How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [34]
—Dan Savage, sex columnist, in “Savage Love”
Men are men. Men generally do not want to wait to have sex. It’s not like with women. It’s a lot easier for gay men to have sex. Gay men are very fortunate in that respect.
—Steven, from Real World Las Vegas, talking to The Advocate magazine
The real issue is not that heterosexuals will be tempted to engage in homosexual sexual activity . . . but that they will be drawn to more flexible norms that gay people, excluded from social structures created by heterosexuality, have created for their own lives. These include less restrictive gender roles; non-monogamous intimate relationships and more freedom for sexual experimentation; family units that are chosen, not biological; and new models for parenting. But most importantly, homosexuality offers a vision of sexual pleasure completely divorced from the burden of reproduction: sex for its own sake, a distillation of the pleasure principle.
—Michael Bronski in Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility
Do gay men have better sex than straight folks? And if so, are they teaching heterosexuals how to get up to speed?
The so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s was really just a set of personal skirmishes that initially succeeded in freeing heterosexuals to enjoy sex outside of marriage. In its first phase, the revolution also granted women the right to have orgasms and to enjoy intercourse, which from the vantage point of the twenty-first century seems like a ridiculously simplistic notion.
But thankfully, just as straight people began to lose their zeal for fighting to be sexually free and became complacent about the gains they had made, homosexuals took up the cause. In the eighties, particularly as gay men started to come out in greater numbers, even the sad onset of the AIDS epidemic could not dampen the refreshing contributions homosexuals made to American sexuality. Much of the diversity and innovation in straight sex lives today is due to these gay influences. Straight America is more comfortable with oral and anal sex, pornography, bondage, sex toys, and bisexuality than it has ever been before.
Straight and Gay: Madonna’s Big Book of Sex
The literary and visual apotheosis of the gay/straight sex connection was Madonna’s slightly twisted coffee-table book Sex, published in 1992. Although Madonna now prefers being known as a children’s author, I keep imagining little Lourdes and Rocco’s surprise the first time someone shows them mommy’s other book, the one she wrote before she discovered motherhood and the kabbalah.
I recall being at many straight parties where the book Sex was passed around; it was the homoerotic photographs that both terrified and titillated at the same time. There was Madonna with two boys servicing her. In another photo, a man dominates another man wearing a black latex hood. And the party guests definitely enjoyed checking out the montage of naked boys having sex. The most provocative shot, I think, is the one in which Madonna is on her knees, kissing a man’s ass. Well, kissing is sort of a euphemism. She’s actually licking his asshole. She’s “rimming” him, although most straight people in 1992 did not know that term. Now the term is becoming common, and the gay attitude toward anal play is becoming more of a presence in heterosexual bedrooms.
In her omni-sexual poise in the late eighties and early nineties, Madonna was a pioneer. She was the first homosexual icon to interact with her audience sexually (well, unless you count Judy Garland’s marriages to gay men). She borrowed from the gay male culture and informed her fans of worlds they didn’t know before. She was dressed by Jean Paul Gaultier, the bitchiest designer of all time. Who else but a gay man could invent such aggressive lingerie? The leather conical bras threatened to impale anyone nearby; the chains and fishnets were straight from a bad Weimar Republic porno flick.
Madonna during her depraved years was a bit like Marco Polo bringing back noodles