The Anal Sex Myth:
A Frottage Manifesto

by

Logan McClintock



Please note: This essay, like all other material on this site, is protected by copyright. It may NOT be reproduced, in whole or in part. Webmasters and hard copy publishers must contact Logan McClintock for permission to reproduce any part of this essay and Bill Weintraub for permission to reproduce any other material from this website, including all written material, logos, and original art work.


The Anal Sex Myth:
A Frottage Manifesto

by

Logan McClintock

The gay community perpetrates the myth that gay sex, and gay identity, centers around anal penetration.

The straight media also works very hard to spread the anal "sex" mythology. Their motivation in doing so may stem from ignorance. Or it could be by design. After all to keep homosexuality at arms length it's easier for discrimination to take hold if the perception is that gay people do something strange and unhealthy in their sex acts. The anti-gay forces also do a nice job in the media of spreading the stereotype that gay people are all effeminate, and know more about style and fashion than they do about sports.

But, even with that, the anal mafia still aims to oppress any discussion of homo-sex that states in plain language that as a whole anal penetration is not the natural and instinctual form of male sexual expression toward other males.

Of course, the alternative to anal is frottage, also known as Frot, the act of rubbing yourself and your cock against a partner who rubs his cock against yours. The results are virtually always intensely pleasurable, and mutually orgasmic. After all, eye contact may not be important for fucking an ass, but it's very important in making love to another person. With frottage the two men are standing or laying together, thrusting front to front, with the ability to look into each other's eyes and have a more emotional and even spiritual coming together.

Yet the gay community has organized itself to call frottage a fetish or even better, "paraphilia," which Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary defines as "a pattern of recurring sexually arousing mental imagery or behavior that involves unusual and especially socially unacceptable sexual practices (as sadism, masochism, fetishism, or pedophilia)."

So, to some gays rubbing with a consenting partner is akin to raping a child! And people wonder why the gay community is reviled in America.

Those of us who know better, know that front-to-front sex is in fact likely to be the highest form of spiritual love-making possible between two men.

Moreover, if anything constitutes "paraphilia" it's anal penetration, which is a dangerous and unhealthy fetish. One need not go into all of the health dangers involved in anal penetration, the ease of transmitting HIV being the most well known (among many others). In this day and age, with so much potential for illness, is it really radical to say to our brothers, stop having anal "sex"? Stop it for the sake of health. Stop it for the sake of your own psyche.

Since frot partners climax in a non-invasive fashion, it is clearly the safest sex possible.

So, why the ingrained dismissal of frot from the sob-sisters of contemporary gay society?

I don't have an answer to that. Perhaps all the money and hours they spend on therapy and anti-depressants will give them an answer for their self-destructive behavior, and self-hate.

Just look at the terrible prevalence of seroconverting and bare-backing going on, especially among gay youth who are seeking "the gift" -- their depraved term for HIV. It's not a gift, it's a death sentence.

Larry Kramer in his book, The Tragedy of Today's Gays, writes about the present crisis, as well as the huge increase in meth addiction among gays in America. Why all this depression and self medication, and suicidal behavior? Why all of this self-loathing and despair?

I have to wonder, is the lack of spiritually fulfilling love and sex at the heart of it? It may be an over-simplification, but think about it: Making love to a person you love, is as much a spiritual act as physical. It opens levels of new feeling through the body and soul. It's not an absurd contention to propose that that kind of spiritual loving making is only possible through frottage, rather than anal "sex."

Among the interesting things Bill Weintraub has noted is that prior to the 1970s, oral, mutual masturbation, and frottage were the norm, and anal was denigrated. If you scan through the many personal stories [2], when young boys discovered sex between each other they also discovered frot. After all, anal penetration usually requires an instruction manual. But, if you are a young lad fumbling and wrestling around with a friend, frot comes naturally. Sex is about rubbing, thrusting, and feeling the whole body of your partner, and genital to genital contact. One bisexual male I recently talked to about this, told me that as a teen his early fantasies were of "frot" -- though he didn't have a name for it at the time. It wasn't until he learned that gay people have anal that he ever gave consideration to butt fucking. More proof that frot is a natural impulse, while anal penetration is more of a learned behavior? Perhaps so.

In 1948 Gore Vidal wrote The City and The Pillar, a landmark novel that was the first American novel to showcase two athletic normal masculine teenagers having a homo-erotic affair. The famous sex scene by the river is clearly a scene of frottage. After wrestling with each other by camp firelight, Vidal's protagonists, Jim and Bob, find themselves, after taking their trousers off, embraced:

Their faces met, their cheeks touched and with a shuddering sigh Bob gripped Jim tightly in his arms... Now they were complete, each became the other, as their bodies collided with a primal violence, like to like, metal to magnet, half to half and the whole restored.

A world of sensation was found. Innocently they discovered each other with their hands and bodies, their eyes shut and seeing for the first time. Jim's movements were natural and familiar, practiced before in many dreams remembered now... Then, at the most heightened moment, they were both released, one against the other, made complete.

Jim felt as if his entire body were exploding, was crashing rocket like in this release. Lights glittered in circles behind his closed eyelids and his breathing stopped. This was the world and he was alive. [1]

It is also interesting that later in the novel, when one of Vidal' s characters commits rape, the method of assault is anal penetration. Is this a conscious or unconscious message from Vidal, that anal sex may not be an act of love, but instead an act of violence, pain, anger, hate, rage, and rape?

Vidal later wrote in his memoirs Palimpsest about his real-life boyhood love, Jimmy Trimble, with whom he shared a deep emotional and physical intimacy. Plato's writings in the Symposium also illuminate what is a natural act between two friends who become lovers, as Vidal writes: "When I came to read the Symposium, I was amazed at how precisely Plato had anticipated two boys twenty-three hundred years later." Vidal quotes Plato:

And so when this boy... is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant... although they may be hard put to say what they really want with one another, and indeed the purely sexual pleasure of their friendship could hardly account for the huge delight they take in one another's company. The fact is that both their souls are longing for something else -- a something to which neither of them can put a name....

Vidal's biographer Fred Kaplan, also covers this ground in his book Gore Vidal, in writing about Vidal's relationship with Jimmy Trimble, and their first encounter together at Vidal's family manor when they were both 12 or 13 years old:

Quietly, to avoid being heard by the butler, they rubbed their stomachs and genitals against one another into what Vidal remembered as an explosion of perfectly blissful orgasm. Neither of them felt they had broken any taboo. Neither felt any guilt, though they both tacitly understood that this was a private affair. It was something they would talk about neither to others nor even, for that matter, between themselves.

Jimmy Trimble

Their sexual partnership continued for some time, as Vidal noted, again echoing Plato, "The purely sexual pleasure of their relationship could hardly account for the huge delight they take in one another's company."

For Vidal his relationship with Jimmy was completion at a deep emotional level. He had found a twin, an equal and opposite. While Vidal was bookish and well read, Jimmy was a star athlete. What they had in common was that each knew exactly what they wanted to do with their adult lives. Their bond and connection was unbreakable.

Vidal and Jimmy were later separated due to Vidal being sent away to distant boarding schools.

Gore Vidal

They met again as 17 year-olds, at a Christmas party in 1942. Vidal showed up to the party with a girl he was considering marrying. Jimmy told him, "You're crazy," in a friendly manner. As Vidal writes, "We went downstairs to the men's room, with its tall marble urinals and large cubicles. I wondered what if anything he felt. Fortunately our bodies still fitted together, as we promptly discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly, talking of girls and marriage and coming simultaneously." The face to face, belly to belly position was to be Vidal's favorite.

A short time later they both served in World War II, and Jimmy died at Iwo Jima. Gore wrote in Palimpsest that Jimmy was his only true love, ever. Considering the stories of the emotional connections formed, as in the story of Luke and Steven on this site [4], Gore's continued emotional connection to a dead 19 year old makes perfect sense.


Jimmy on Iwo Jima

After World War II, Vidal spent a good deal of time in New Orleans. It was there that he first started reading Plato, and found in the Symposium a historical, cultural and intellectual framework to understand his own sexuality.

In New Orleans he became friends with a British intellectual couple, Geoffrey and Penelope Moore. Geoffrey taught at Tulane and ran a literary radio-interview program that the young author, Vidal would be interviewed on. In private discussions Vidal would educate the couple about sexuality. Geoffrey and his wife (a journalist) had only known "obvious queens" as their reference point for homosexuals. Vidal, all masculine and athletic, was revealing to them in breaking the stereotype. In conversation, Geoffrey said to Vidal that the idea of anal penetration was "pretty repellant" to him. Vidal was taken aback and quickly noted, "Oh we don't do that! We don't do that!" When Geoffrey asked Vidal what he did sexually, he noted that Vidal, "used a curious expression, 'belly rubbing' ... I had never heard of that."

But, doesn't the evidence lead to a clear conclusion that frottage, frot, or "belly rubbing" is the normal and instinctual way to express sexual affection between two males? And, when you accept that as a fact, you come to realize that there are no labels. [3] There are no gays, straights, and bisexuals, as nouns, only as adjectives do they exist. People do different things, and may have certain interests in doing one thing, but not the other. But, people are not what they do. A human being is more complex that filling in a check box of some sort of societally-defined identity. Gay, straight, bi, are all arbitrary check boxes on some bureaucratic form. People are more complex that simple definitions. After all, the word "homosexual" only came into the language in the 1890s. The word "heterosexual" came along after that. (Hence, heterosexuality was in a sense "invented" after homosexuality.)

Some people who enjoy frottage with men have girlfriends, or wives. The judgmental sob-sister crowd will call such men in denial of their gayness. Ridiculous. Some people can love their wife or girlfriend, while loving their male close friend in a different way, and find great pleasure at expressing it sexually. (Though certainly, in our strange puritanical society many men because of their family or religious background are not able to be open about their relations with the same sex, and thus hide behind a girlfriend or wife. That is certainly true, but we cannot assume that every guy who has gay sex in secret while maintaining an open straight life, is necessarily hiding from his true sexuality. It's not something to be judged in general. It is something each individual will have to judge for their own life.)

As Gore Vidal wrote in his essay "Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With":

...there is no such thing as a homosexual or heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices, and what anyone does with a willing partner is of no social or cosmic significance. ...So why all the fuss? In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock up someone or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed, and seldom used in civilized societies.... That is why we have allowed our [leaders] to divide the population into two teams. One is good, godly, straight; the other is evil, sick, vicious.

And by and large the contemporary gay community accepts this arbitrary two team division of society. Accepting such a division empowers our enemies. It also does damage to the psyche because a human being is far too complex an organism to be easily pigeonholed.

warriors and kings

There is a crisis in society today. Robert Bly has written about uninitiated men in his books Iron John: A Book About Men and The Sibling Society. Bly points out that in society today, men are not properly initiated into manhood. That instead we have a sibling society. We don't have warriors and kings. Yet in some cultures a major part of the ritual for a boy to become a man is to have a same-sex experience.

Bly notes that the path to male feeling is through grief. That men need to strike the balance in their lives as warriors and kings. And that another aspect of these lost men is a lack of bonding with their fellow men.

They have feelings for their close male friends that pass unexpressed. (Or they want to have a close male friend who can fulfill them in ways a woman cannot.) Just as it's possible for two men to be each other's soul mates, completely and totally in love with each other, knowing that they need each other to complete them at a spiritual level. And to achieve the highest level of expressing feeling, that focal point of Ananda, or bliss, can only be touched through making love. Like communicating without words.

It is quite clear-- in reading about Vidal's deep love for Jimmy, or in many of the other personal stories about frot experiences-- that a love informed by frottage creates a more deeply emotional connection between two people, than the empty promiscuity of today's anal-obsessed gay society.

And we have a society as a whole restricting itself by these arbitrary categories.

Athenian warrior-lovers who died in battle and were buried together

Yet, if more men knew the truth, if we had a more Classical Greek society rather than Puritan, they could open up and explore their desires freely without fear or guilt.

That's the basic problem with society today: weighed down with guilt and puritanism, which has led to a fundamental ignorance of human sexuality and practice. People are locked into binary thinking, straight or gay, vaginal or anal, and that's that.

If more men were educated about frottage more and more would do it, enjoy it, and be quite happy about it, and quite fulfilled in an intimate friendship or love with a fellow male. And in a non-binary society, non-guilt society they wouldn't have a crisis of sexual identity afterward. "Oh my god, I just came with a guy, does that mean I'm gay?" No. It means you are a human being. It means you are a man. It means you can give and receive affection and love from a friend, and still be a masculine man. People need to free their minds, and free their bodies.

Then their souls will wake up to the real possibilities of love that life has to offer.

When that day comes, it will be a powerful revolution in thought. And it will truly lead to a society of equality and justice for everyone. We don't need to let go of Athens. The world of Plato's Symposium is possible in our time, here and now.

The work of creating it will be a worthy effort.

Logan McClintock

October 10, 2005

Notes

1. In 1965 Vidal extensively rewrote and republished The City and the Pillar. In the above passage I have merged together both the original 1948 text along with the 1965 text.

2. Found on the Personal Stories message board and in Warriors Speak.

3. See, for example, on this site, Labels Are Meaningless.

4. See Beatific in Warriors Speak.


Greek depiction of lovers Zephyr and Hyacinth engaging in Frot


Afterword from Bill Weintraub

The genesis of this essay was a Personal Stories post titled The Real Possibilities of Love.

I encourage interested readers to look at that post, which is estimable in its own right.

I thank Logan McClintock for his excellent manifesto.

Bill Weintraub
Jimmy Trimble





© All material Copyright 2011 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.


Bill Weintraub heads The Man2Man Alliance, an organization of men into Frot


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This essay, like all other material on this site, is protected by copyright. It may NOT be reproduced, in whole or in part. Webmasters and hard copy publishers must contact Bill Weintraub for permission to reproduce this or any other material from our Man2Man Alliance, Heroic Homosex, Heroes, Cockrub Warriors, Frot Men, and Frot Club sites.



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A Frottage Manifesto

Logan McClintock

Sex is about rubbing, thrusting, and feeling the whole body of your partner, and
genital to genital contact.