Bill Weintraub

Re: BREAKING THE BONDS

1-15-2005

Hey Joel

It's understandable that you now regret your abstinence.

But it's also understandable that you've been abstinent.

Indeed, it's difficult to see what else you could have done, given the limited information you had to go on.

Because the only choices presented you, were you to be sexually active, were:

1. Exclusive heterosexuality -- which you clearly weren't prepared to follow; or

2. Analist homosexuality -- which, to your credit, you weren't prepared to follow either.

Since discovering this site you've learned two things:

1. That virtually all human beings are to some degree bisexual, and that therefore your same-sex needs and desires, far from being aberrant, are normal and natural and shared with literally billions of other men; and,

2. That should you decide to act on your same-sex desires, there's a way for you to do so which is both intimate and intense and which requires no surrender of or injury to your masculinity -- to the contrary, it enhances your masculinity, which is the reason Warrior cultures have also been Heroic Homosex cultures.

Notice we don't say that you *must* act on either your same-sex or heterosexual desires -- before you're ready to act on them -- or ever.

To the contrary.

In Why Be Faithful, which is a Man2Man Alliance *policy* paper, we endorse abstinence:

1. For men who can't find a Frot brother and whose only option appears to be analism:

For a Frot Man to choose abstinence rather than take part in a form of sex he dislikes and which is dangerous as well, is good -- it's a response which protects both his integrity and his health, and gives him time to look for a long term relationship with another Frot guy -- which is what he needs.

2. For gay teens who are told ad nauseum that being gay means being promiscuous and doing anal, and that being a gay teen or young adult means being penetrated anally by lots of different men:

We're human beings, and we have the same needs for purity and security in our emotional and sexual relationships as heterosexual people.

And the best way for you as a young gay person to achieve those goals is to abstain from sex until you're sure you've met the man with whom you will spend the rest of your life.

My generation of gay men didn't play it that way, and we paid a terrible price: in shattered relationships, in ill health, in the deaths of the men we loved.

Young gay and bi men today have a chance that we didn't have: to build their lives on the same terms as, and with full equality to, nongay people.

To do that means living responsibly and consciously, aware of the consequences of your acts.

Which is why Abstain and Be Faithful is still the best advice young gay men can receive.

Now there's a third circumstance in which we endorse a form of abstinence, and that's for guys who are partnered, either with a man or a woman, and who believe that having sex with a third person, albeit of a different gender from their partner, will violate their vows of marriage or holy union.

Whether those vows were given publicly in a church to a woman, or whether they were given privately to another man.

So, for example, when straight-identified men who are married come to this site having recognized and admitted their strong same-sex needs, we don't tell them that they *should* have sex with another man.

What we do is present Frot and having a Frot brother as an option; and we tell them, truthfully, that most married men report that having a Frot buddy enhances, rather than detracts from, their lives with their wives.

But we also have a statement on the site from a married man who very eloquently acknowledges his need for intense male friendship but who has chosen not to have a frankly erotic relationship with another guy.

Without question, that's a legitimate choice.

As is the choice of a bi guy who's partnered with another man, and who chooses *not* to have sex with a woman.

Because he sees that as violating his vow to his man.

That too is a legitimate choice.

Not that it's recognized as such, however, by most analists or multipartnered pansexualists, the heirs to the ideology of the sexual revolution.

That's because they view sex as a panacea -- which it's not.

At the the beginning of the sexual revolution, in the 1960s, we thought, naively, that sex and plenty of it would solve all the world's problems.

That if people became sexually more free, they'd be less competitive, less aggressive, less acquisitive, less gluttoness, and so forth.

You name it, we thought sex could cure or fix it.

We were wrong.

It turned out that the sexual revolution, which was both predicated upon and the result of certain technological advances, primarily the birth control pill and antibiotics, brought with it a huge number of new problems while not actually solving many, if any, of the old ones.

People did not become less competitive, or aggressive, or acquisitive, or eat less, or anything else.

All that happened was that some people had more sex.

But not necessarily better and/or happier sex.

Just more sex with more partners.

The first and most dramatic result was an explosion in what we used to call "venereal diseases" -- sexually transmitted infections.

Whereas at the beginning of the sexual revolution there were only two, both easily treated, now there are more than twenty, the list is growing, and while some are treatable, some are not, and some are deadly.

The most deadly, HIV, currently infects about 40 million people worldwide, and has devastated not just individuals and their friends and families, but entire countries and continents.

It's true that gay people -- that is people whose sexual desire is primarily towards members of their own sex -- did, eventually, experience less persecution and thus more freedom as a result of the sexual revolution.

But with that came increased societal awareness of homosexuality, which in some places, paradoxically, actually made it harder for people to be gay.

For example, when I was a kid, homosexuality was so little known that no one suspected I was gay.

And I didn't have to do much to conceal my preference.

But since the early 1980s, and into the present, kids have been obsessed with questions of sexual orientation.

It got so bad in the 1990s that there were newspaper reports of high school athletic teams that refused to shower together.

The guys would practice, and then hit the showers at home and alone -- so that there was no danger, as you point out, of an errant erection in a communal shower suggesting that some jock was gay.

An increased awareness of homosexuality for these kids was not liberating -- rather it was terrifying and imprisoning.

In addition, within the gay community, we went from a situation pre-sexual revolution in which sex was a smorgasbord and little attention was paid to sexual orthodoxy, to one, starting in the mid-1970s, in which sex had to be anal to be gay.

There was also, in part because of the emphasis on sex as a universal good, and also due to the extensive development of bath-houses and sex clubs, an explosive increase in male-male promiscuity, which we first experienced as liberating, but which rapidly came to seem compulsive and forced.

Those ideas -- that all gay men must do anal and must be promiscuous -- persist to this day, and are responsible for the loss of literally hundreds of thousands of lives in America and millions throughout the world.

Not to mention the other sorts of miseries that guys express on this board every day.

So: what we learned, I hope, from the sexual revolution, is that sex alone isn't enough to solve our ills.

It's not just a question of becoming sexually active, it's a question of when, and how, and with whom.

Which is why, and to repeat, given the intense pressures gay and bi kids are under today to have not just sex, but anal "sex," and not just anal "sex," but anally-receptive "sex," very young and very often -- and you can see that expressed in Oscar Vallejo's recent Is Anal Penetration Pleasurable post -- we counsel abstinence.

That is, we advise young people to put off having sex until they're old enough to make intelligent and informed choices about with whom and how they'll have sex.

And Joel, that will be the case at different times for different people.

Some people may be capable of making those choices at 16.

Others not till their 36.

This decision is complex and intensely private, and should not be imposed by social forces, whether of the secular left or "religious" right.

One of my mentors, who was, not coincidentally, a Holocaust survivor, told me that most of human history can be read as the failure of moderation.

And that's so.

Within my own lifetime, we've gone from a situation in which any sex outside of church-sanctioned heterosexual marriage was condemned, to one in which promiscuous, anything-goes sex, is celebrated.

Now the "religious" right, which is really just the reactionary right, wants to return us, no matter how poorly the model worked, to the first of those; while the analist and pansexualist left insists we ignore the growing body count and ever greater individual distress and societal anomie and continue, full steam ahead, on the present course.

What we represent here, no matter what the analists and the various reverends and divines may think, is a third force and a moderate, middle, way.

Most people aren't exclusively heterosexual; which means that exclusive heterosexuality won't work for them.

But neither are people capable of living lives of limitless promiscuity.

Human beings are essentially dyadic -- and that too has to be factored into our equations of sexual freedom, license, and responsibility.

I'll have a lot more to say about this in the closing chaper of an anus is not a vagina.

In any case, Joel, I salute the honesty and earnest of your self-reports on this board.

I hope that as you examine your past, you'll recognize that like most of us, you did the best you could with the information you had.

Sex, more than at any previous moment in history I can think of, has become a battlefield -- the pre-eminent battlefield of the culture wars of our time.

And we've all been ground up, to some degree, in the conflict.

Hopefully, what you've now found in Heroic Homosex and The Man2Man Alliance is a home which is both humane and informed by Faith; and which enables you to recognize and integrate the many aspects of your complex nature.

In the coming days I hope to post a message from a guy who was part of the other side -- analist and promiscuous -- and who still, I suspect, has one foot in that camp.

Guys come to the Alliance from abstinence, from analism, and from conventional heterosexuality.

What we offer them is a way of relating to another man which is phallic, masculine, and heroic.

You can have a relationship, a bond, a union, a marriage, with another man which contains all three of those elements.

Not however -- and I'm speaking here not to Joel but to all of you -- not overnight.

Like anything else worth having in life, you'll have to work for it.

"Faint heart ne'er won fair lady."

Every myth, every folk tale, recognizes how difficult and even dangerous the quest for true love is.

The hero is he who undertakes the quest nevertheless, and who puts all his energy, all his knowledge, all his cunning, all his strength, and all his heart into the search for that one man who is both his other and his brother.

Bill G

Re: BREAKING THE BONDS

1-18-2005

Hi Joel,

Just wanted to let you know that you are not alone. I hope you can find as much guidence and knowledge here as I have. My life has been a lot like you've described your own, if fact almost a mirror image of your post. I only came to terms with my feelings about 6 years ago, (I'm 48), more so since I found this site a few years ago, even though I think I've always known I was attracted more to men. I was always so turned off by modern gay culture, the effeminazation(sp?), the promiscuity, the dominant(top)/submissive(bottom) thing, the idea that being attrached to men meant only anal sex. It just wasn't how I saw myself, so I stayed celibate, rather then sink into what was presented. I hope you never give up hope that you will find the person who shares your ideals, with whom you can share your life with. I haven't :-).

Be Safe,

Bill G