Tag: homosexuality

Book Notes: Álvaro Pombo’s Gay Novel

~ Clarissa ~ 23 Comments

Contra natura – or “against nature” – is the magnum opus of the famous Spanish author Álvaro Pombo who finally decided to lay out his understanding of homosexuality after a lifetime of being openly gay. Pombo doesn’t write about the gays who imitate the heterosexual setup by getting married and setting up joint households. For those gays he has quite a bit of contempt because the kind of homosexuality that fails to embrace its unnatural (contra natura), anti-social dimension is, in Pombo’s eyes, pathetic and vaguely disgusting.

Pombo’s novel is about another kind of gays, the ones who are gay in order to avoid the complexities placed by women on the way to sex. That there is such a duality among homosexuals – the ones who want to be (or to marry) men who are like women and the ones that want a sex life free from female patterns – was a commonplace even in the prissy US 15 years ago. But now it’s all a big secret and we are supposed to pretend that the entirety of homosexuality can be reduced to the lifestyle embraced by Pete Buttigieg.

Pombo is blissfully unaware of political correctness and writes his novel to show what happens to the non-Buttigieg gays in old age. What do you do when you are 65, and your body simply can’t give you rapid-fire sex acts with a large variety of new partners? You have to buy the companionship of young men, Pombo says. You have to open yourself up to humiliation and abuse. To Pombo, that is perfectly fine. The gays, he says, should not be like the heterosexual

shit-eaters whom we have always envied and hated. Our purest connection is with failure, with marginalization and with death.

And that, Pombo believes, is fine. Gay men are the shadow of self-satisfied bourgeois propriety. They are a conduit to the darker, more painful and chaotic side of human beings, to the Dionysian rites of pleasure and pain that inspire non-reproductive creation. Instead of running down the streets in Pride parades, says Pombo, the love that dared not speak its name should now choose to not speak it in order to remain on the margins where, says Pombo, it belongs.

I am a heterosexual woman, and much of the novel’s text was hard for me to understand. It’s a beautifully written work of art. Pombo is one of the Spanish greats, having received every literary prize in existence, and deservedly so. But it took me far longer to read the novel because none of it was understandable to me or rooted in any sort of intuitive motivation. Which, of course, is the point.

I recommend the novel only if you are VERY open-minded, both from the left and from the right.

Homophobia on the Offensive in Russia

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

Russia is preparing for the elections to its parliament (called Duma.) Everybody knows that the elections will be a sham. The government forces state employees to vote for the party that is currently in power by threatening to fire them. It forces business people to vote the “right” way by threatening them with sanctions in case they refuse. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that the results of the elections have been predetermined. The Russian Prime-Minister Putin doesn’t even try to conceal that he is the puppet-master behind the current lame-duck President Medvedev.

So what do you do when you are planning to perpetrate such a massive electoral fraud against the people of your country? The answer is clear: distract them by something that will make them feel good and in control. It is no surprise that the authorities of St. Petersburg have introduced a bill that will impose fines on everybody who “engages in propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia.” Of course, the idea that homosexuality can be “promoted” makes as much sense as a plan to promote tallness. I’ve tried asking many a homophobe how much “propaganda” of gayness would be enough to make them gay. The answer is always the same: “Of course, nothing would make me gay, but I’m just worried about others.” Equating homosexuality and pedophilia, like this bill does, is also egregiously offensive.

However, many people in the fiercely homophobic Russia that inherited its hatred of homosexuality from the Soviet Union are happy about this bill. The authorities humiliate them by using them to pretend that there is some form of democracy in Russia. In reality, though, people are powerless to choose who will be in charge of their country. The attacks on gays make these downtrodden and humiliated people feel proud of their heterosexuality because there isn’t much else to be proud of. The suggestion that homosexuality can be promoted makes the heterosexual majority feel that sexual orientation is a choice and congratulate itself for making the “right” and the “moral” choice on this issue.

The anti-gay bill in St. Petersburg is still under review. Other areas in Russia, however, have already implemented this kind of legislation (Arkhangelsk and Ryazan). The economy in these areas is in even worse shape than elsewhere in the country, which gives their inhabitants more reasons to be unhappy with the government. And whenever popular discontent in Russia grows, you can always expect to see a distracting maneuver aimed at getting people to concentrate on their hatred towards some marginalized group instead of questioning the ruling party.