Bill Weintraub

Re: to deepen, not weaken, masculinity

7-28-2005

Thank you Jim.

Jim says he had "an inchoate longing for something both physical and deeply, transcendentally spiritual and the sense that it deepened, not weakened, my masculinity."

That's a beautiful definition of the Heroic -- that is, warrior -- conception of Homosex:

An act of phallic bonding which is both physical and transcendentally spiritual and which strengthens masculinity.

Those who seek to reduce human sexuality to a series of purely material acts are involved in a fundamental misprison of sex -- a misunderstanding so profound that it betrays sex and leads to behavior which is both physically and morally destructive.

That's what anal penetration is -- a failure to understand, and a deliberate misreading of, sexuality which dishonors and disrespects sex and its central role in our human condition.

The result has been what is *literally* the deadliest epidemic the human race has ever known, and the spiritual degradation of homosex, which, historically, has been one of the highest manifestations of the human spirit.

The consumerist homosexualism of late 20th-century America has nothing in common with the exalted homosexuality of ancient Greece and other warrior cultures.

Analism turns the ethos of warrior homosex -- martial, masculine, and monogamous -- on its head: the martial (phallic) becomes anal, the masculine effeminate, the monogamous promiscuous.

And both the culture and the human beings who emerge are diseased and spiritually degraded.

Under analist pansexualism, which is an avowedly secular ideology, men who love men are doomed.

Spirituality, in this context, is not a luxury, nor is talk of it an intellectual exercise.

Spirituality is a necessity.

To divorce sex from spirit is to invite disease and death, both physical and spiritual, into one's life.

That's why I say, in Masculinity and Spirit, that we must

counteract all the negativity about sex in mass gay culture -- we never hear that phallus is sacred, or that masculinity is holy, or that our lives are heroic -- but they are.

[And that] if we understand that the phallus is sacred, then we understand it's not to be misused, either by sticking it in a hole full of shit or in meaningless sex - promiscuity.

Sex itself is a sacred act, it connects us with the power and love of another man, and we need always to think of it that way.

And that's how Jim does think of it.

He says he has "an inchoate longing for something both physical and deeply, transcendently spiritual and the sense that it deepened, not weakened, my masculinity."

What's important to understand is that Jim's longing does not make him eccentric or odd.

To the contrary, that longing puts him at the center of the human and specifically male condition because it's an instinctive expression of what all men know they need both physically and spiritually: a phallic bond with another man.

If men deny that need it becomes a demon which consumes their lives.

That's what happens: gods denied become demons, the denial of God leads to the demonic.

That's the truth of our human existence.

And it's because of that innate and inescapable interconnection between the sexual and the spiritual that men who love men cannot focus, in secular pansexualist fashion, on a simply physical act of cockrubbing.

If they seek that and that alone, it will ultimately destroy them.

For there must be a spiritual component to our phallic connection with another man -- and that's why we emphasize Fidelity.

Because Fidelity ultimately strengthens and promiscuity inevitably weakens that holy bond.

Jim's "inchoate longing for something both physical and deeply, transcendently spiritual and the sense that it deepened, not weakened, my masculinity," then, puts him squarely in the tradition of the hero, whom mythographer Joseph Campbell defines as "the noble uncorrupted son of nature, pure in the yearning of his heart"; and it is precisely that hero who, across thousands of cultures, is the male role model par excellence.

Jim's longing is "inchoate" -- not yet completely formed, incompletely formulated; and that's how we conceive, as we begin our quest, of our love -- incompletely, as though through a mist.

The analist's approach, by contrast, is concrete and consumerist: as though buying a car, he wants someone of a certain age, race, income, and social status.

Indeed, a recent article on yahoo tells us that gay men in California are now paying $15,000 apiece -- yes, that's fifteen THOUSAND dollars per guy -- to a gay matchmaker who claims he can find them an LTR.

Apparently someone forgot to tell these guys that "money can't buy ya love"; but their behavior bears out that, as Mart Finn wrote more than three years ago on this site, analism is at its core transactional:

In the affluent West we have become used to getting what we want. Transacting and trading off as and when we need to.

'A transactional kind of sex' is where two individuals have expectations and specific requirements, which to them add up to 'good sex'. This may be called sexual attitude. The important thing is that one plays a role well and expects one's partner to perform equally as strongly. In this arena empathy gives way to mutual continuous assessment. Some things are good others not so good. The quality of the transaction to be evaluated post orgasm.

The concept is inextricably linked to the commercialisation of gay male attitudes to sex and often life. Sex is just another activity. To be compared and evaluated against previous experience and those of our peers and dominant subcultural norms. If our expectations and an idiosyncratic paradigm of desires are fixed as we engage, embrace ... come to our lovers, then we are asking them to fulfill something for US. We fully intend reciprocity ... if they can stimulate it from us.

Mart says: "Sex is just another activity."

Which is the essence of the secular and consumerist conception of sex.

Contrast that with ours, which is heroic, and which sees sex as an heroic act between two equally heroic men who have found each other through the process of the heroic, arduous quest.

Fantasy?

NO.

Fable and myth?

YES.

Fable and myth which have guided men on their lives' journies for eons.

From Gilgamesh and Enkidu through Jonathan and David to the ancient Greeks and their embattled brothers the Celts, romantic love between men was understood to be the result of a quest.

Which is also how the medieval troubadors conceptualized it.

All of those men were warriors.

And in most cases they literally wrestled for and with their lovers.

As an expression of what was for them a sacred struggle.

Romantic love and most especially love between men existed and to this day exists outside the realm of money and commerce.

That analists think they can buy love is not surprising.

But they are deceived.

Jim is not.

Jim's "longing for something both physical and deeply, transcendently spiritual and the sense that it deepened, not weakened, my masculinity," is true, and real, and so long as he honors it, it will not play him false.

The quote from Hillel Jim refers to, which is famous both as a formulation of human circumstance and as a motivational homily, goes like this:

If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

And if I'm not for others, what am I?

And if not now, when?

That's as succinct a statement of our human condition, and specifically of the position that Frot men are in, that I know.

1. If you won't fight for yourself, who will fight for you?

No one.

Not the analists -- they'll denigrate your practice and pressure and coerce you into doing anal.

And not the religious right -- they want you to cease being, sexually, spiritually, and if need be, physically.

There are many in the American religious right who would be glad to see you dead -- just as those Iranian clergy mandated the execution of those teenaged Frot guys.

Only you care about your existence as a Frot man.

And no one else will fight for you.

2. If you won't fight for others, what are you?

In Hillel's view, you're not part of the human community, and in my view you're not part of the Frot fraternity.

Because you're not willing to fight for and help your brothers.

3. And if not now, when?

When are you going to join this fight?

In a year, ten years, one hundred years?

What's stopping you?

Nothing but your own fear and selfishness.

You're like Phill Wilson, the head of the Black AIDS Institute, who, faced with a 46% rate of HIV prevalence among Black gay and bi men, still refuses to talk about Frot (see Complicit in our own genocide).

How much higher does it have to go before he'll discuss non-anal alternatives?

56%, 66%, 76, 86, 96%?

When every Black gay man in America is poz, will he still refuse?

Based on past behavior, I'd say yes.

By the same token, how much more degraded and miserable does your own life have to become before you'll fight against analism and for Frot?

It's a rhetorical question because clearly you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by joining this battle.

Jim understands that.

Do you?

Bill G

Re: to deepen, not weaken, masculinity

7-28-2005

Well said again !!!

Brian Hulme

Re: to deepen, not weaken, masculinity

6-15-10

Jim, you said:

"Everything spoke to what I've been feeling and wanting for years without the words. I can say now that this is truly me and I finally feel like I have brothers and comrades to share this with."

I can say that I know EXACTLY what and how you feel, and I hope many more WILL soon.

Warrior Love,

Brian