Nerd With Me!

" How much of wanting another man is the desire to be that man? So many gay men love not men but the idea of masculinity: their desire is not for any individual man but for maleness as an ideal, exactly that which defines them as other and lesser. This perhaps contributes to the promiscuity so many gay men pursue, because no particular individual can embody an ideal, or not for long, whereas that one (the one across the bar, the one you don't know yet) may well be everything you ever wanted, everything you ever needed, manhood itself. If one cannot be a real man, which by definition no homosexual is, then at least one can have a real man, though that's always problematic, since real men don't have sex with other men, certainly not with other real men. I think many gay men worship the power that oppresses them. I think, too, all sexual relations in our society are about power over another on the submission to the power of another. For a gay man, both roles are simultaneously available."-Reginald Shepherd