How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [35]
Girls and Gays, and the Sex Tips They Share
When the television show Sex and the City first aired, many critics mentioned that it featured women talking in a realistic way about sex to their female friends. I don’t believe it. The four main characters—Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha, and Carrie—talk to one another the way I talk to my gay male friends. I would never discuss anal sex, sex toys, penis size, or other intimate topics with my girlfriends, but all of these topics emerge frequently in conversations with my gay boyfriends. My gay pals talk about hard-ons and discuss kissing in much more depth than my female friends. They’re also nonchalant about sex toys in a way that the average female population is not.
Sex and the City was created by Darren Starr, a gay producer, and was overseen by another gay writer, Michael Patrick King. Gay males as well as straight women often scripted it. Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that the four main female characters are really gay men disguised as women.
I disagree, but I do think that the female characters are inflected with a certain gay male spirit. They’ve been given the freedom to talk about sex constantly, which is not something women do very well.
The show has become a catalyst for deeper sexual communication among women. Now that Sex and the City has run its course through six seasons of popularity, I’ve seen how it can start intimate sexual conversations among women. Friends who would never be as open before about all sorts of sexual issues will discuss them if they know a Sex and the City character has talked about them.
The comedy series devoted an entire episode to anal sex; another episode featured a discussion about anal/oral sex. “Are we talking assalingus here?” asked Miranda at one point. One episode had Samantha despairing over her lover’s tiny penis. On another show, Samantha confided, “I’m dating a guy with the funkiest tasting spunk.”
Straight people are getting fresh ideas and advice about sex from the gay world in many media. The country’s most popular syndicated sex-advice column is “Savage Love,” penned by an openly gay man, Dan Savage. Savage, who has written several books, is now the editor of Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger. Most of the questions he answers are from heterosexuals. Savage answers them in a delightfully bitchy, assertive way. For example, a father writes in and asks what he should do now that he has walked in on his son, who was masturbating in the bathroom. Says Savage: “Your son is 14 fucking years old, you moron, of course he’s beating off in his room. Where did you beat off when you were 14? Bucking-ham Palace?”
In an earlier incarnation of his column, Savage had his readers address him “Hey, Faggot,” emphasizing his self-deprecating gay wit. He frequently offers in-depth advice on specific acts and techniques that I don’t think a straight columnist would attempt, such as dildo or anal penetration, fisting, and specific techniques for cunnilingus.
A Hard Pill for Swallowing, or How Gays Invented Recreational Viagra
Like everyone else in the country, I heard about Viagra from magazine and newspaper articles when it was first put on the market in 1998. The “little blue pill” that promised instant erections seemed sort of sad, or embarrassing, when it was first introduced. Boyfriends and husbands of my straight friends feigned disinterest in the breakthrough—surely they didn’t need a drug to get it up. Yet only six months after Pfizer had introduced it, I began hearing about the pleasure potential of Viagra from my gay male friends. “Oh my god, oh my godddd!” said one of my friends. “It’s like you’re nineteen again! I had several new admirers at the bar the other night.”
I tip my hat (or something else, fill in the blank here, since this is a sex chapter) to gay guys for their pharmaceutical ingenuity. They co-opted a serious medicine with negative associations of aging and