So, in three separate places now I’ve seen straight women
talk about how much they love m/m because it lets them have their hot
fetishistic sexy time without any kind of sex shaming and isn’t that wonderful?!
Because gay men are never shamed for sex…
…riiiiight. Have you heard about this thing called AIDS?
It’s a global pandemic that vast portions of the straight world believe is ALL
OUR FAULT. Our sex lives are held responsible for one of the biggest global
plagues in the world today and you cannot even imagine the constant judging we
get both in the community and from without because of our sex lives, our
dangerous sex lives, our promiscuity, our terribad plague carrying evilness.
AIDS awareness literature, speeches, lectures, documentaries (seriously, how
many films out there with gay main characters involve tragically dying of
AIDS?) are all encompassing because of our terribad evil sexing!
And what’s one of the main weapons the homophobes use
against us? Our supposed sex lives! Martin Ssempa is one of the chief driving
forces of the Uganda genocide Bill and he is roundly mocked for showing
explicit gay porn at his seminars and declaring that gay men eat each other’s
faeces.
Peter LaBarbera, one of the loudest voices of hate in the
US has been giving the mocking name “Porno Pete” by some in GBLT community
because of his overwhelming obsession with gay men having sex and gay male
porn.
Direct quote from professional homophobe Matt Barber on
what being gay is “…one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower
intestine and calling it ‘love.’” Ever heard of “gay bowel syndrome”? It’s completely fictional but still
being trotted out by the haters on the right with depressing regularity.
A huge plank of the attacks against our every single right and
protection is “Ewwww gay buttsex!” But our sex lives aren’t shamed? Are you
serious? There are people campaigning to have us murdered on mass using sexual
shaming as a major plank in that campaign.
In fact, one of the common polemics about why our love is not real, why
we don’t deserve marriage equality, why our families are fake is because we’re
supposed to be so utterly sex obsessed. Overwhelmed by lust, incapable of
commitment, driven by endless dark urges – churches, court rooms and halls of
government alike have rung with cries of what dirty sex monsters we are and
that that justifies us not having equality
And even outside of the blatant hate groups – how many memes and bad
jokes have you heard about gay men and sex? The hamster meme? The ridiculous
and homophobic lie
about sagging trousers being a signal you’re receptive to anal sex in
prison to try and shame youth into abandoning the style?
And how often when something does happen – like the recent tragic death
in the UK of a man in a gay sauna – did the forces of shaming and policing
(both in and out the community) rush forward to remind us all how dirty and
naughty and wrong we are? Do you
remember Jan Moir deciding that Stephen Gately simply had to have died of unnatural
causes and was having kinky threesomes throwing in an extra dig that we don’t
need civil partnerships?
Every time there is even a suggestion or possibility of a gay man somewhere in the world involved in even the most mild of “sex scandals” we get another repeat of why we’re dirty and wrong and don’t deserve have rights – or even to exist.
Our sex lives are constantly shamed.
Which is one of the reoccurring and glaring issues with these
conversations about M/M. We have these female authors and readers extolling the
joys of reading about the hawt sexing without issues they have to deal with as
a marginalised people – while completely ignoring, disrespecting and being
outright contemptuous of the marginalised people they’ve decided to use and
exploit. They are not only not gay men, but they neither know nor care to know
about the issues gay men face that they so merrily pass over when using us as
tools for their useage. Even the slightest attempt to be aware of gay men as
actual people would have realised that “gay men don’t face shame for having sex”
was a truly ridiculous and insulting thing to say – but that attempt isn’t
there. Gay men as people are not considered – only as objects: objects to help
avoid their own issues or objects to fetishise for titillation or both.
