Sex - 2/8/2002

No - that was not just a cheap shot at a title in order to get a massive number of hits ... I really am going to talk about it. No diary is complete without its inclusion I suppose (I take my cue from Bridget Jones and Adrian Mole - hang on, they're both Brit - maybe there's something about Brit repression: diaries and sex ...)

Actually what's prompting me to write this is really a note I tagged on to an earlier entry. It was a matter of fact suggestion that a poem presumed innocent of inuendo was actually homoerotic. I've never been big into sex in literature (though a lot of people are and though there are lots of references)partly because it seems to be merely an identification game. However what got me thinking shortly after the posting of the note was 1. the ease with which I found the reference and 2. the blasè manner in which I wrote it.

I suppose a lot of it has to do with the fact that Lit is so permeated with sexual references, after a while that's all sex becomes, a mere footnote. Shouldn't sex be that sacred and cherished intimacy that deserves more attention than a notice? It's want teenage boys yearn for all of their adolescent years and have to exercise every once of self control to put off. I've never been casual about the issue - but why am I blasè when it comes to finding thinking about it intellectually? I wonder. Of course my research interest was Desire - but that was a more amorphous notion, not physical or sexual Desire per se.

Another aspect of sex that I suppose I think about sometimes has to do with the homoerotic. Now I don't use the word "homosexual" because I don't want to run immediately to the conclusion that it's merely a physical act. Looking back on what's interested me in lit, it's never been homoeroticism either. BUT, obliquely, it's always been a hovering presence. Like there was this course I did in American Poetry where I discovered that all the authors studied were homosexual. Then there's Jonathan Dollimore and Radical Tragedy which I was quite an admirer of quite recently - and he's very much into queer studies. I suppose it's an interest from a distance. There are all the social taboos, the religious beliefs and the sense of identity that weigh in against an immersion in that subject I guess. And yet there is the constant thought about whether or not it may be approached precisely from a distance.

Complementing this fact is that I've never been the macho crap kind of guy. I've got women's hands and most of my friends are girls. Plus I am a Guy teaching Lit Lang - a rarity these days. So I suppose even if there has never been an inclination towards the homoerotic, the confusing of gender roles has always been fascinating.

What does this have to do with sex? Not much by way of titillation I guess. But surely there's more to the word so casually flung around.