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Sexual
Outlaws
by Tom Moon, MFCC
O something unprov'd!
Something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors
and
holds!
To drive free! To love free! To dash
reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts,
with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of
the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate
soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with
one hour or fullness and
freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and
joy.
--Walt
Whitman
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Tom Moon,
MFCC
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These lines are one of the reasons Whitman is sort
of a patron saint for gay men. He captures well the
sense of defiant abandon that so often
characterizes our sexual behavior. In a world where
being who we are is so often associated with
"defying accepted social norms," it is no surprise
that so many of us identify with the role of the
outlaw.
One of the marvelous capacities of the human
mind is its ability to turn sources of pain into
sources of pleasure. It is painful for us, as
social animals, to be treated as outsiders. But we
can turn this apparent liability into a source of
pride and sexual excitement.
I remember one young man, newly out, who told
me: "Every time I put a guy's dick in my mouth,
it's like I hear mom's voice in my head saying, 'Do
you realize what you're doing?' And I say, 'Uh,
yep.'" Imagining his mother's horror made the
turn-on all that much better.
But there are also downsides to the outlaw
mentality. Conscious defiance is often unconscious
compliance. I knew a man some years ago whose
wealthy parents disowned him because he was gay. In
a brutal farewell letter, his father described him
as "vile, base and degraded." He was consumed with
overwhelming hatred for them and set out to do
everything they forbade, to violate every tenet of
their moral code. He dropped out of college and
began supporting himself by dealing drugs and,
later, with armed robbery. He spent most of his 20s
in and out of prison, and he died alone in a hotel
room of a heroin overdose at the age of 33. The
tragic irony of his "rebellion" was that he wound
up proving to his parents, and probably to himself
as well, that they were right after all.
He might have fared better if he had been able
to grasp the truth in that popular bumper sticker,
"Living Well is the Best Revenge." He would have
done even better if he had understood that really
living well entails giving up all thoughts of
revenge and focusing instead on developing autonomy
and self-respect.
In a sense, the outlaw is not really free, in
the same way that his supposed opposite, the
"assimilationist" or the "best little boy in the
world" isn't free, either. Both the outlaw and the
"good boy" are defining themselves in reaction to
the heterosexual world. The outlaw may be on his
way to freedom in the same way that adolescence is
a stage on the way to adulthood, but he hasn't
arrived at full autonomy yet.
Recently I talked with a man who was feeling
frustrated and unfulfilled in his sexual life, and
wondering what he "ought" to do about it. I
suggested he spend time alone with himself and the
question: "What, for me, would be the most
pleasurable and fulfilling way to live sexually?"
He was surprised to discover that this apparently
simple and direct question was very hard for him to
focus on; every time he tried to do it, he was
derailed with ideas about what "all gay men" want
or should want, what was masculine and what was
feminine, what was politically correct, what his
friends were doing and not doing, and so on.
I asked him to precede his attempts to think
about this question with a thought exercise. I
asked him to think about three ideas in succession.
The first: "I am not inferior to anyone else." The
second: "I am not superior to anyone else." And the
third, the show-stopper: "I am not equal to anyone
else." He wondered, "If I'm not inferior, superior
or equal, then who am I?" Good question. The
exercise had the effect of quieting the activity of
his judging and comparing mind. Freed of that
distraction, he could feel directly what excited
his body and what warmed his heart. Then he knew,
from inside, what kind of sexual life he wanted,
and he did not need advice or direction from me or
anyone else.
In some ways, the gay-male community has much in
common with this man. In San Francisco, we haven't
been legal outlaws in decades, yet many of us
continue to live as if we were, because we continue
to define ourselves in reaction to the larger
society. We will really be free when we can live
our sexual lives without looking over our shoulders
at the reactions of others.
Tom Moon is a psychotherapist in private
practice in San Francisco. He may be reached at
SF Frontiers.
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