Monthly Archives: September 2009

Would You Want to be 100% Straight?

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So you’ve recognized the fact you’re attracted to men.  Is that something you regret?  If you walked into a French Quarter voodoo shop in New Orleans and found, among the spider eggs, fly wings, and toad stools, a magic potion that would make you 100% straight, would you grab it up and drink it as fast as you could?

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How many gay or bisexual men have asked themselves this question?  I bet 99% of them.  What if a pill would do it, would you swallow two or three  and then stare at yourself in the mirror, waiting for the change, wondering what you will look like straight?  Or perhaps you find out about a tribal dance practiced by young warriors in Kenya that makes real men out of boys; would you put on a loincloth, take up a spear and give it hell around a backyard bonfire come the next full moon?  Given the circumstances gay and bisexual men face in our misguided society, it’s little wonder if some of them would.

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But when you get under the surface, below the lifetime of negative self-images and male identity questions, all that history that has glommed together to comprise your uniqueness, would you really want to give up one of the most vivid colors in your rainbow?  You’ve finally gotten past all those gender-identity issues and have learned how to let your thoughts blossom without self-imposed limits–would you really want to force all that  vital roundness back into such a small square hole?

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Your liberated sexuality defines far more than the shape of the human body that attracts you, it’s interrelated with other facets of your persona.  It’s likely to make people perceive you as interesting, whether they know about your sexuality or not.  It plays a role in the books you chose to read, the movies you choose to see, the places you choose to travel to, the friends you choose.  Without it, you may not even be interested in books, or you may find yourself lined up with the masses at the next college coed exploitation movie.  You might even identify with those guys in TV beer commercials, heaven forbid.

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Henry Scott Tuke

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If there are artists that present day artists aspire to emulate, Henry Scott Tuke would be one of them.

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Born in York, England in 1858, he died at age seventy in 1929.

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In 1874 Tuke’s family moved to London, where he enrolled in the Slade School of Art. After graduating he traveled to Italy in 1880 , and from 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris, where he studied with the French history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer Sargent (who was also a painter of male nudes, although this fact was little known in his lifetime).

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His motivation to paint teenage boys is unknown.  For me the images are reminiscent of my own youth, those carefree, innocent days of exploring the world around us, uninhibited by self-imposed shame and the dictates of moral autocrats.  Although Tuke’s paintings of nude youths undoubtedly appealed to those gay men who found adolescents attractive, they are never explicitly sexual. The models’ genitals are almost never shown, they are almost never in physical contact with each other, and there is never any suggestion of overt sexuality.

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During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers, most of them homosexual (then usually called Uranian) who celebrated the adolescent male. He wrote a “sonnet to youth” which was published anonymously in The Artist, and also contributed an essay to The Studio.

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