Subject: that dare not speak its name?
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Nov 10 2001 - 07:42:40 GMT
I hadn’t occurred to me before – but Allison has opened
an interesting area of speculation.
It depends, I suppose, on how you recognise a gay man.
Allison bases her diagnosis on a lack of genuine interest in having
sex with a woman. Which is fair enough, except it doesn’t involve
any ‘positive’ element (such as the recognition of an attraction
to members of one’s own sex) – and quite a number of young males
have initial problems with the idea of getting into bed with a girl:
chaps who later become very enthusiastic practitioners indeed.
Of course in the Fifties even Holden might have had difficulty
acknowledging a gay preference in himself. (It’s interesting to
remember how true pink, certified, enlightened liberals like me
& my friends could, in those days, be so openly & scornfully
dismissive of such a harmless minority.) And his pervasive sense
of being a stranger in a hostile world may have its roots in
a concealed sexuality. Also, his tenderness towards vulnerable
females – such as nuns & little girls – may reflect the fellow-feeling
that many homosexual men certainly show.
Yet, somehow I doubt it. There seems to be not one single male,
outside his family, for whom he harbours the wistful admiration
or longing that most honest homosexuals would at some stage
assert. His aversion to Mr Antolini’s kindness is instinctive –
& not, to my mind in any way feigned. Whilst his rage at the pert,
self-assured girls of his own age is just the kind of fury nearly
all heterosexual adolescents feel at finding themselves enslaved by
such worthless objects of desire.
There’s just enough of the orthodox analyst left in me to accept
that all of us experience ambiguous attachments at different stages
in our emotional journeys. Yet most ‘real’ homosexuals will tell
you they knew even before adolescence that they recognised
themselves to be profoundly ‘different’. I don’t think Holden
is different in that way. He simply feels different in the way every
single member of the majority feels different.
Maybe why he speaks to so many of us.
Scottie B.
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