Paisley Prick

There's a certain kind of queer man, whether queer in gender traits or in sexual object choice, who finds it confusing and difficult to make sense of his queerness and retreats to one of the sterner religious dogmas in an attempt to, if not sort himself out, then hold himself down.

The gay community is chock full of people who, even if they didn't grow up in a religious family, found themselves turning to religion as a means of dealing (or not dealing, which is a form of dealing) with being gay or differently gendered.

Some of them are good friends of mine .... though usually, we became friends many years after they came out of the closet and, often as not, out of religion as well.

Since this temptation to use religion against oneself is common enough among gay-as-in-totally-gay men, how much more tempting it must be for men who might actually feel themselves drawn to women as well as to men (assuming, for the rest of this post, that their queerness is at all about object choice, rather than gender identity).

It's not uncommon to find Kinsey 1ish or 2ish men who are scared shitless of their interest in men, not JUST because they're dealing with internalized homophobia, but ALSO because they perceive (not always inaccurately, it has to be said) that nobody, particularly chicks, will believe that they really go both ways. Supposing they want the hole 9 times out of 10, their motivation for dealing with the pole issue isn't all that obvious.

You meet one of these guys who's actually checked his own head about it, rather than run from it, and you've usually met someone with a fair amount of personal ethics and courage. Not to mention, often a good lay, in the sense that chucking one's self-repressions tends to do wonders for performance in the sack.

But many of them are so afraid to open Pandora's Cock that their clinging to dogma is all the stronger for having an actual crack in the armor. Nobody who starts out with a shred of possible heterosexuality knows whether he's going to keep liking pussy once he's tried dick, and it's not necessarily even helpful to point to openly bisexual men one might know who have a devoted following of hot chicks following them around, turned on by the fact that these guys know their way around cocks and vaginas, because a) most people don't take the time to find out that there are such guys, and b) it's easy enough to disbelieve in fairies no matter how many of them you meet--particularly if they're a kind of fairy the other fairies say is just a myth.

The middle ground is an unpopular place to be, and plenty of people who genuinely fall into it torture themselves about it, with the full approval of the world at large. The self-torture gets read as "commitment" and "principle" rather than "OMG get over it, it's not so bad." It's similar to the way that some of the most strident "you have to make up your mind and commit to your gay identity, bisexuality is a cop-out" gays are Kinsey 5's who "experimented" plenty with girls and probably yen to keep doing it. Scratch a fundamentalist, religious or sexuo-political, find someone with more issues than National Geographic.

Catch someone like this out in the real world, and maybe you can point him at a support group for safely exploring sexuality or gender identity. You take his sacred-holy-text thumping for the poor clingy life-saver it is and you smile and nod and hope they do some therapy.

You don't take it seriously ... or too personally.

If you catch someone like this and he's a rich pop star, then he might be named Prince, and you might enjoy his music. You still don't take his homophobia seriously.

Or too personally.

After all, this is someone who thinks he "owns" video rights to his cover of someone's else's song.

We're not talking about psychologically well-adjusted here.