#fag4dyke

(image description / transcript under the cut)

Part of me wants the chaos and part of me walks alone What am I doing, who am I fooling? What's a life spent on your own?

Should we start loving? Give this a try? You got baggage but so do I You got baggage but so do I Let's give it a try

Alternate version under the cut!

That there are straight men who appreciate and identify with the sensual, whole-body focus and absence of hetero sex roles in lesbian porn is a barely acknowledged secret—but it helps explain why some gay men, too, might appreciate a peek at all all-women's world. True, most gay men probably do focus on cock. But some find the roles and conventions expressed in much gay porn as tired as those in straight porn.

Gay male pornography does not hold the same appeal to the heterosexual woman who has been reared on romance novels and sex-role stereotypes as all-girl action does to her male counterparts, since gay porn studs are obviously aroused and quite visibly know how to satisfy each other, and there are no swept-away female characters with whom to identify. Many other women, though, relish the male eroticism—lord knows the men in gay porn embody male beauty more successfully than their heterosexual porn counterparts—and female viewers who are dykes or bisexual may also appreciate the specifically homoerotic, male-on-male dynamic of porn made for gay men. Here, a woman porn consumer finds no pesky heterosexual assumptions or sex-role stereotypes (at least none that relate directly to her); even the emphasis on a relationship that often marks lesbian erotica is usually absent. What she gets, instead, is hot homo-sex—and a chance to voyeuristically appreciate male sexuality without calling her sexual orientation into question.

For all the culture's insistence that women and men are deeply different, even "opposite" (language which shores up the notion that there are only two sexes/genders whose members have next to nothing in common), the fence that separates us can be scaled; sometimes the view from the top is surprisingly clear. Fags and dykes, freed from the folie a deux that heterosexuality can be, have the space to look at maleness and femaleness afresh, as well as to view members of the other gender through the lens of our own femme or butch or androgynous sensibilities. Even when we get our portraits of each other all wrong, our perspectives and projections are illustrative of uniquely queer takes on sexuality and gender roles.

Quim Issue #5 (1994)

[image description: a cropped image of a magazine in black and white. at the top is the question “how can you be a lesbian and sleep with boys?” echoed by the words “call yourself a lesbian.” below this are answers with different text formatting for different responses. a black and white cartoon in the bottom right corner shows two people in skirts saying “what on earth was that about?” “haven’t a clue.”

the responses read:

I hardly ever actually slept with them. Of course you can and many of us do. Having sex with men is a diversion I allow myself every 6-8 years. They become more exciting by being forbidden.

I am a lesbian because of the people I choose to live my life with. Occasionally fucking a man doesn’t change that.

I don’t, I call myself bisexual.

My lesbianism means that I am only physically, mentally and emotionally attracted to women. Though I have had good one-off sex with men in the past, that’s as far as it goes. As far as sexual relationships go they don’t feature.

The few occasions I have done it I have had no problem dealing with it at all. I know I’m a dyke – and one of the benefits of being a dyke is having the choice and occasion to do what the hell you like. If I want to shag a bloke then I will (if nothing else to remind me why I never really wanted to sleep with them in the first place!)

If I was interested enough to commit myself to getting good sex with men, there’d come a point when I’d call myself bi-sexual. Anything I engage and put myself into is something to be proud of, so I’d be proud to call myself bi-sexual. But I don’t feel proud of what I have ever felt or done with men in bed, so the label doesn’t apply.

Easy. I am a lesbian and I sleep with guys every once in a while. Which I know many dykes do but they’re just too scared to admit thinking that women will see them in a different light. Most dykes get the 7 year itch even when they don’t admit it to themselves.

I can’t see a way of sleeping with a man/men on a regular basis and calling yourself a lesbian.

Easy.

I can fall in love with women in a matter of minutes. I have never fallen for a man in the same way.