Re: Brett memorial

3-3-2004

Thank you Mark

The memorial to which Mark refers is Brett Averill: A Remembrance in Pictures.

I want to comment on Mark's email because he understood -- apparently immediately -- what this site is about and why it exists.

And I know that's not true of everyone who visits the site.

After caring for Brett through a long, terrible illness, I watched him take his last agonized breath, and at that moment I promised him and myself that I would do something about those forces which killed him, and that I would continue his life's work of telling the truth about gay and bi and other men who have sex with men.

And that's what I'm doing.

For example, the site doesn't support promiscuity, in part because the promiscuity of men into anal is what created the HIV epidemic and killed Brett.

Because, you see, if you live in a promiscuous society, you don't have to be promiscuous yourself to suffer the ill-effects of that promiscuity.

Brett was not promiscuous.

He was a young man, and he dated.

And his last boyfriend, before he met me, had AIDS.

Because he'd been promiscuous.

Brett didn't know his boyfriend had AIDS, the boyfriend didn't know it, no one knew it.

But AIDS killed both of them.

So -- this site and The Man2Man Alliance do not support promiscuity.

That's not on a whim.

That's based on my own hard-bought and truly brutal real-life experience.

If you want to be promiscuous, you'll have to look elsewhere for support and succor because you won't find it here.

Similarly, Brett was not effeminate.

Not remotely.

As Mark observed, Brett was very masculine and in particular he was very commanding.

There was nothing in his personality, in his life skills, in the way he related to the world, to suggest that he was "intergendered."

I'm going to be exploring this issue of "intergendered," because a man who was on this site briefly, until I threw him off, has lifted (as in stolen) many of our key concepts and ideas and set up his own site, on which he's putting forth his notion that men who have sex with men are intergendered.

Specifically, he claims that Adam -- that's the Biblical Adam, as in Adam and Eve -- had not an XY chromosome pair, but an "XO" chromosome pair, which in some way made him intergendered.

Problem: While there is an XO karyotype or descriptor, it's a genetic anamoly and very rare.

So what he's actually talking about is an X and a vacancy -- that's what the "0" or zero stands for -- nothing -- and, to repeat, that X0 karyotype is a genetic anomaly, very rare, which, like most genetic anomalies, usually results in either spontaneous abortion of the foetus or early death.

Let's be clear about that: Most genetic anomalies spontaneously abort or die shortly after birth.

That's why they're "a-nomalies" -- they are rare and far from the norm.

Whereas male homosexuality -- men having sex with men -- is extremely extensive, and in cultures which don't denigrate it, is virtually universal.

If something is a norm -- normative behavior -- it can't be an anomaly nor can it be the effect of an anomaly.

All it can be, in this case, is just part of natural, normal, male behavior.

Mevertheless, this man maintains this view, so far as I can tell, because as a fundamentalist Christian, that idea makes his homosexuality more acceptable to him.

But he's wrong.

Gay, bi, and other men who have sex with men are NOT intergendered or inter-sexed or inter-anything.

If they were, I would say so, because, as an openly gay man writing and working under my own name for 32 years, I have always told the truth about gay and bi men.

Like Brett, that's the only thing which interests me and it's been my life's work -- telling the truth about men who have sex with men.

Not launching commercial schemes to enrich myself at the expense of the community, and not making up fairy tales so that I can reconcile my sexuality with some religious right prohibition against same-sex sex.

It's not necessary to do that and I don't do it.

I live with an evangelical Christian, we're at peace with our love, our sexuality, and God, and we don't need to invent fanciful genetic schemes to make us so.

So Patrick and I, like Adam, have an XY chromosome.

As did Brett.

Mark said, that "Brett obviously incorporated the best of masculine sensuality with the best of masculine character and nobility--the male ideal!"

That's true.

He was masculine, and in many respects answered to a masculine ideal.

He was not intergendered.

There was nothing in the way he acted, the way he spoke, or the way he thought which suggested that he was expressing or attempting to get in touch with the "feminine side of his personality."

Yes, he was a nurturing and caring person.

But such traits are hardly uniquely feminine or even un-masculine.

Men in general, for example, are very nuturing with their children.

So nurturance is not a uniquely female trait.

And it most certainly is not a gay male trait.

Before I threw him off the site, this self-serving individual who's pushing his intergendered nonsense claimed that he was more empathetic and nurturing than his straight-identified male friends.

I doubt that's true, since his principal activities in life seem to be lying and stealing.

But more important, I know that it's not true of gay men in general.

Again, I have lived among openly gay men for more than thirty years, and what I've seen is that they are *not* more empathetic, more nuturting, more caring, or more intuitive than nongay men.

Indeed, it's an open question whether women themselves are any of these things.

Feminists have fed us a myth that women are intrinsically nice and men intrinsically nasty.

The truth is that men and women have different reproductive strategies, and that in pursuit of those strategies both sexes are capable of behaving very badly.

But that's as far as it goes.

Women are not inherently better than men, nor men than women.

They're just different.

And gay men are men.

They have an XY chromosome pair, not an XX, and it's that Y which makes them male.

And gay men behave like men.

Except when they've bought into a self-hating paradigm which says that men who have sex with men aren't really men.

Even so, having bought into that paradigm, such gay men act not like women, but like burlesques and parodies of women.

That is to say, effeminate.

Again, if they were truly "intergendered," they wouldn't be effeminate -- they would be feminine.

But they are not.

So I don't support promiscuity because I saw how promiscuity in the gay male community killed men who were once and even twice removed from it.

I also saw the soul-destroying effects of promiscuity, which no one other than the religious right wants to talk about, but which needs to be addressed in a way that acknowledges that sex between men is good and promiscuity bad.

Which is what we do on this site, and so far as I know we're unique in so doing.

And I don't support theories of gay and bi men being intergendered because the gay and bi men I knew and know who are whole human beings are masculine men.

The effeminate men are clearly men who have problems with their sexuality, and who act out in bitchy, promiscuous, and effeminate ways.

I thank Mark again for his very kind and clarifying remarks about Brett, about his character, and about our love.

Because Brett -- his life and his death -- is, more than anything else, the reason I do what I do.

Roe

Re: Brett memorial

03-11-2004

WOW! Such a sincere and beautiful memorial of love between two. I laughed, cried, and found endearing your presentation of this memorial. As always your communication of men to men relationships is wonderful.

Thanks.