Confessions of a more-or-less straight guy
Allan MacInnis / Xtra West / Vancouver
It’s time for me to come out of the closet to Xtra West readers.
I’ve written a half-dozen articles and reviews for the paper, interviewed Annie Sprinkle and her partner Beth Stephens, and talked to the directors of two queer-themed documentaries, one horror film and at least one play. I might do another article or two for the paper, if they’ll have me.
The thing is, it’s time to admit it and take my lumps: I’m straight. An interloper, a tourist. I feel like I have to come clean.
I’m not completely straight, understand; probably no one is, but my version of “straight” may be a little more crooked than some.
I posed nude once with Michael V Smith, and – he doesn’t know it – had a dream once, possibly wet, where he went down on me.
In university, I was convinced by an essay of Leo Bersani’s, “Is the Rectum a Grave,” that our culture’s homophobia had wrongly led men to disown their anuses as a source of sexual pleasure, which prompted me to experiment with penetrating myself during masturbation sessions.
I even figured out during my yoga days how to perform autofellatio, so I can boast about having had one penis in my mouth – my own. (Sadly, I couldn’t get hard, mostly because the position was so fucking uncomfortable; talk about a Catch 22).
There was even an episode once in my 20s where I agreed to let some anonymous man on a chat line give me a blowjob, only to discover to my disappointment that I couldn’t find the address he’d told me to meet him at.
And long before that, in my preteen years, a neighbourhood boy and myself compared our penises while hiding, literally, in a closet (I declined his invitation to suck his, but I did touch it and hold it, and he mine; I was mostly just curious – he was the one who got hard).
None of this gives me the right to call myself “gay.” Every orgasm I’ve given or shared has been with a woman. Every sexual impulse I’ve felt in adult life towards men around me – and such impulses do arise from time to time despite my hetero orientation – has been squelched as potentially opening a can of worms.
