Buddies

[TakeNoPrizners]

I think movies and TV are super important for gay teens. They were for me and still are. Your post made me realize that I can’t recall ever hearing a straight friend say that a film or TV show helped him identify what turns him on or put him in touch with his sexuality. Straights are encouraged to look at the opposite sex, talk about girls as sexual objects among themselves, and even, as our president puts it, “grab their pussies.” Straight guys seldom need visual representations of their sexual desire, because they’re surrounded by the real thing and told to go for it. It’s very different for guys whose sexual identity has been a social taboo. And when the turn-on is male combat, killing and dying, there’s an even greater reliance on third-person accounts or media representations. We don’t have access to the real thing, but at the same time most of us don’t want or need to actually join the army or the foreign legion or a gang so that we can kill other men for real. Our proclivity toward actual violence is directly disproportional to the beautifully extreme but harmless violence in our erotic daydreams. Sword and sandal movies are public images of our private imaginings. The contrived studio set is about as close to an actual arena as our creative jerkoff fantasies are. I think gladiator and combat enthusiasts are much more imaginative than many of our straight counterparts. We derive more enjoyment than they can understand from donning loin cloths and playing with plastic swords on a wrestling mat in the basement. (That was my thing. The mat was great for cushioning the fall after taking a blade.)  We consciously embrace the pleasure of watching gladiator movies with a buddy on a Saturday afternoon. (Or stroking together with a likeminded friend as we watched a couple of episodes of the STARZ Spartacus series when it came out on DVD, and with a different bud as we share-viewed the opening scenes of Saving Pvt. Ryan on Skype.) Meanwhile, a lot of straight guys who are also attracted by the primal appeal of man-to-man combat to the death, even if it’s in a less eroticized way, are afraid to admit that they like it. I’ve met a couple of straight Marines who I think may have felt less need to join the military and to fire real guns if they just had liberated buddies as playmates and a bit more imagination. I tried explaining all this to a straight friend once, and she asked incredulously, “So you know you’re gay by what movies you like?” I thought about it and said, “Yeah. And thank goodness for those movies, too.”