Amis and Gays--4

Topic:	Martinian moral sloth (26 of 37), Read 89 times
Conf:	Martin Amis Discussion Web
From:	StephenP
Date:	Sunday, July 08, 2001 04:35 AM

Yes, dear Simon, it was an insult. Well spotted. It certainly wasn't an attempt to appear clever that I identified the Simon Brockwell of the belated parody with the SBrockwell@500cc.com of your email address. (500cc.com? No wonder you're so laudably butch.)

I feel that your points are insulting to homosexuals, that's why I insulted you. This is clearly self-righteous of me, not being one myself, but fine. Your post is mostly sophistry; for all your high-aiming talk of literature and history, you are simply a little disgusted by them. You have decided to accord them rights (not EQUAL rights, of course: in your universe a seventeen year old male can have sex with a woman but not with a man), but only because you're worried that if you don't they'll turn into Himmler. Intelligent.

I have to congratulate you on one of the funniest sentences ever posted on the board: "Most people would still find toilet trading, rimming, fisting and felching contemptible acts but these are not publicised." (How would you go about 'publicising' felching, by the way? It would be the Saatchi's toughest brief yet, 13 years of Margaret Thatcher excepted). Simon, come and sit close to me here: I have to tell you, my sex life has been exclusively heterosexual. Purely legal. And yet (whisper it) I confess here and now, to a total stranger, that I've done some pretty dirty stuff. Even a couple of the things you describe in your scabrous hate-sheet (if you count hanging out near the ladies' at Romeo & Juliets as toilet trading). I thought of them as fun, and naughty, and sometimes prfoundly embarrassing, but never 'contemptible', I must say. So why would I find it contemptible if over-16-year-old men wanted to do them to each other?

You miss the point about all this. You seem to think that homosexuality is a matter of brief resistance, gleeful acceptance, then a happy and guilt-free lifetime divided between trumpeting your life choices and the privileges you are thus entitled to, plus a bit of extra-curricular sucking your own semen out of your partner's arse with a straw. The experience of gays I know is very different: years 'not fitting in' during adolescence, with all the fun that involves; a while plucking up the courage, once you've admitted to yourself the inevitable, to tell others, ultimately your parents, with all the difficulties involved there (sorry mum: no grandchildren, but at least you won't have to buy a hat); and, far from the Brockwell paranoia of having to keep quiet in case your boss is a poof (where did you get THAT from?), a nagging concern that your own boss has a problem with you (a very justified concern in my experience). I have never met a homosexual who has not found each stage extremely difficult, long-drawn-out and painful. Otherwise intelligent people like you getting upset about what they want to get up to doesn't exactly help.

So, to get round to Amis. I think he's pretty much in line with Brockwell on this. I think he's too damn straight. I think some of the things he writes, when he doesn't satisfy my hopes for authorial distance, about gays and blacks and women, are regrettable. You expect them from someone who, say, works for 500cc.com, but not from the finest English writer alive today.

(Incidentally, with his usual sense of timing, my eight-month-old just summoned me to his cot. And it made me think: why deny such joy to 'same-sexers', just because of a couple of trivial biological necessities? Am I getting too sanctimonious now?)