By Perry Brass

In the beginning there was only sex. Sex was pleasurable and a constant appetite that had to be fed. Sex was open-ended, in every sense of the word. It was an innate part of human development that came from post-primate human evolution, that is, that period in which human beings, Homo Sapiens, differentiated themselves from the ape-like creatures that came before them. The first Homo Sapiens ("wise men") were hunters and tool users. They were nomadic, but unlike many other nomadic animals, they had almost no defenses against terrible changes in temperature or climate. The first people had no fur to protect them or stashes of body fat to keep them going through a winter hibernation. They were lean and mobile, and as hunters in a seasonal environment, there was no telling where the next meal might come from. This produced one of the most amazing of all human traits: humans were constantly sexual and had no regular mating season. Female humans came into fertility not once a year, as mammals do in the fall or spring, but once every month. All human activity became involved with sexuality, which came to be seen as normal and pleasurable. Males were constantly sexual and always wanted sexual fulfillment. Females, though, had periods in which they could not be sexual, for instance, during the last several months of pregnancy when sex was painful, or during those times when they were worn out from childbearing and feared having more children. Monogamy, therefore, was not innate to human nature. Unlike geese who mate for life (and among which there is a high degree of homosexual activity), human intelligence from earliest times dictated that people would change mates as their needs changed. Hunting men would often leave a female with children and go off to hunt in another territory. There they would find another mate. The fact that human beings are not monogamous by nature is one of the most feared and secret aspects of human life-one that all "civilizing" influences, such as organized religion, the state, or the military have fought hard to suppress. Monogamy was a later introduction into human culture: it came about as tribal people settled into city states and child-bearing pairs of humans became part of state economies. But for hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of written laws or organized states themselves, monogamy was not a part of human culture. In fact, monogamy was not expected of either men or women. Women, of course, who had to bear children, wanted some security during those periods in which they were weighed down with childbearing responsibilities, such as the first three years of an infant's life. Therefore, back in "cave days" or the days of the earliest human settlements, sexuality was often presented as a "family" thing involving children, a man, a woman, and a man's closest friends. In other words, during those times when the woman was busy (was either in late pregnancy or nursing children), a man would go to his friends, his bonding-companions, and have sex with them. These bonding situations were sometimes very loose, as can be seen today in tribal situations such as the Asmat warriors of New Guinea. Asmat men regularly have sex with each other. They describe their sexual partners only as "special friends." The Asmat, who in some ways were models for the "Dark Men" of the planet Ki that I have written about in my books "Mirage," "Circles", and "Albert," do not have a particular type of men who serve as their sexual partners. That is, they do not have a special group of men who might be considered "gay," or, who would be described in North American culture as "queens." Although it is considered acceptable to have a "special friend," most Asmat men have wives to whom they are loyal for procreative purposes, but for whom they have very little romantic attachment. As in many other violent, warlike cultures (and even in the old European age of knights and crusaders), the Asmat save their most tender feelings for the same men that they hunt and fight with; the difference is that the "primitive" Asmat also openly have sex with them. But going back to the secret roots of homosexuality, another type of person soon entered the "cave" situation. This was the shaman/ priest/ artist, or as anthropologists would call him, the "sex-expert." He organized activities such as ritual dances. He was also the one powerful hunters went to for sexual favors when their female mates were busy. And he drew on the walls of caves and made fertility figures. Exactly when this sort of person entered into human consciousness we have no idea. But we do know that he existed; cave drawings and accounts of him are literally as old as human consciousness, even as there has been a systematic need to keep his existence secret. Part of this need was the privatization of sex itself. Sex had stopped becoming an open or tribal situation and became a private one. In some ways, the "sex-expert" benefited by keeping sex private: "private," but not shameful. By keeping sex private, it became even more magical and heightened the shaman's status as the keeper of sexual knowledge. But in our own time, this need to keep the existence of the artist/magician/sex-expert secret can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian tradition of making sex shameful. Therefore, the artist/sex-expert became the whore, the slut, the "faggot," who took on the language and ways of the "gutter," the vulgar streets. In short, Western Judeo-Christian society has taken away any special, wondrous qualities the artist/magician/sex-expert had. But in many societies, this special character had a very different role: he was the public persona of the magic and mystery of sex. Going back to cave days, he was the first artist who drew on the walls, and drew himself there as well. He was a friend of the hunters, or a hunter himself who had not settled into a mate. He was a facilitator who satisfied the hunter's sexual needs either in group sex rituals, or privately when the hunter's mate would not allow him to go to her. He was either a "male" person who also hunted, or a softer "female" man who took on the magic of both men and women. He became, in short, the go-between of the sexes. This role was one that flourished in many cultures. In fact, it exists very underground, even in our own culture. Among the Zunis and the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest, according to anthropologists such as Walter L. Williams (The Spirit and the Flesh, Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture) a respect for berdaches, homosexual men who appeared either as women or men, verged on worship. These men could commune with the sky gods who favored aspects of both men and women, something that those stuck in "straight" gender roles could not do. In our own culture we have the sexually open festivals of Carnival where one often sees the Harlequin, a man whose black-and-white, skin-tight costume is both male and female identified. We also have the clown, dressed as a man-woman with his huge lipsticked lips; and the rock singer who can get away with anything as long as he is on stage. Going back even further, to the secret roots of Western civilization, we have the priestly men who once served Inanni, the first "Great Goddess" to be named in history. Inanni was the goddess of Sumer, the first powerful city state in the world, situated in what became Babylonia and then Iraq. The Babylonians called her Ishtar; the Hebrews referred to her as the "Whore of Babylon." She was the goddess of beauty and war, which early peoples saw as intricately intertwined. She was immensely powerful and her beauty threatened men. Her sister was the horrifying Ereshkigal, the goddess of the Underworld, who could kill men with a single look. Inanni, who was born beautiful, and Ereshkigal, who was presented as a hag, had a relationship like two old movie queens (Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, perhaps?), one of constant jealousy and one-upmanship. The worst thing though was to be a man in the middle of them: to find oneself somewhere out there between Love and Death. An ancient Sumerian man, puzzled, horny, and in need of guidance and sexual satisfaction, fearfully went to the goddess. At her temple, he was brought face to face with one of her priests, who very often represented the goddess herself, as a man in drag. All of this is explained in the world's oldest poem, The Lament of Inanni, recited by the goddess after killing, in black-widow fashion, her simple, sweet mate, the shepherd Dumuzi. After murdering Dumuzi in a fit of jealousy, Inanni cries for him and calls upon her priests who come to her in women's clothes; in fine veils and shawls. They dance for her and invite other men to come into the temple and worship her. The "Lament" speaks openly of Inanni's sexual favors: that she takes Dumuzi's penis in her mouth, that she worships his body and loves the male scent of him. That The Lament of Inanni was written by the men who served her is obvious. Throughout the ancient world, religion revolved around specialized men whom we might refer to today as "queens." These were men who transmitted among themselves the "mysteries," that is the dark feelings of anguish, exaltation, and sexual frenzy that religion was all about. These men were always considered very different and very special from the rest of society. Among the ancient Egyptians, they were shaved from head to toe and circumcised. Among modern Roman Catholics, they practice (at least publicly) celibacy and such homoerotic rites as ring-kissing, foot washing, and same-sex communal meals. In working on my trilogy of books that revolve around the planet Ki, gay science fiction novels in which myth is important, I did research into Sumerian and Egyptian myths. One controversial belief (still debated by Egyptologists) was that Osiris's son, the handsome Egyptian god Horus, represented with a young man's muscular body and a hawk's head, performed autofellatio every night to keep the heavens in control. There are pictures of this; it was considered a fairly accepted aspect of Egyptian lore, although one censored by Victorian Egyptologists. The Egyptians believed that homosexual sex was a part of religious ritual; we often see a mummified Osiris with an erection sticking out of his mummy-wrappings, being fondled by attendants. But the idea of Horus performing autofellatio every night to keep the heavens in control-that his injesting his own semen kept the stars in their places and produced a stable universe-turned on a light for me. It reverted to the cave idea of the homosexual man as the magician, artist, and friend who brought the dangerous world of the hunt into stability. Although heterosexuality produced children, whose presence opened up the world, it could also produce havoc: determining fatherhood, for instance; or tying down the powerful urges of men to hunt. There was also the old matter of making forest men feel useless in the domestic presence of women. Homosexuality, on the other hand, produced calm. As a force that affirmed the male principal, it sent the man back into his own world. Like Horus, he is making love to himself while at the same time sucking the penis of another man. Homosexuality produced a sense of self-rapture which was akin to religious ecstasy; it represented, in effect, a necessary closed circuit in human consciousness. The ancients understood this and honored, for the most part, homosexual urges and feelings. In many situations, homosexuality was aligned with war and patriotism. How this came about was simple. Early tribes or clans realized it was important to go outside of the clan to produce children. Outsiders brought in new genes, "new blood," and also the prospect of new lands and skills. It was common among clans to exchange children, to bring in a foreign child both as a marriage partner and also as a hostage in case of later hostilities. But as the clan became more open to foreign influences, it became "watered down," polluted by foreign blood-a fear we feel even today with immigrants. The circuits become too open: the first people to recognize this were homosexual men, whose job was to preserve the culture of the clan, either as priests, artists, or the willing sex partners of powerful hunters or warriors. We seen this influence today in the "conservatism" of gay culture, in its need to hold on to "High Culture," such as opera, ballet, the cult of old movies, antiques, etc. As an oppressed "closed circuit," for years we feared the open circuits of sports or politics, which we saw as "straight" situations, threatening and in flux. Our need to hide insisted that the environments we hid in-such as antique rooms, or the "rule" of ballet or theater-stayed put. Straight men are interested in who wins or who loses in sports, one of our last vestiges of the hunting instinct. In the hunt, it was kill or be killed, eat or die. But gay men will see sports as a series of moves-frozen as ballet-of beautiful bodies sculpted in motion. This ability to see sports figures as beautiful, to objectify them as "beautiful things," threatens the mobile, heterosexual role of sports. It is the reason why gay sports figures are trivialized; the homophobic idea that fags don't care who wins or loses, just who "looks good." Football fans, for instance, see the sport as a blood feast. Like hockey or boxing, where teeth are knocked out and noses disjointed, it is pure adrenaline. It is the celebration of the hunt again, and, strangely enough, close to the all-male, homoerotic environment in which the old gay magician, lurking in the background, is still a star. Sports, in short, always have a "gay tension" to them. This must be relieved either in admiration and enthusiasm for the winner (which as any gay or closeted sports queen knows means loads of opportunities for men to kiss and grab-ass each other); or in disdain for the rival (graffiti that screams: "Mets suck!"); or when the tension breaks out completely, in uncontrollable mayhem and violence. Sports are the opposite of the static world of "civilization," where the active participation of homosexual men is necessary. We "save" civilization. We archive and promote it. Just as in our deepest, blackest fantasies, we destroy it. These fantasies take us back to pre-civilized life: to the world of leather, animals, horses, dungeons, and stables. Of "down-and-dirty" wild sex, where every sexual hunger is unleashed. These fantasies have long been a gay preoccupation-as well as an occupation, in that so many homosexual men have been interested in (and found compassion for) people who live beyond the limits of Western homophobia. People who allow the primitive outlaw within the confined, civilized "queer" to come out. A few examples include Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer who was the first European to enter Mecca. Burton searched for the source of the Nile, and lived a wild, homosexual life among the Arabs, while producing the first translation of The Arabian Nights. Back in England he led a "normal" life with a conventional Victorian wife (who did not approve of her husband's wanderings) and children. We can also include T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), who was erotically attracted to his Arab hosts. And Sir Roger Casement, the great turn-of-the-century Irish rebel and patriot. Casement was the first Westerner to expose the atrocities of the white colonial Belgians in the Congo, while at the same time he was having sex with the natives and writing about it in his journals. He journals were later confiscated by the British, who hanged him as a spy during World War I. Much of the "evidence" that condemned Casement was based on his "going native," that is, having sexual relations with African black men. In these cases, as in leathersex or group sex, we see the "flip side" of this "closed circuit" of homosexuality. Here, the circuit is ripped open as wide as possible, into the wilder shores of pre-Western sexuality, away from the confines of our own repressive "gay" consciousnesses; in fact, what we have attempted to do is to escape consciousness. Today, for the first time, gay men find themselves in a strange and exciting place-at the threshold of unlocking their own histories, a history that was locked tighter than Fort Knox by shame and ignorance. Our Western theology, stoked with Calvinism (modern, guilt-laden Protestantism), Bible-thumping Fundamentalism, and wrapped in a package of Freudian analysis, equates shame with consciousness. In other words, you are only aware of what makes you feel bad. Sex can not have meaning unless it is surrounded by a wall of shame. Shame is at the center of knowledge, as the Garden of Eden story tells us: only when we become conscious of shame do we become conscious of the difference between you (an outsider) and me (a true believer). Between right and wrong. Along with Shame (Knowledge) also comes Responsibility: I will be bound to you, a stranger, due to my responsibility to do Good at all times. Going back again to the Bible, we come across the idea-which is not limited to Western Judeo-Christianity, but which seems to be at the center of it-that Godliness is goodliness, and that to produce Godliness we must divorce ourselves from anything that is not good, too. In other words, one false move and you're out of God's game. Abraham, the first to see this distinction between God and Bad, lived in Ur, just a bit over from Sumer. In the Bible we learn not so much that Abraham believed in one God as much as he had his own God and he wanted his God to be above all others. In those days, having your own god (your private god) was considered a necessity. Your own god may not have always been good, but He (or She), by golly, was yours. And He was always on your side. If He wasn't, you could always get another god, usually without having to die for it. The Egyptians had hundreds of gods and various permutations of them, such a Ammun-Ra. Ammun, the god of one part of Egypt joined Ra, the god of another, and together they became an even bigger, Corporate god named Ammun-Ra. The ability to have many different gods allowed for various parts of the imagination to unfold. We see this situation today in "scenes": that is, one worships money in his office, and leather in his bar. The ancients understood this as a need for a "private life." In their times, that took on a completely different meaning than in our own. Today we think of private as "naughty," "illegal," etc. But back then, "private" referred to the life of the imagination as expressed in religious and sexual ecstasy. "Private" meant set apart, not defamed. Allowing another man into your private life was considered an erotic and religious rite. An ancient Hebrew man would swear on his own genitals, and would have another man touch his cock to swear with him. Religion was an intensely personal affair whose ecstatic joys flowed into the whole community. An important aspect of religious life was to share these ecstatic feelings with others. This is an idea totally outside modern Western culture, which, if it can't put a price tag on something and display it in a shopping mall, sees little value in it. The only people today who understand this idea, the private life being the imagination as expressed in religious and sexual ecstasy, are considered "marginal." They include people like the Holy Rollers in the South; those who've been through illegal drug experiences; or those, who for want of a better word, are called by the inadequate one, "gays." Or better yet, in this case, "queers," "dick-suckers," "ass-eaters," etc. since ecstasy in its most raw form is urgent and impolite. There is little room in it for the "politically correct." To the ancients, religious and sexual ecstasy were one and the same; and they were damn open about it. Religion was not a sublimation for sexual ecstasy, but a way into it. If you read four-thousand-year-old prayers to Osiris, the Egyptian resurrection god whose cult seems like an ancient rehearsal for that of Jesus, they sound amazingly familiar: Osiris is seen as "the lover of my soul." The worshipper is often said to be "born again in the spirit of Osiris." "I germinateth in your Spirit, Osiris. I became fruitful," says another prayer. During the middle of the yearly Osirian rites, worshippers swayed back and forth, fell into tears, realized themselves to be "reborn" in the spirit of Osiris, cleansed, and without any personal history before that moment when they stood before the resurrected god. At two quite opposite ends of the spectrum, these same feelings are witnessed today in Charismatic Christians, who claim to be "born-again" in the spirit of Christ, but who deny the sexuality of these feelings (in fact, believe ecstasy comes about due to the rejection of sex); and the sexual mysteries of gay group sex or very eroticized group rites. These include experiences such as leather and motorcycle clubs, and bath houses or sex clubs, where the members reveal no past life (we call this anonymous sex), status, or even national affiliation. In the bath or sex club, attendees "worship" without any personal history, except those called forth by the body (such as muscles from working out, or physical handicaps, which are often no impediment to "gay" sex), or from fetish/adornment objects such as tit pieces, cock rings, piercings, or leather wear. In the gay attempts to "clean up our acts," that is, do away with the sex clubs, the baths, etc., we have also done away with many of the feelings and needs that went with them for warmth, group tenderness, and inclusion. We have replaced them with various artificial images, such as "the successful gay who is just like the boy-next-door," or the gay man who can completely compartmentalize his need for sexual ecstasy away from his professional life. We call these "new gay men" our role models, and like the old Southern joke: "They don't smoke, they don't chew, or step out with boys who do." In many ways, the "new gay" has rejected his old role: that of "the necessary closed circuit," the conduit of consciousness who saw the Universe as a circular, unified path of beauty and ecstasy going through his own mind and body. He also may be rejecting himself as an object of beauty; that is, beauty for its own sake. This is another role of the gay magician/ sex-expert. That he himself, as a man, saw himself as beautiful-not by utility-but by definition. He did not just do beautiful things; he was beautiful. There was no "handsome is as handsome does" in his world, there was only handsome. To the Greeks, who also saw war and beauty as related, this was one of life's great problems: how could a man stay a man (warrior/father: always on the verge of being slaughtered) and still be beautiful, worthy of preservation for his own sake. The upper class Greeks solved this dilemma by stating that money and ambition were vulgar, therefore they had to live by a code above these things. The code said "duty" was above all things: it allowed them to be both beautiful and violent. This won them centuries of respect from the upper class British who as long as they had an Empire to support them never had to grovel in "filthy lucre," like a bunch of Americans, and who used the Greeks as their models, even while cringing at the thought of their models being overt homosexual. To the upper class Greeks, homosexual feelings were the "closed circuit" that preserved male beauty, while war and competition, such as the Olympic games, both celebrated and destroyed it. A great competitor in the Games was lauded for his physical beauty, an idea which today we can barely imagine. A beauty was considered touched by the gods; it was beyond his control. The beauty of boys was considered as powerful as the whims of movie queens later in Hollywood, where movie lots were shut down when Marilyn or Liz had a bad hair day. The Greeks considered male beauty sacred. Beautiful men often had beautiful sons, and odes were written to extol the beauty of famous father-son pairs. Since men led public lives in Greece and women were usually kept at home and treated as chattel, there was a question always at hand of how to keep men from becoming "precious" in public. Greek men, like men today, had a fear of being considered silly and girlish. But they also wanted to be seen as gorgeous and desirable. In a way, they solved this problem the way that gay men often have done, by adhering to a very rigid class structure: they "homosexualized" society. They made the "closed circuits" of homosexual culture their own culture. Greek men of the upper classes associated only with themselves, they spoke the same highly cultivated language, they admired the same things; they knew that the lower classes often found them frivolous and sexually contemptible, so they excluded them, while at the same time lusting after them the way that modern queer men will lust after construction workers who sneer at them. Homosexuality was a way of keeping Greek culture intact. That your son might have a lover who was of the same class as you, before he married a girl who could not read or write, was considered desirable. So much so, that Greek upper class men had their sons circumcised because they felt that uncut penises were not as inviting for fellatio. To open up the circuit though, the Greek upper class man knew that at any time he would have to be prepared to die, either in a dispute over honor or to defend his city state. He might preen over his beautiful body, his elegant mind, his fine speech and know that the next week he would have to go out into battle and face death. Death in this case would be the ultimate open circuit, sport, and hunt. This idea of the tension between homosexual refinement and heterosexual brutality was brought all the way down into our century by the great writer Marcel Proust, who wrote about French aristocrats of pre-War World I vintage. Often secret homosexuals, they were prepared at any moment to die in a duel or a war. One of these aristocrats, the beautiful Robert de Saint-Loup, is a secret man-izer who cheats regularly on his wife, first with other women, then with men. The joke among his friends was that Saint-Loup was always late, because he was always with some one else. So he should just send a telegram to his wife saying: "Can't write now. Lie follows." When I first came out, six years before Stonewall, I was often asked (usually in bed with another man) this question: "What do you think makes guys gay?" For a while, I decided this was the gay version of "Mommy, where do babies come from?" The only answer I had was the stock Freudian formula about distant fathers (which I did not have; I was closer to my father than to my mother, and recognized my attraction to boys before I turned eleven) and suffocating mothers (that I did have, but what Jewish boy doesn't?). But back then it did not occur to me to ask in turn: "What is it about us that makes us so different? Why are people so scared of us; and why am I so scared of myself?" To begin to understand these questions you have to go back through your own history, as well as that of the human race. You have to start to excavate both of them together, so that digging back through human history becomes like digging back through your own life. Years of it; finally, you will come to some bedrock strata. There you realize that at some point you were not frightened of, or even conscious of, your own difference, your own feelings. In fact, like the rest of mankind, you must have enjoyed all of them. These are the places in history that speak to me openly as a gay man. To see them, ages later, and say, "Yes, we were there," and to experience once again the gay imagination at full play, that is something that puts me in line with every same-sexualized man who came before me; who, like Walt Whitman, felt the power of "adhesiveness," his term for gay love. These are the secret roots of our gay identity, and they are not simply waiting for us but are now a part of us. Perry Brass's latest book is The Harvest, a gay science fiction thriller. His newest book, The Lover of My Soul, a book of erotic and spiritual poetry and other writings, will be in bookstores this November. He can be reached at belhuepress@earthlink.net and loves to hear from admirers, e-mail heavy-breathers, and just plain readers.