The Weekly Screed (#694)

“Ick!”

by David Benjamin

“This is judicial activism at its worst. The Constitution entrusts state legislatures, elected by the People, to define marriage consistent with the values and mores of their citizens. Unelected judges should not be imposing their policy preferences to subvert the considered judgments of democratically elected legislatures.”

 — Sen. Ted Cruz

MADISON, Wis. — On the long list of Things I Wanna Watch, two guys kissing each other is pretty far down there. But I can stand it — especially if it has symbolic and political significance, as it did this week when the Supreme Court allowed marriage equality in five more states, including Wisconsin.

I’m less enthusiastic about watching a couple of guys, say, drinking champagne out of their navels and licking hot fudge off each other’s nipples. Actually, this is something I’d prefer not to see even if it’s a guy and a girl with great bodies, vintage champagne and that famous fudge from Mackinac Island.

I’m even a little squeamish about that scene in Basic Instinct — you know, where Sharon Stone is naked, mounted on this guy in the throes of orgasmic ecstasy. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Ms. Stone (or, probably, her body double) in the nude, nicely tanned, bouncing and exercising vigorously. My issue is privacy. Notwithstanding a Sexual Revolution in which I participated eagerly, I’ve always regarded serious sex — nakedness, awkward positions, body fluids, climaxes,  yelling involuntarily, etc. — as something you do without an audience. Movie sex scenes can be vital to the narrative, but I’m always ambivalent as I stare at the screen. Even as I succumb to the cheap thrill of vicarious passion, I can’t help but feel vaguely like a pervert peering through Ralph and Alice’s bedroom window.

So, when Sharon grabs the ice-pick and plunges it repeatedly into her lover, I’m relieved. The movie has steered its way to the safe harbor of blood, guts, murder and mayhem — which, at least in America — offer a far more socially acceptable form of family amusement. Everybody watches fictional people shoot, stab, strangle and dismember other fictional people. This is good clean, make-believe fun and we’re not embarrassed to admit that we consume it.

Many of us also watch hardcore porn. But we tend to do so surreptitiously, because there’s a measure of peeping-Tom in this sort of pleasure. We feel a little creepy watching people do something that we ourselves do behind closed doors with the lights out and the shades down, so that the children, or the neighbors —  or people who know how to do it better — won’t see.

Whether we call ourselves liberal or conservative, most of us agree that sexual display has limits, and that venturing beyond that pale is unseemly, unsightly and uncivilized — not to mention frightening the horses.

This is why the right-wing angst over same-sex marriage is so fascinating. There seems to be a real dread among so-called conservatives that gay people, especially men, don’t subscribe to the taboo about against pulling out your privates in public. A lot of gay marriage opponents, notably Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, are honestly afraid that all the queers are going to start doing it in the road.

Scalia has difficulty uttering terms like “same-sex marriage.” He prefers the far more clinical formulation, “homosexual sodomy.” This explicit usage suggests a perception both voyeuristic and apocalyptic. Justice Scalia, who has clearly managed to avoid any knowing contact with openly gay people for more than 70 years, has been shaken by the millions of Americans who “came out” of a closet that was traditionally reserved for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Justice Scalia typifies the fear that gay people — whose sexuality is both aberrant and mysterious to him — will go beyond marrying, adopting and raising children. They will also express their unconventional libidos in alarmingly non-traditional ways, forsaking the discretion that supposedly governs heterosexual love. They will — dear God, help us! — commence to sodomize one another right out in the open, on the sidewalk, in elevators, in the waiting room at the podiatrist’s office, on the benches at the mall with hot fudge, in the pews at the First Presbyterian as the pastor leads the faithful in “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

Justice Scalia suffers perpetual homophobic panic because of the “ick factor,” a visceral terror of watching grown men — many of them as flabby and hairy as Justice Scalia — doing nasty things together in front of throngs of moms all gaping with disgust, covering their kids’ eyes and saying, “Ew! Ick! Gross!”

Justice Scalia’s army of alarmists seem not to appreciate the very closet where they locked their gay brothers and sisters for centuries. Gay people have always had sex with one another. However, as a matter of self-preservation — not to mention good taste — they did so far more secretly than their heterosexual peers.

Privacy has had to be more dearly protected in the gay community than in the 007, strip-club, topless-bar, skin-flick, Pet-of-the-Month sexual culture populated by the rest of us. After all, for most of my life, you could be killed for being a little bit swishy. And then there’s Rock Hudson. After kissing Doris Day a hundred times on-screen, he was dead of AIDS before anyone knew he was gay.

All those strait-laced “Christian” straights — who’ve seen too many YouTube clips of gay-pride parades — seem to believe that “coming out” is the same as “strutting your stuff.” Better they should ponder, with empathy and admiration, how gay life was presciently defined by Paul 2,000 years ago, when he told the Thessalonians, “to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs.”

They do already. And they will. Watch.