(3)

They say that in springtime a young man's fancy turns to love.  I sometimes feel that it might be truer to say that in springtime (also summertime, winter, and fall) a young man's fancy turns to sex; certainly my own experience leads me to believe this is so.  But what, then, does a young woman's fancy turn to?  Love oftentimes being nothing more than a euphemism for sexual desire, the answer might be supposed to be the same.  Yet love is no mere masquerade.  To truly "fall in love" with someone, even for the space of a single night, requires something more than an attraction to the merely physical.  It requires a desire to know the whole of another person, body, mind and soul.  At least, the woman in me would like to believe so.

I remember one of my old college professors telling me that there had never been a better time in history for women than now.  "These days women can do anything," he said.  "Or be anything.  They can be tough or vulnerable, aggressive or passive; they can become power bitches in the world of business or act the part of sweet, flirtatious 'girls.'  They can play almost any role they choose, 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 are starting to know it."  The only problem women face today, he said, was that of 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 amidst the constantly changing personae with which women present them."

I have sometimes dreamed of myself as a woman.  A young, fat woman, 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.  My dream figure, I think, 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 going on between the sexes.  On the one hand, it may be that a male vs. female paradigm is being used by my psyche as a map for sexual orientation 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 existing 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, the masculine and feminine aspects of gender identification brought to a condition of all-encompassing harmony?  This question, I think, reflects upon one of the most profound anxieties any homosexual must face on his or her quest for self-understanding, for it explores the possibility of a entirely new order of existence, one that transcends not only traditionally defined gender roles but which questions the value of sexuality itself.

IT MUST BE THIS