(3)

They say that in the spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love.  I sometimes think it would be more honest to say that in the spring (also in the summer, winter, and fall) a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of sex.  At least that's what my own experience has always been.  But what thoughts, I wonder, does a young woman's fancy turn to?  Love being, in the case of this old saw at least, little more than a euphemism for sexual desire, I would suppose the answer to be the same.  Yet "love," even if experienced for but a single night, is no mere masquerade.  It requires something more than physical attraction alone:  it requires the desire to know the whole of another person, body, mind and soul, however momentary, however fragmentary, that knowledge may be.  At least, that's what the woman in me would like to believe.

I remember one of my college professors telling me that there had never been a better time in history for women than now.  "The modern day woman can do anything," he said, "or be anything.  She can be tough or vulnerable, aggressive or passive; she can become a power bitch in the world of business or act the part of the sweet, flirtatious 'girl.'  She can play almost any role she chooses, or play a whole gamut of roles, each one in turn.  In short," he said, "in today's society, women rule.  Of course, women have always ruled – the difference now is that they're starting to know it.  The real problem for women today lies in learning how to handle the power inherent to the use of their many possible personae.  The problem for men, of course, is to figure out how to be an equal player amid the constantly changing personae with which women present them."

I have sometimes dreamed of myself as a woman.  A young, fat woman, plain of face and painfully shy.  I have no desire to be such a woman – or any woman – nor to be in any way physically like a woman; and yet I have often felt that some spirit, some tonality, very much like a woman's, exists within me.  I assume that my dream figure must represent, as all dream figures more or less do, some psychological imperative lying within me.  At first glance it may appear to indicate some type of anxiety I feel with regard to my sexual identity.  And so it does, in a sense:  as a homosexual, I am stuck in a kind of no man's land, my sexual definition caught in the crossfire of the gender wars currently taking place between the sexes.  It may be that a male/female paradigm is being used by my psyche as a way of mapping my sexual identity because this represents, even now, the form of desire considered to be the most socially acceptable.  Under its influence I imagine myself as a vulnerable young woman in order to reflexively assert my masculinity while simultaneously using it to give myself covert validation for my attraction to other men.

Yet I sometimes wonder if it doesn't also indicate an anxiety of a more transcendent order.  Perhaps my psyche is urging me to probe the question of what would happen to both the male and female parts within me if they were brought into a state of perfect union.  What would become of my sexuality if the struggle between my two psychic/sexual selves was stabilized?  What sort of new being would be created were they to be balanced and made whole?  I would then be, not female, yet not wholly male either, but a new gender altogether:  the fully realized, fully actualized, fully self-accepting homosexual male.  Looked at in this light, the woman of my dream represents but a transient aspect of my psychic growth:  she allegorizes the unactualized homosexual male's shame.  If she appears unbeautiful, it is only because I myself have not yet fully perceived her beauty, and of what it consists.

IT MUST BE THIS