The first chapter of Douglas’ 2019 book The Madness of Crowds is titled “Gay”.  Here, Douglas wrestles with the social, political, religious, psychological, scientific and biological states of being gay.  He tackles gay marriage, adoption, and a whole plethora of issues both past and present, as well as some new ones that are being manufactured within the gay rights movement in a bid for organisations like Mermaids and Stonewall to remain funded.  He does this without adding any drama or grievance of his own.  He is open-minded, questioning, and insightful in turn.  He is relaxed and comfortable enough in his own person to attend a screening of a documentary that deals with gay conversion therapy.  And he is civil and curious enough to be conversational and social with the crowd who attended as well as its maker, and cordial enough to write a bad review of it without demonising the filmmaker or the attendees.  So far so good.

He ends the chapter by veering off into Greek mythology and making reference to Zeus.  There’s a legend that Zeus cut human beings in half; that we were all born with four arms, four legs, and two faces, and that the act of lovemaking is an attempt to make ourselves whole again as we search for our other halves.  “What is the act of lovemaking like?  What does the other person feel?”  The Greeks laboured over this, Douglas states, and suggests that the answer will never be known.  Or will it?  He then tells us that the answer to this mystery actually resides within the coupling and the union of two gay men.  

He continues: “All women have something that heterosexual men want.  They are holders, and wielders, of a kind of magic … gays appear in some way to be in on the secret … gays will always be the people – especially the men – who know too much … about the secret women hold in sex.”  Gay men, according to Douglas, hold the key to the secret of what a union during heterosexual coupling feels like, but admits that with surgery men who feel trans can now experience penetration so they may or may not, with their custom-made simulacrum of a vagina, be privy to even more secrets of what biological females feel.  In this way, a new assault on the female is born and with it a hierarchy of what types of non-biological people get to insert themselves into the experiences that biological females have.

He describes the psychology behind imaginary courtship scenarios that, to my mind, are very Elizabethan in feel.  Men and women who are dating each other are going around in an absolute mental tizzy, apparently, as they agonise over what the other might possibly be after from love and a union, and what they could possibly feel during the act of sex.  Reading it, I’m picturing men and women at court; the men in white curled wigs, white stockings, and silk outfits.  It’s not written for today’s lovers who are courting and rutting up an alley, inebriated, after a night out having met minutes before on the dancefloor, oblivious to and uncaring for any emotions and gratification other than their own.  Douglas would have us believe that the questions men and women hold of what the intimate penetrative experience feels like are being asked, and have been asked, by all of us in great angst “from adolescence onwards”.  I’ve never personally wondered such a thing, but in order to make his point Douglas does speak in absolute terms in this chapter. 

He puts forward the legend of Tiresias from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – a man who was turned into a woman and then turned back into a man.  Tiresias is a “traveller across the sexes” who, when questioned as to who derives more pleasure from sex (“the woman or the man?”) replies “the woman”.  Douglas likens this state of having been a woman to the state of being a gay man (presumably a submissive gay man for not all gay men enjoy receiving anal sex). 

Douglas gets this theory from a fellow lover of literature and the classics, Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the memoir The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity.  Daniel writes: “All straight men who have engaged in the physical act of love know what it is like to penetrate a partner during intercourse, to be inside the other … Sex between men dissolves otherness into sameness, men into de, in a perfect suspension: there is nothing that either party doesn’t know about the other.  If the emotional aim of intercourse is a total knowing of the other, gay sex may be, in its way, perfect, because in it, a total knowledge of the other’s experience is, finally, possible.” 

Daniel finishes off with the recount of a poem where he is lusting after footballers and where he looks at one of their girlfriends and falls “through her into his own passion”.  Today he would be diagnosed as being trans.  He wants to be the girl, he wants to have a vagina, and he wants to be the submissive sex partner who is held in the arms of one emblem of a very strong masculinity – the athlete – and he wants to experience a penis entering him via the channel that God created for such an event – the vagina.  To me, this is a description of the soul fleeing one’s body and latching on to an idea of itself which resides in the visual representation of another man, and being described as same-sex attraction when it’s anything but. In lieu of having a vagina, both he and Douglas promote the anus as being the gay equivalent which can go one better than an actual vagina because it holds code-breaking keys to the angst that is felt by the universe of heterosexual lovers.  Gays are the envy of the straights because of this, and they can impart knowledge to women of what it feels like to penetrate, and to men of what it feels like to be penetrated.

The gays can’t, though.  A cavity filled with excrement is not a self-lubricating vagina that can birth a baby.  The comparison is arrogant, illiterate towards the female condition, and incredibly odious.  I can’t conceive of any female likening her vagina to an anus, or asking questions of a gay man who penetrates an anus and thinking it’s just the same as when she gets made love to vaginally by her heterosexual partner.  A female also has an anus of her own through which she can be penetrated and instantly compare to the act of vaginal penetration.  All things are permissible between consenting adults, and if anal sex is enjoyable for her then that’s fine, but she doesn’t need a gay man to tell her what it feels like.  And to state the obvious while trying not to get too graphic, a heterosexual man can also be penetrated by a woman via a variety of cylindrical objects, not limited to and including a finger.  And there you have it, as if by magic a heterosexual man has been penetrated by someone or some object other than a gay man. 

What does this do to Douglas’ logic?  Does it invalidate gay men’s existence or reason for being? Why else to exist if not to be the educator of women and the people holding the keys to the mysteries? I hope you see the arrogance of Douglas’ train of thought here.  This way of thinking doesn’t sit right with me.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call it misogynistic, but if I were sitting on a bus then misogyny would be the next stop the bus would be arriving at.  The comparison is jaw-droppingly narcissistic and reveals much about the psychology of the gay man who would proclaim such a thing. 

“From those indifferent couplings” (of Mendelsohn’s own youth) “I do remember this: when men have sex with women, they fall into the woman.  She is the thing that they desire, or sometimes fear, but in any event she is the end point, the place where they are going.  She is the destination.  It is gay men who, during sex, fall through their partners back into themselves, over and over again.”  It’s all terribly romantic, and comes with such high expectations and a heavy load on any prospective partners.  Tiresias, for his honesty in relation to who enjoys lovemaking more, is struck blind by Zeus and given the gift of prophecy, which will later enable him to “predict the fate of Narcissus”.  Mendelsohn goes on to say “When I hold them (other males), it is like falling into a reflection back into my desire, into the thing that defines me, my self”.  This is absolute narcissism in thinking, lovemaking and writing.    

Douglas and Daniel speak of the union, that place whereby only two men can truly know what the other is thinking and feeling in relation to penetration and being inside.  I’ll also wager that, outside of the poets, not very many men are wondering how lovemaking feels for a woman.  If the man is doing it right, he’ll be able to see and to hear what it feels like for her and vice versa.  In my own situation for example, and I’m by no means unique, in that one instance I tried being rimmed and being fucked I hated it.  The anus is a blood-rich area, for sure, and therefore it can experience heightened sensations.  A tongue being placed on me back there felt so wrong, and the penis trying to breach me felt, besides painful and uncomfortable, like a violation.  So, to continue with Douglas’ logic, entering or being entered by a male partner to me means brutality. Does it stop me from doing it to another man? No. And I don’t care so long as I’m the one doing it to the other.  I’m fucking him and I know that it hurt me so I can only imagine it’s doing the same to him.  I even delight in the thought of his pain and my dominance, and the faster and deeper I go.  I can hear cries and moans and slight protestations to go slower or stop for a bit.  Sometimes I slow down, other times I pause, mostly I don’t; I simply continue because I know that this is all part of the power play that arises when two men fuck.  One of us has to be dominant, as Douglas’ own words and logic inadvertently prove.

Getting back to the topic of conversion therapy from the first paragraph, I think the dynamics of what drives the gay man are worth delving into, and once examined might possibly lead to sexual changes of heart and mind and behaviour, therefore leading to a reduction in the number of men who identify as gay or changing the way that gay men are gay.  ‘Conversion’ is the wrong word for what they’re doing – ‘examination’ or ‘reflection’ would be better.  The condition of being a gay man is, in my opinion, predominantly that of being emasculated (Daniel’s own words, and Douglas’ promotion of them, show this). Rather than searching for their other halves I’d propose that gay men are searching for the masculinity that they feel they are lacking or have lost or that they would like to be.  How many times I hear the cries of ‘I got a straight guy last night’ or ‘he’s only one more pint of lager away from letting me suck his dick’.  Rather than a “traveller between the sexes” as Douglas would have us believe gay men are, I’d put forward the idea that gay men are stuck somewhere between the sexes in a state of limbo as they search for their masculinity. Too often feeling it resides in someone else.  The other half is not missing. No one is incomplete.

And while I don’t think Douglas is in any way a misogynist, I do feel his logic is very confused as he adds to the pile on against the state of being female. We have men in dresses telling the public and women what it is to be a woman. Likewise we have Douglas putting forward the notion that gay men, because of anal sex, hold the secrets to lovemaking that women are desperate to know more of.