusation: “we don’t think you’re really gay at all. You’re just doing it to make yourself interesting.” I could cope with being abhorrent or disgusting; nothing, nothing was as bad as being unimportant. To this struggle session, I could have replied “I have fantasized sexually about more than half of you in this room.” But perhaps it’s too late for esprit d’escalier.
These experiences did not leave me with a deep sexual radicalism, but with an instinctive suspicion and distrust of self-righteous people in groups.
Old farts should perhaps not be too disapproving of the proliferation of sexualities, for two reasons. First, from the outside it may look like acronym soup, but it is easy to forget that when you are young, sexuality actually seems interesting and important. So if you want to do X, that’s exciting and scary, and if there’s a word for it, that’s even better. Better if it’s funny — like the aeromorphs of noncredibledefense, who insist they want to have sex with planes — yet better if it annoys bores, and if those bores are blood-handed tyrants, how can anyone object?
More importantly, what counts as “normal” sexuality has not been a very appealing alternative.
From the sixties to the nineties, sexual mores were less settled than either before or after, more chaotic and arguably more harmful. It wasn’t that there was a neat progression from the sixties to us. That idea elides some strange byways.
Teenage sexuality was more accepted, and teens were also accepted as objects of adult desire. Iggy Pop wrote Sixteen — “Sweet sixteen in leather boots / Body and soul, I go crazy” — and David Bowie slept with a fourteen-year-old fan. (He is going to get a permanent museum in East London, run by the V&A.) The sexual attitudes of Donald Trump are also plausibly a product of this era.
The politics of sexual liberation did not settle immediately either. The Paedophile Information Exchange campaigned for the abolition of the age of consent from 1974 to 1984. It was at one time affiliated with Liberty and received support from the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, as well as from some MPs. Debate over the group raged in the pages of the Guardian.
The 1990s and 2000s saw a different kind of liberation, sex-positive feminism. What could be wrong with being sex-positive? That depends what sex is. The internet’s arrival brought with it a huge increase in available porn. One description of the market for relationships for women at this time might be: you will need to provide a wide variety of sexual services, in exchange for a very uncertain level of commitment. Perhaps that is why, not long after, young people started having less sex.
Or alternatively, you could choose your own identity: leave the supermarket and shop at the specialist deli.
The Manic Street Preachers released The Holy Bible in 1994. The opening track, “Yes”, which drew on the band’s tour in Thailand, painted a dark picture of commodified sexuality:
in these plagued streets of pity, you can buy anything…
He's a boy, you want a girl, so tear off his cock
Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want
It is also not hard to hear painful autobiographical notes. The Manics were teen pop idols and they faced the pressure in that market to be androgynous, beautiful boys. A year later, their bassist and lyricist Richey Edwards — a shy, unmusical intellectual with the air of a rabbit caught in headlights — had vanished, presumed dead. It felt personal; I had been in mental hospital about the same time he had. Through my first year at university I remember waiting for news. There has never been any.
The current consensus on sexuality really isn’t one: it involves too much dogma on topics we don’t know about. Differences in human sexuality will never go away, but they cannot easily be tied back to a set of sexual identities. And the idea of sexual identity itself is more fragile than it looks. It comes from a specific time in history (you might start with Havelock Ellis). There is no reason to think it is eternal. The fuss around youth transitions might just be the inevitable pushback against a movement which has got over its skis. Or it might be a bigger turning point, because we simply don’t really know much about how sexuality works, how it changes, and how it fits into the rest of the social system.
But there are also no paths back from where we are. It just makes no sense to think of the sixties, seventies or eighties as representing a sexual utopia. When I hear boomers complaining how young people aren’t getting it on any more, they sound ridiculous. The “manosphere”, with its sub-Nietzschean ideology and celebration of the alpha male, is another non-contender. Women may prefer winners to losers, but they are not going to put up with that sort of crap, and ultimately it is women who have to buy into the social system around sexuality and reproduction. Which is also the reason why we will not go back to the traditional society of the 1950s, with heterosexual marriage as central and women as housewives.
If the only path is forward, and unknown, then maybe it is worth revisiting George Harrison, and his sense of puzzlement and uncertainty in the face of the mystery of human sexuality. It might not be the worst place to start.
It turned out my mother was right, and in a way so was the school psycho. Before I left university, I even got a girlfriend. Perhaps it’s unusual to have to come to terms with one’s sexuality twice. I wouldn’t count it a loss.
I remember how uncertain everything was back then. I knew much less, I had more fear and more hope. We were waiting to get on the merry-go-round. Some people would have a fine time, others would end up crying, but there we were, standing in line, anticipating, and we could hear the music starting up.
If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.
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