"All homosexuals are alike -- looking for love where there can be no love...."

Handsome Gay Male and I went out last night for drinks with dinner, followed by after-dinner drinks. We had a lot to talk about, and most of it was *very* gay. Turns out that I am one of HGM's only gay friends, and he is one of a very small handful of mine -- and the only male in my local gay family.

The evening started off on a sweet note. When I let him in the building, he was bearing a single yellow rose. He handed it to me and said, "This is for the courage you displayed in your Couples class. The fact that discussion of gay and lesbian relationship issues can be summarily dismissed from a Couples Therapy class in a master's-level program at a politically liberal college in Portland shows how much work still needs to be done. It takes brave people to bring it to the attention of everyone else."

That touched me. Especially because even my most supportive straight friends still experience a big gap between their understanding and mine on this issue. Sometimes, it just helps to have an audience that knows what you're talking about without the need to explain it.

Now, here's the "fun" part of this blog entry:

HGM asked me if I would give a book to Dr. R, who's in one of my classes. It came to him by way of one of Dr. R's friends, a man who came to my Mardi Gras party as what I imagine was a "gay pirate" costume. He and HGM had dinner the other week, and the gay pirate asked him to get this book to Dr. R.

The nice thing about passing along a book is the opportunity to thumb through it. This one was old and a bit dusty looking, so I accepted it eagerly from HGM without questions.

I looked at the faint embossed title on the hardbound spine. "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex*" with that little asterisk explained lower on the spine in tiny print: "*but were afraid to ask." This pristine little gem was published in 1969.

"I read some of it," HGM said, "and found myself feeling torn up by the section on homosexuality. I could not believe it."

This morning, I put my nose in the book, randomly opening it to a chapter on masturbation. The discussion was surprisingly shame-busting, although the idea of girls masturbating by "climbing a tree" is still a jarring image. Not straddling a branch, my friends, but "climbing" the tree. Maybe it's because so many of the trees I climbed had kind of rough bark -- oaks, for example -- that I'm not seeing my little girl (or my grown woman) clitoris enjoying that very much.

Anyway, after a bit of perusing in that section and a scanning of the Table of Contents, I noticed there was an entire chapter on male homosexuality, but nothing about lesbians. This surprised me. So I turned to the index and looked up "lesbian." There were a couple references, so I turned to the pages in question.

Lesbians were, in fact, discussed -- not extensively, but nevertheless discussed.

In the CHAPTER ON PROSTITUTION!

It was so incredibly illuminating that I thought I would share with you all the entire section on lesbians, even though it might represent some kind of copyright violation:

"What do female homosexuals do with each other?

Like their male counterparts, lesbians are handicapped by having only half the pieces in the anatomical jigsaw puzzle. Just as one penis plus one penis equals nothing, one vagina plus another vagina still equals zero.

The most common lesbian sexual activity is mutual masturbation. They caress each other's clitoris and labia until sexual excitation and orgasm occurs. Many different techniques are used but the effect is basically the same. Occasionally, they use the third or index finger to massage the vagina, and rarely, lesbians lean to the Italian three-fingered method. In this variation of masturbation, the thumb is on the clitoris, the index finger is in the vagina, the middle finger works on the anus. The effect is something like a do-it-yourself three-way girl.

Some female homosexuals lean toward tribadism. This calls for one woman to lie atop the other while the pubic areas are rubbed together -- faster and faster as the sexual excitement increases. Pressure and friction on the clitoris finally brings orgasm. Some "tribads" almost accomplish an equivalent of heterosexual sexual intercourse.

How is that?

Occasionally a woman may have an unusually large clitoris which reaches as much as two or more inches in length when erect. If she happens to be a lesbian and her partner spreads her legs widely, the clitoris may just penetrate the vagina. What would be a disgrace to a man is a delight to a woman. Lesbians with this anatomical quirk are in great demand.

For homosexual women with average endowments, the dildoe may be useful. These sponge rubber or plastic penises can be held in place with an elastic harness and an unreasonable facsimile of heterosexual intercourse is possible.

(This is of course the curse of the homosexual, male or female. No matter how ingenious they are, their sexual practices must always be some sort of imitation of heterosexual intercourse.)

Some women simply take turns using the dildoe to masturbate each other. Often this tends to be too exciting for the lady who is waiting her turn to be copulated with the artificial penis and too dull for the one who has already had her turn. About 200 years ago, an anonymous Japanese genius came up with the solution. It is known in Japan as the "harigata." It is a long, flexible dildo with two heads. Each woman inserts one end into her respective vagina, and both of them get what they are looking for. The unanswered question at this point then becomes why they need each other. If they snip the harigata in the middle, both girls can go home and enjoy themselves at leisure.

What else do lesbians do?

Another common lesbian technique is mutual cunnilingus. Some girls consider themselves experts and prolong this form of intercourse for hours. Mary Anne, a twenty-seven-year-old hstler, tells about it:

"Sure I'm a lezz and I'm not ashamed of it. I've been in love with girls since I was fourteen -- I only hustle so I can take care of my lover-girl. I hate men and I don't try to hide it. Only a woman knows how to make love to another woman. I can do more for a girl with my tongue in fifteen minutes than a man can do for her in fifteen years. I should know -- I've let 50,000 men lay me since I started and I wouldn't trade of\ne of my girls for all of them!"

There are some other differences between gay guys and lesbians.

What are they?

The girls make out much more than the boys. Kissing on the lips, kissing and fondling the breasts, hugging and squeezing, are popular with the girls. This is probably a reflection for the female desire for at least the illusion of romance in sexual involvement. Most gay guys just want to hurry up and get down to the business of masturbation. Female homosexual relationships also seem to last a little longer than the male equivalent, but their course is no less stormy; the girls betray and deceive eiach other with monotonous regularity.

Anal activity is not quite so popular with lesbians -- most of their attention is focused on the vagina and clitoris. But basically all homosexuals are alike -- looking for love where there can be no love and looking for sexual satisfaction where there can be no lasting satisfaction."

UCM comments: And to think I was 1 year old when this book was published. How old do you think I was when it was finally considered hopelessly out of date? ... Well, I wish I could answer that for you, but no matter how dated you and I might think this wretched read is, there are still plenty of people out in the world today who would take this 'insight' into lesbians as gospel.

'The girls betray and deceive each other with monotonous regularity' is a line that, coupled with the notion that all my loving physical behavior for women is the 'desire for at least the illusion of romance,' I will be chewing on for a long time to come.

This book may seem absurd in the 21st Century, but it represents the world I was born into and the attitudes that permeated my youth all the way through college. This is my early history. It is not so much a matter of having taken on this yolk myself as having been given it by society. It has been a long process of learning to stand under the weight of it, and when people tell me that I'm taking things too personally or otherwise should not be quite as outraged as I get sometimes over this absurd stigma, I try to remember that we don't all come from the same place.

I am so glad I was not born 30 years earlier. Now, how will it be for a girl like me born 30 years hence? That's probably all that really matters.