Fraternity and Brotherhood

We Warriors celebrate comradeship -- but how little the larger gay male world honors that idea, and, consequently, how difficult that world is.

One of the things we're working towards in our Alliance is a new definition of M2M, one that gets away from the attitude, the rudeness, the bitchiness that make so much of mainstream gay male life so unpleasant.

The attitude and rejection don't have to be there -- as I remarked in my note at the end of Warrior Doug's A Wankin Warrior Speaks, the NY Jacks, a club for guys who loved JO, didn't allow attitude or rejection.

So it doesn't have to be there, and it's more likely not to be there if you're into bone on bone or JO, and so not in the gay mainstream, which carries a lot of internalized self-hate.

What's interesting to me is that so many of the warriors have rejected not just anal, but mainstream gay culture -- and those are warriors who aren't necessarily in the same place sexually.

For example, Warrior Sierra Mountain Man, who likes gentle, sensuous frot, tells us in both his Personal Recollections and the afternote to his story The Bond that, because his identity is masculine, he's never thought of himself as part of the gay mainstream.

And Warrior Patrick in A Boxer Warrior Speaks -- a guy into combat and frot -- says the same thing -- he was never interested in the "gay establishment."

And it's not just these two guys -- warrior after warrior has said the same thing to me -- ck out Warrior BradWrestle in Wrestling Warriors Speak for example. Or the Cockster in Personal Stories.

Their's is a very different conception of M2M.

So I've been using the phrase phallic, masculine, and heroic to describe where i want to take the club, and that phrase has come to me through my interactions with the other warriors -- including you.

Phallic means sacred, means a sense of sex and sexuality and phallus-to-phallus as sacred -- doesn't mean you can't have fun, just means you have a different understanding of what the phallus is and what it means.

And masculine means effective, an effective actor in the world -- doesn't mean macho, doesn't mean phony male posturing -- but it doesn't mean effeminate either. Gay male effeminacy has nothing to do with true femininity -- it's a parody of femininity, and very damaging, and just a cultural overlay besides -- like anal sex, it's a learned behavior that can be unlearned.

And gay men have their masculinity taken from them twice -- first when they're growing up, and learn they're "gay" -- less than male -- and then when they come out -- and learn they're "gay" -- still less than male. It's time for guys into M2M to reclaim that masculinity.

And heroic means loyal, brave, and true -- and we know that gay men are capable of that because we saw it during the worst days of AIDS -- and again it's cultural, if we expect people to behave that way, they will.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, cultures expected men into same-sex eros to be masculine, monogamous, and have a martial or warrior ethic -- and that's how they were.

Our culture expects "gay men" to be effeminate, promiscuous, and cowardly -- and many are.

So one of the things the Warriors is about is a different concept of men into M2M -- men who like to have sex with men -- one that's a lot more like the ancient concept than the current one.

I'll be writing more about this for the club in the future on the page called Heroic Homosex -- ck it out.

bill