It is also interesting that later in the novel, when one of Vidal' s characters commits rape, the method of assault is anal penetration. Is this a conscious or unconscious message from Vidal, that anal sex may not be an act of love, but instead an act of violence, pain, anger, hate, rage, and rape?

Vidal later wrote in his memoirs Palimpsest about his real-life boyhood love, Jimmy Trimble, with whom he shared a deep emotional and physical intimacy. Plato's writings in the Symposium also illuminate what is a natural act between two friends who become lovers, as Vidal writes: "When I came to read the Symposium, I was amazed at how precisely Plato had anticipated two boys twenty-three hundred years later." Vidal quotes Plato:

And so when this boy... is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant... although they may be hard put to say what they really want with one another, and indeed the purely sexual pleasure of their friendship could hardly account for the huge delight they take in one another's company. The fact is that both their souls are longing for something else -- a something to which neither of them can put a name....

Vidal's biographer Fred Kaplan, also covers this ground in his book Gore Vidal, in writing about Vidal's relationship with Jimmy Trimble, and their first encounter together at Vidal's family manor when they were both 12 or 13 years old:

Quietly, to avoid being heard by the butler, they rubbed their stomachs and genitals against one another into what Vidal remembered as an explosion of perfectly blissful orgasm. Neither of them felt they had broken any taboo. Neither felt any guilt, though they both tacitly understood that this was a private affair. It was something they would talk about neither to others nor even, for that matter, between themselves.

Jimmy Trimble

Their sexual partnership continued for some time, as Vidal noted, again echoing Plato, "The purely sexual pleasure of their relationship could hardly account for the huge delight they take in one another's company."

For Vidal his relationship with Jimmy was completion at a deep emotional level. He had found a twin, an equal and opposite. While Vidal was bookish and well read, Jimmy was a star athlete. What they had in common was that each knew exactly what they wanted to do with their adult lives. Their bond and connection was unbreakable.

Vidal and Jimmy were later separated due to Vidal being sent away to distant boarding schools.

Gore Vidal

They met again as 17 year-olds, at a Christmas party in 1942. Vidal showed up to the party with a girl he was considering marrying. Jimmy told him, "You're crazy," in a friendly manner. As Vidal writes, "We went downstairs to the men's room, with its tall marble urinals and large cubicles. I wondered what if anything he felt. Fortunately our bodies still fitted together, as we promptly discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly, talking of girls and marriage and coming simultaneously." The face to face, belly to belly position was to be Vidal's favorite.

A short time later they both served in World War II, and Jimmy died at Iwo Jima. Gore wrote in Palimpsest that Jimmy was his only true love, ever. Considering the stories of the emotional connections formed, as in the story of Luke and Steven on this site ^[4], Gore's continued emotional connection to a dead 19 year old makes perfect sense.

After World War II, Vidal spent a good deal of time in New Orleans. It was there that he first started reading Plato, and found in the Symposium a historical, cultural and intellectual framework to understand his own sexuality.

In New Orleans he became friends with a British intellectual couple, Geoffrey and Penelope Moore. Geoffrey taught at Tulane and ran a literary radio-interview program that the young author, Vidal would be interviewed on. In private discussions Vidal would educate the couple about sexuality. Geoffrey and his wife (a journalist) had only known "obvious queens" as their reference point for homosexuals. Vidal, all masculine and athletic, was revealing to them in breaking the stereotype. In conversation, Geoffrey said to Vidal that the idea of anal penetration was "pretty repellant" to him. Vidal was taken aback and quickly noted, "Oh we don't do that! We don't do that!" When Geoffrey asked Vidal what he did sexually, he noted that Vidal, "used a curious expression, 'belly rubbing' ... I had never heard of that."

But, doesn't the evidence lead to a clear conclusion that frottage, frot, or "belly rubbing" is the normal and instinctual way to express sexual affection between two males? And, when you accept that as a fact, you come to realize that there are no labels. ^[3] There are no gays, straights, and bisexuals, as nouns, only as adjectives do they exist. People do different things, and may have certain interests in doing one thing, but not the other. But, people are not what they do. A human being is more complex that filling in a check box of some sort of societally-defined identity. Gay, straight, bi, are all arbitrary check boxes on some bureaucratic form. People are more complex that simple definitions. After all, the word "homosexual" only came into the language in the 1890s. The word "heterosexual" came along after that. (Hence, heterosexuality was in a sense "invented" after homosexuality.)

Some people who enjoy frottage with men have girlfriends, or wives. The judgmental sob-sister crowd will call such men in denial of their gayness. Ridiculous. Some people can love their wife or girlfriend, while loving their male close friend in a different way, and find great pleasure at expressing it sexually. (Though certainly, in our strange puritanical society many men because of their family or religious background are not able to be open about their relations with the same sex, and thus hide behind a girlfriend or wife. That is certainly true, but we cannot assume that every guy who has gay sex in secret while maintaining an open straight life, is necessarily hiding from his true sexuality. It's not something to be judged in general. It is something each individual will have to judge for their own life.)

As Gore Vidal wrote in his essay "Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With":

...there is no such thing as a homosexual or heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices, and what anyone does with a willing partner is of no social or cosmic significance. ...So why all the fuss? In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock up someone or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed, and seldom used in civilized societies.... That is why we have allowed our [leaders] to divide the population into two teams. One is good, godly, straight; the other is evil, sick, vicious.

And by and large the contemporary gay community accepts this arbitrary two team division of society. Accepting such a division empowers our enemies. It also does damage to the psyche because a human being is far too complex an organism to be easily pigeonholed.

warriors and kings

There is a crisis in society today. Robert Bly has written about uninitiated men in his books Iron John: A Book About Men and The Sibling Society. Bly points out that in society today, men are not properly initiated into manhood. That instead we have a sibling society. We don't have warriors and kings. Yet in some cultures a major part of the ritual for a boy to become a man is to have a same-sex experience.

Bly notes that the path to male feeling is through grief. That men need to strike the balance in their lives as warriors and kings. And that another aspect of these lost men is a lack of bonding with their fellow men.

They have feelings for their close male friends that pass unexpressed. (Or they want to have a close male friend who can fulfill them in ways a woman cannot.) Just as it's possible for two men to be each other's soul mates, completely and totally in love with each other, knowing that they need each other to complete them at a spiritual level. And to achieve the highest level of expressing feeling, that focal point of Ananda, or bliss, can only be touched through making love. Like communicating without words.

It is quite clear-- in reading about Vidal's deep love for Jimmy, or in many of the other personal stories about frot experiences-- that a love informed by frottage creates a more deeply emotional connection between two people, than the empty promiscuity of today's anal-obsessed gay society.

And we have a society as a whole restricting itself by these arbitrary categories.

Athenian warrior-lovers who died in battle and were buried together

Yet, if more men knew the truth, if we had a more Classical Greek society rather than Puritan, they could open up and explore their desires freely without fear or guilt.

That's the basic problem with society today: weighed down with guilt and puritanism, which has led to a fundamental ignorance of human sexuality and practice. People are locked into binary thinking, straight or gay, vaginal or anal, and that's that.

If more men were educated about frottage more and more would do it, enjoy it, and be quite happy about it, and quite fulfilled in an intimate friendship or love with a fellow male. And in a non-binary society, non-guilt society they wouldn't have a crisis of sexual identity afterward. "Oh my god, I just came with a guy, does that mean I'm gay?" No. It means you are a human being. It means you are a man. It means you can give and receive affection and love from a friend, and still be a masculine man. People need to free their minds, and free their bodies.

Then their souls will wake up to the real possibilities of love that life has to offer.

When that day comes, it will be a powerful revolution in thought. And it will truly lead to a society of equality and justice for everyone. We don't need to let go of Athens. The world of Plato's Symposium is possible in our time, here and now.

The work of creating it will be a worthy effort.

Logan McClintock

October 10, 2005

Notes

4. See Beatific in Warriors Speak.

Greek depiction of lovers Zephyr and Hyacinth engaging in Frot

Afterword from Bill Weintraub

The genesis of this essay was a Personal Stories post titled The Real Possibilities of Love.

I encourage interested readers to look at that post, which is estimable in its own right.

I thank Logan McClintock for his excellent manifesto.

Bill Weintraub

Jimmy Trimble