(Creative analytic writing for English 368 - Gay Male Writers...for those interested)
Reckon Balls
The mind
struggles to say no, the body disputes with “yes” and the pyramid of power,
that ubiquitous hierarchy, will hear of neither. The life of the budding
homosexual on the verge of his story’s climax, the finding and acceptance of
self in society, is a curious one, among other clichés. Fortunately, E.M
Forster and W.H Auden, in their works Maurice and “The Platonic Blow,”
respectively, avoid such banal stereotypes, but instead dip their appendages in
deeper terrain. What does a homoerotic love triangle and oral sex escapade have
in common? Other than the obvious, Maurice and “The Platonic Blow”
challenge the knowledge versus body binary and, in doing so, subvert, if not
completely demolish, the established hierarchy.
Why should
these works and their authors want to tear down that patriarchal,
heteronormative hierarchy, shake the very foundation in which they’re writing?
The characters’ internal monologue or external concerns expose the answer.
Forster’s Maurice, on the first page of the novel, eyes not even fully adjusted
to font type, addresses the triviality of the conventional hierarchy as the
narrator describes the education system in which the “pupils did not do badly
in the long run, became parents in their turn, and in some cases sent him their
sons” (9). This menial cycle ignores emotions, goals, dreams, potential in
education, let alone personal lives, but, thank God, at least the educators
have higher hopes for the students who “seemed to [the junior assistant] a race
small but complete, like the New Guinea pygmies, ‘my boys’” (10). Of course,
why would those at the upper end of the echelon reflect different ideas than
what they were taught? Where else should this ceaseless sequence stop but in an
undesirable conclusion: shame of unaddressed passions?
In order for
these texts to effectively destroy any form of ranks and conformed conventions,
they must find the root of rebellion. Since nothing is as easy as it seems, especially
for a homosexual text, even roots have roots. Unfortunately, those original
roots are rooted in internalized homophobia due to institutional homophobia. “The
Platonic Blow,” which is, because of it’s sheer openness a celebration of
homoerotic sexuality, even suffers this. Auden’s speaker is out, presumably
cruising, when the speaker stops and:
watched
the crotch where the cloth intriguingly bulged.
Our
eyes met, I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I
couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to say.
In
a blur I heard words myself like a stranger speak. (8-11)
Cloth conceals, and, if the cliché rings true and eyes are
the window to the soul, then, when the cloth is removed and the speaker’s naked
eye is faced with the naked truth, the truth of his own lusts, the speaker of
the poem ought to be elated. Instead, there’s been instilled within him an
institutional homophobia that stops his motion, turns his stomach and makes his
own speech sound foreign, untrue to himself. Other than merely stating the actions,
or inactions, of the speaker, Auden also drops word play, alliteration and
consonance and instead adopts a formal and professional tone, simply stating
the facts: “Present address next door./ Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest.
From Illinois./ Profession mechanic. Name: Bud. Age twenty-four” (14-16). Auden’s
speaker loses his fun personality, feels shameful, sick even. Hold up a mirror
to this situation and the black and white reflection of the Maurice text
is reflected.
Maurice’s
struggle with his homophobia lasts much longer than a few lines in a poem, and
the climax of his story isn’t necessarily as messy, but, like the poem, there
is the first seed that reveals his conflict. Maurice, growing into a man at
school, is caught dreaming in class and he realizes, “[his] secret life can be
understood now; it was part brutal, part ideal, like his dreams. As soon as his
body developed he became obscene” (23). Where to begin? Maurice’s secret life,
not open or true to self, is split, as most things homosexual. Split between
brutal and ideal, what he truly lusts for and how the omnipresent “they” force
him to view that desire. Torn inside, Maurice begins to see his body as
obscene, a word with not exactly the most positive of connotations. Maurice,
subconsciously, does not view his body as obscene. There’s a cloth, perhaps the
same as in “The Platonic Blow,” that is shielding how Maurice’s body is true to
himself. These roots of shame are at the bottom of these homosexual’s
experiences, but the roots higher up begin to crack through the asphalt,
tripping bikers and hikers alike, making its presence known. The roots of the
body.
Forster and
Auden begin to seep past the concrete, knowing the best way to further
penetrate cracks is with the body, not the mind. Maurice, long before accepting
his homosexuality, begins to fall asleep, alone, “bit by bit, and first of all
his brain, his weakest organ” (40). Surprising that Auden is not the one to
play with the word organ, but Forster. Binaries work in such a way that they
hold analogous relationships, such as how brain versus body relates to reason
versus emotion relates to strength versus weakness. By accusing his mind of
being his weakest organ, the narrator’s subverting the chain of doubles.
Maurice isn’t the only homosexual with a struggle in the novel, as Clive, too,
is forced to face head on, and in, with dualities and homophobia. Clive,
immediately before he seemingly stops being homosexual, is reminded that “the
body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable” (118). While,
traditionally, the very word that has a target on its chest, knowledge relates
to strength and the body relates to weakness, the body here is made stronger,
the concrete splits. But Clive does turn the way of a straight, heterosexual
throughout the remainder of the novel. Was his homosexuality an act of rebellion against the heteronormative or
confusion? Clive’s fate will prove the destruction of the established system,
but first, with the brain on the ropes, the body will deliver the final right
hook. When reason loses to emotion and passion and the traditionally weak puts
its run-down boots on the defeated chest of the strong, the stiff roots will
have erected a new ground to walk on.
The body is
the contender, and there is no stronger muscle behind it than with an oddly
repetitive, yet effective, odyssey through W.H. Auden’s intrepid, fleshy poem.
Like sex, “The Platonic Blow” uses rhythm, energy and images to build to a
climax, a climax that ends in a glorious defeat. As stated before, the poem
begins with a sense of nervous tepidity and formality, but once the pants drop
and bodily fluids flow, the vigor of the “sexcapade” takes form and moves the
poem towards that peak. As hands and “knobs” (46) touch and expose themselves,
Bud, the lover, is described, or at least Bud’s bits, as “noble,” (36) “royal”
(44) and “luxuriant but couth“ (62). The hierarchy is taking form within a text
that is challenging it. From formal to refined, Auden transforms a base
homosexual desire and masculine, bodily, features beyond the realm of the
tangible when he describes Bud’s balls as “herculean eggs” (67). The change of
command is already lost as Auden enters higher territory by curiously exploring
more of the skin. Continuing the “treck of inspection, a leisurely tour of the
waist” (88), the speaker of the poem begins “straddling my legs a little I
inserted his divine” (73). His member, slurped, has surpassed supernatural into
the celestial. Bud’s body is traveled by the speaker “down the shaggy slopes,”
(98) “through the forest of pubic hair/ to the range of the chest” (107-108).
The body as nature signifies the body as a divine, pure creation. Which,
naturally, leads to the Romantics. Namely, William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing
to Byzantium.” Auden’s speaker begins “slipping my lips round the Byzantine
dome of the head” (113). As in Yeats’ poem, Byzantium represents a divine
beauty or nature that is eternal, unlike the nature of the orgasm still to come
(2040). Lastly, at the penultimate moment of Bud’s intercourse, the edge of the
inevitable, Bud “melted into what he felt. ‘O Jesus!’” (132). Jesus, part
divine, therefore eternal, but, most importantly, part man. The assimilation of
divine and flesh represented at one of the most, at its core, bodily functions.
With this, the body, now not only elegant, not only mythical, not only natural,
not only divine, not only eternal, but all of these within flesh, has
dismantled the body and brain binary by Bud’s bobbing, budding and bursting.
The ladder
of power, the vertical chain of command has tipped over as the concrete has
given way to the extending roots of opposition, refusing to be forced under.
Fallen ladders are now in a horizontal position, similar to a position found in
“The Platonic Blow,” face to face. Within this horizontal realm of the
transcendent flesh, any form of upper or lower echelon cannot exist. Maurice,
along with Bud and the poem’s unnamed lover, take advantage of this position
and, with their newly open and accepted bodies, stomp on the hierarchy.
Maurice, rising above the heartbreak and homophobia of Clive, with his new
lover, Alec, knows “they must live outside class, without relations or money;
they must work and stick to each other till death” (239). Alec, a lower-class
servant to Clive, brings forth that rebellion against oppression within
Maurice. Maurice shouts to Mr. Borenius, who represents institutionalized
homophobia by speaking rumors to Alec against Maurice (216), “‘do look at the
sky––it’s gone all on fire,’ but the rector had no use for the sky when on
fire, and disappeared” (239). Success goes to Forster and his characters for
shaking even the most certain of things as the color of the sky. Borenius
disappears and takes his hierarchy with him, he has no use for this new fiery
sky, nor the horizontal world that rests under it. Is the subversion at its
end? The Victorian model followed within the times of these works’ publications
call for a tragedy or punishment of homosexual desires or actions. While
Maurice and Alec live, implied romantically, happily ever after, Clive “did not
realize this was the end, without twilight or compromise” (246). If Clive’s
ending is tragic and Clive had a relationship with Maurice, then the
hierarchal, Victorian model rings true. However, Clive’s acts of homosexuality
were not a rebellion against the heteronormative or acts of confusion, but his
tragic desire to love women, resulting in his marriage to the affluent Anne, is
instead a rebellion against his homosexuality. There’s a role reversal that
leaves Clive stuck in the jurisdiction of the now subverted heteronormative
hierarchy. A tragic ending for Clive? Yes, but for a Clive who did not remain
true to his queer self but sold himself to heterosexuality to end up, in a way,
as collateral damage. However, Maurice and Alec aren’t the only duo who dare
dispute the domineering social system.
The narrator
in “The Platonic Blow” shows obvious signs of heretofore unaccepted differences
than Bud. Education is typically a sign of at least mild affluence and the
speaker’s inclusion of alliteration, consonance, loquacious, scholarly words
such as “divulged,” (6) “viscous,” (60) “consummation,” (101) and “voluminous”
(124) prove his culture. On the other hand, Bud, his soon-to-be lover at the
time of his description, is narrowed down into, “Half Polish, half Irish” (15)
and “Profession mechanic” (16). There is no sense of Bud’s vocabulary other
than his eruptive ejaculation at climax, but a mixed-race mechanic in the
1940s, the time the poem was written, would not be a sign of an upper-classman.
Like, Maurice and Alec, the mixed race of Bud shows the challenging of class to
class relationship norms, gender norms, as well as racial norms. The
differences between the two are no longer relevant when the clothes fly off,
exposing the all-mighty body. Once again, without the punishment for the lewd
acts of love, “The Platonic Blow” ends with an apropos happy ending. The last
lines of the poem uproot any trace, if any is left, of the hierarchical system
while representing all aspects of revolt up to this point. With his fingers in
Bud’s rosebud and his mouth around his member, the speaker feels “His ring
convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich and thick,/ His hot spunk spouted in
gouts, spurted in jet after jet” (135-136). “Ring” connatates a wedding,
something sacred, a divine institution “where the two will become one flesh” (Holy
Bible, 831). “Rich,” describing Bud’s semen, further shows that a monetary
value is second to physical or lustful value. Lastly, “jet after jet”
connatates a long distance or traveling, the cumshot heard ‘round the world.
Unlike the famous Revolutionary War myth, this shot does not start a war, but
ends the upheaval of a repressive system against homosexuals that instills
shame and homophobia and calls for a menial cycle of tragedy.
The
pleasure-wave of the destructive orgasm has rolled over and laps back and forth
on the beach, now what? With no concrete walls and floors to hold back the new
sense of homonormativity, or a homopolis, the future is as optimistically
ambiguous as Maurice and Alec’s metaphoric riding off into that flaming sunset,
like two gay trail-blazers. “The Platonic Blow’s” flaming sunset is of the
slightly more naked variety. Regardless, with no tragic endings in sight, only
the horizon, the last question to pose is: “Who gets blown next?
Works Cited
Auden, W.H. “A Day for a Lay.” 40-44. Web.
Forster, E.M. Maurice. New York: Norton, 1993. Print.
The Holy Bible. Michigan: Zondervan, 1984. Print. New International Version
Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Norton
Anthology of English Literature: Volume
2. 8th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2006. 2040.
Print.
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Naked Bunch: An Argument In Five
Parts
Muscles
begin contracting, the spinal cord slightly curves and the pelvis spasms.
However, the inevitable orgasm is without bliss but burns. An orgasm is
reached, but not the French la petite mort. “The little death” cannot
occur, the spirit cannot leave, when forced into a rigid position.
Specifically, a constructed position within heteronormative expectations. The
orgasmic burn is like a sadist tied up, desiring to break out of their bondage
and have their way. William Burroughs’ “The Wild Boys” and André
Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name are the muzzled sadists, struggling and
fingering at the knots of gender roles. From the outside, through a
stereotyping, heteronormative peephole, an opinionated person watches the
dissenting homosexual texts, the tribes of “The Wild Boys” and Elio, the
passionate, peach prodding wild boy, penetrate and cultivate rituals that
extend beyond gender fluidity all the way to gender and sex destruction.
* * *
Part 1: The Scopophallic Room
Heteronormative
eyes adjust to the limited sight of the peephole and focus on the most obvious,
the visual. A tribe of Burroughs’ wild boys called the Warrior Ants, “wear
aluminum bikinis and sandals and tight steel helmets…wash and anoint their
bodies with a musk of genitals, roses, carbolic soap, gardenias, jasmine, oil
of cloves, ambergris and rectal mucus” (160). The bikini, stereotypically a
type of clothing worn by a female, is instead on a male wearing a phallic
helmet.
“But note
the construction of the bikini,” says the eyeball through the wall, “of hard,
durable metal. These traits are surely of male persuasion and appropriate the
wardrobe. The bikini no longer has relation to the female.” But a bikini isn’t
only of sight. Lifting a nose to the peephole, there’s a whiff of the male
mixed with the female on a wild boy. A musk of masculine genitals with a scent
of feminine flowers and soaps and finally the reek of rectal mucus, both feminine
and masculine. The latter a destruction of the male role versus female role
binary. After all, everyone has rectums. This decisive piece of knowledge does
not escape Elio in Call Me By Your Name as he looks the motific peach up
and down. While inside the peach, Elio invents a Ovidian story in which “an
ill-fated young man and young girl who in their peachy beauty… had turned… into
a peach tree, and only now after three thousand years, were being given what
had been so unjustly taken away from them.” The peach has then transcended
genders.
The eyeball
lightens up, “You’ve dug your own grave with that. The peach is, first, only a
fruit and already without gender and, second, it does not show Elio questioning
or subverting any binaries.” Elio recalls a moment of thought, before his
affection for Oliver is spoken, that, “no one my age had wanted to be both man
and woman” (25). Furthermore, the physical positions of Elio during sex, his
domination over the “rape victim” (147) fruit, his submissiveness with Oliver
their first night together where “I let him do things to me…spurred them
on…begging him” (135) and at the end of his affair with Oliver when, again
dominating, Elio “let my left hand rub his buttocks and then began to stick my
middle finger into him” (171). Before the voice behind the hole could retort
that Elio was merely exampling gender fluidity, it overhears Elio’s and
Oliver’s sweet little nothings such as the reversal of names and “my body is
your body” (172). If Elio’s body is Oliver’s body and vice versa, then the
feminine weakness and masculine power occur simultaneously within Elio and
Oliver, not a back and forth between the two. Even the wild boys, in their
orgiastic lifestyle, take expected sexual positions to task when a “boy who is
being masturbated rocks back hugging his knees against his chest” and “a
yellow-haired boy straddles a copper-skinned Mexican” (161-163). The roles of
control and obedience, masculine and feminine respectively, do exist in the
gender fluid wild boy culture, but aren’t assigned to genders. The eyeball
moves away and is replaced by a mouth, but before it can propose an argument,
or concede, a finger is thrust in its mouth as the texts call him fool, if,
indeed, that is a finger.
* * *
Part 2: The Assy Knoll and the Second
Shooter
Above the
opening on one side of the wall might read “peephole,” but, unsurprisingly,
above the erotic side of Burrough’s and Aciman, “gloryhole” is etched with
eighteen-inch bowie knives. With their god given asses, the wild boys convert
the orifice on the other side of the wall to another of their conquests. After
all, sexual orientation is anything but black and white in the gay rainbow. In
the same breath that Elio said he wanted to be both man and woman he also
confesses he wanted to be “with men and women” (25). Pretending that Elio
didn’t blatantly state his, at the least, bisexuality, the peach poking scene
illustrates his desire. There’s a muffled grunt behind the wall. When Elio
starts thrusting he, “finally succeeded in tearing it apart with my
cock…holding each half in either hand firmly against my cock” (146). While not
classifying himself as a trans identity, Elio deals with the internalized
duality in the asexual masturbation session. Thinking of neither sex, he,
desiring to be both man and woman, is engaging in sex with both man and woman.
His desire foreshadowed at the start of the novel is stickily realized and when
Elio cums he can purely enter the realm of la petite mort, not
restrained by being conscious of bodies unlike the peeping tom. Pulling away
for a gasp of air, the mouth at the hole asks, “I understand the peach fucking
is representative of Elio’s desire to be with both sexes which supports the
fluidity of sexual orientation, but what about the arguably misogynistic nature
of these wild boys?” Sexual orientation will be made nonexistent by “The Wild
Boys” as well as in Call Me By Your Name. “So why argue sexual
orientation flexibility in Aciman if it will be invalid later,” asks the mouth,
sore from the thrusting of the argument. In order to achieve a complete
destruction of gender and sex binaries, gender roles, heteronormative sexual
orientation rigidity and even the binary of male sex versus female sex must be
disassembled to make the asexual, genderless realm’s glory whole.
* * *
Part 3: A Banana Clit with Nuts
Steam rolls through the hole in the
wall and the face behind it grows sultry with sweat. The haze of the steam
makes the scene before the eye in the wall nearly indecipherable, as well as
the identities of the bodies writhing on the other end. Elio, after entering
the fruit, notices, “that its reddened core reminded me not just of an anus but
of a vagina” (146). Earlier, Elio compares Oliver’s butt to that of an apricot
and, when tossed an apricot, Elio feels that, “touching the apricot was like
touching him” (35). The apricot is compared to the peach like the anus to the
vagina: interchangeable in a dark or steamy room. Inserting his “apricock”
(35), to steal Aciman’s wordplay, into the peach, Elio is inserting himself
into something with the appearance of Oliver’s round mound, as well as
anonymous, genderless anus’ and female vaginas. The transposable nature of the
male and female sex within only one object reveals a split in the “established”
differences of sex.
“Elio’s
sordid actions with the peach is still only fluidity of his sexual orientation
since, after all, a peach is without sex to begin with,” the self-assured grin
is felt from behind the wall. Elio, no doubt, has a sex though? “Naturally, as
is the way of the world.” The essentialist thinking behind the heteronormative
wall is incorrect. The sex of the peach is both man and woman, as Elio desires,
and while jerking off Elio hears the peach “say to me, Fuck me, Elio, fuck
me harder, and after a moment, Harder, I said!” (147). Recall that
Oliver and Elio refer to each other by their own names during lovemaking (134).
Therefore, Elio embodies the peach in the masturbation session and loses his
sex.
“This damn
peach! But you, wild boys, you’re just personally dissimilating yourselves with
your genderqueer ways, but the sex binary as a whole still stands. And you
don’t have any peaches to fuck,” the eyeball argues loudly. Burroughs’ wild
boys are, naturally, posed to attack. They take the argument one step further
than Aciman from metaphoric to literal. Promptly, they make their way to the
cutting room where, “they are going to take a cutting from the rectum…arrange
him on a table with his knees up rubber slings” (165). The physical position of
legs in stirrups is associated with a woman in labor or a gynecologist’s
office, neither of which are present in the cutting room. Physically, the wild
boys are taking on a the female position while the ritual itself is fusing the
genders contradictorily by fission. Opening the anus and cutting from it is
metaphorically transforming the hole into a vaginal opening. Once again, a
constructionism perspective trumps essentialism as the wild boys create for
themselves a female genitalia on their body. While not exactly intersexual, the
wild boy, with their penis’ and vaginas show the variability and uncertainty of
sex. To punctuate the point, when the cutting ritual occurs, “little phantom
figures dance on their bodies, slide up and down their pulsing cocks, and ride the
cutting tubes” (165). These phantom figures have no sexual category or gender
and are having sex with a penis while a vagina is being cut into an anus. The
Burroughsian blurring of sex and gender is evident.
Still wiping
their mouth from the wild boys, the voice behind the wall scoffs, “despite the
argument, this wall still stands. You speak of the rituals of the wild boys and
the ritual of masturbation, but the sex binary cannot be destructed. Even the
Greeks new the purpose of the females was their reproductive qualities. Need I
remind you that only those with actual vaginas are capable of that, not
split rectums and peaches.”
* * *
Part 4: Sexpocalypse
Without
warning, a two by four strikes the head of the arguer. The eye through the hole
spells the shocked confusion that struggles to come out through it’s mouth.
“But, the sex binary can’t collapse, I just said how it couldn’t.” After the
wall entirely falls around it, the peephole is unnecessary as the eye is seen
attached to a face attached to a naked body. Elio’s masturbation doesn’t simply
peter off, there is an orgasm as “carefully, aiming the spurt into the reddened
core of the open peach as if in a ritual of insemination” (147). But the
pregnancy goes outside the peach and into Oliver’s awaiting stomach as Elio
“watched him put the peach in his mouth and slowly begin to eat it” (149). A
physical part of Elio enters Oliver and so does Elio’s love. The metaphoric
pregnancy is Elio’s acceptance of himself growing and nurturing within his
relationship with Oliver. A creation of a new Elio.
“But
metaphors aren’t strong enough to result in this. This…where am I exactly,“ the
naked body queries. The steam, the showers, the lockers. It’s a YMCA and “The
Wild Boys” is about to partake in the final step in the day of reckoning for
gender and sex binaries. Immediately after being cut, which has its own
connotations, a wild boy “walks over to the blackboard and rubs out the word
MOTHER” (165). The naked body tries to cover up while arguing, “clearly a misogynistic
act as I labeled the boys earlier. Weakening a gender or sex doesn’t annihilate
a binary, it’s only subversion. To truly eliminate a binary, a fusion must
occur. Much like Aciman and Burroughs did when they merged the male sex v.
female sex binary.” The rubbing out of the word, among other things, doesn’t
eliminate the female gender, but assimilates the gender into a new form that’s
free of stereotypical gender and sex expectations. The boy also returns the
apple to the teacher (165) in an act of defiance against associating with
original sin. How this associates with this argument is that it is a denial of
both the male and female act of Adam and Eve. “Snake boys,” a tribe, use
“venomous speckled sea-snakes” and “black mambas” to fight their enemies (164).
Snakes, the ubiquitous metaphor for Satan and sin, is used to rebel against the
heteronormative soldiers. The boy erasing the word “Mother” is as much a
statement about binaries as a dissent against biblical creation as a whole.
“You’ve lost
me. Why does religion peek its head in this argument?” The ritual in which they
do so transcends a ceremony and becomes religious in its own right. Despite
what Larry Kramer might have said, these faggots are fucking themselves to
life. After several repeated steps done with precision on a large, blue rug
surrounded by other boys, one boy in the middle conjures up a mist and moulds a
shape and “slowly the boy penetrated the phantom body I could see his penis
inside the other and as he moved in and out the soft red gelatin clung to his
penis thighs and buttocks… spurting sperm inside and suddenly the red boy was
solid” (168).
“But now
you’ve cornered yourself! The female has been extracted from the binary
if these wild boys give ‘birth’ to boys. Not destroying it, but replacing it
with a unary.” The naked arguer is taken to a chair and has their rectum cut,
then placed in the middle of the rug. Minutes later the ritual is done and “two
attendants stepped forward with a littler of soft leather. Carefully they lifted
the Zimbu onto the litter and carried him to the blue tent” (169). “Zimbu” is
what shuts down the last strand of the argument. Burroughs and Aciman don’t
give birth, literal or metaphorically, to any person of an established gender
or sex within the binary. A male is a male and female is a female, but a
Zimbu…A Zimbu with neither entirely masculine or feminine traits or genitalia.
With no preference to male or female because a Zimbu is neither. By all means,
a Zimbu is a peach.
* * *
Epilogue: Many Ways To Have a Good
Time
Where do the
peachy Zimbus go from here? The steam rises from the shower at the YMCA and,
from another wall, another eyeball is seen peering through a peephole. Another
dysejaculation, an orgasm that only brings burning. Like a needle pointing
north, all the wild boys and fruits turn to the walls.
