Queer Intimacies

I’ve just been reading Michael Warner’s “The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life”, and the following passage really struck me:

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way, intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly unchartered territory – whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the “fag hag” label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our parents or school or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends’ tricks and tricks’ bar friends and gal pals and companions “in the life”. Queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room . . . You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends. (pp. 115-116).

I feel some kind of erotic charge with most of my female friends (gay or straight) that I just don’t feel with hardly any men (geez, do you think I might be a lesbian????). It doesn’t mean I’m going to jump their bones or anything, I think it’s just a sort of joyful arousal that simply makes me feel good. Plato and his mob certainly believed this to be an aspect of the relationships between men (of their class, I hasten to add), which had nothing to do with partnering and family, and ideally would lead them all on to the love of wisdom (philosophy), but they saw no need to deny the erotic in the process.

The challenge for me is in recognising this but then knowing what to do with it. I think often in the past it’s led me into relationships that were never going to work. But having said that, I have no regrets about any of them (even the ones that hurt) because I’ve learned and grown so much from all of them.

The other main problem is that I don’t know how to go from a place of greater to lesser intimacy. It simply feels so unsatisfactory to me, like I’m not fully present, I’m on my guard. Plus I can’t bear the thought of someone I’m still very attracted to with someone else, enjoying the intimacy that I crave. Clearly I have a lot of progress still to make as a human being!