I've spent a lot of my spare time in my life in gay bars, not that I'm gay but that I'm not straight either and one needs friends. They are a good place also to meet women (the slang for the phenomenon is "fag hag,") who, thought straight, don't want the pressures normal dating involves. I was almost a perfect companion for them to go to concerts and gallery openings and the like where a mixed couple fit.
From this I realized (I suppose observing objectively) that there existed a paradise for young male homosexuals that I had never thought might exist. At least it seemed a paradise at the time, although as I matured I came to be able to put it into better balance, particularly seeing what a waste of time it was. The biological nature of the male is to be promiscuous. Of course such a broad statement has to be hedged in with a lot of qualifications and exceptions, both as to species and to individuals. Still, the picture remains: the male generally makes little contribution, at almost no cost, to the next generation (although our cultures and even natural selection often "fixes" this). Females will be somewhat different. They may also have reason to be promiscuous up to a point, but have other objectives, mainly to somehow lasso the male into helping with the rearing of children, and this doesn't work very well in an unbounded society.
So, then, many if not most males would be promiscuous except the females won't allow it. Hence, we see female prostitution far more than male prostitution (and what of that is largely to other males) and in the gay world the gay male society is largely promiscuous, while the gay female society much less so. This sets up, when religious and societal rules have been weakened and by large numbers dismissed or rationalized, a situation in most American cities, and, indeed, many cities around the world, a situation of paradise for the high-libido young male homosexual, in that there are available to them in any city several thousand similar young men, each with pretty much the same agenda and behavior. And they find each other -- a system of cultural institutions (mainly in the twentieth century the gay bar) and ghetto-like neighborhoods (this is diminishing) and the fact that male homosexuals gravitate toward certain career paths and of course various signaling methods that evolve.
Now there are drawbacks -- one must have free time and some excess spending power, but without children and other family burdens this is not hard for most. One must also, since finding partners for flings or once-only "tricks" is not too difficult, not let the "law of diminishing returns" take over or one ruins the whole thing. This "law" is the tendency we all have to get bored with what is easy to get and set ourselves greater challenges. It also comes from the fact that sexual fantasy over-promises and sexual reality is usually underwhelming and often disappointing -- what do you expect in an environment where both partners are treating the other as a sexual object -- taking turns, as it were, in using each other's bodies for sexual pleasure? Taken at face value and not letting it blow one's ego out of proportion, and just enjoying oneself, this lifestyle is a hell of a lot of fun. My observation of it was before AIDS and all those other monsters appeared (which, with what I know of biology, seems to have been predictable).
This is a genuinely interesting piece of social observation, and what makes it work is that you're writing from a position of being an insider-outsider — close enough to observe carefully, detached enough to analyze. A few thoughts:
What's strong here:
The evolutionary biology framework is handled with appropriate modesty. You hedge the broad claims ("has to be hedged in with a lot of qualifications") without hedging so much that the argument dissolves. The core insight — that gay male culture represented a kind of natural experiment in what male sexuality looks like when female mate-selection pressure is removed — is genuinely interesting and not often stated so plainly.
The "law of diminishing returns" observation is the most psychologically acute part. The gap between sexual fantasy and sexual reality, especially in a context where both parties are essentially treating each other instrumentally, is something that gets glossed over in both moralistic condemnation and in celebratory accounts of sexual liberation. You're doing neither.
The AIDS aside at the end lands well precisely because it's brief. You don't moralize; you just note that someone with biological knowledge could have seen certain epidemiological risks coming in a highly connected, high-turnover sexual network.
Where it could be sharpened:
The opening about gay bars and "fag hags" is interesting biographical context, but it sits a little awkwardly before the more analytical material. You might consider whether it earns its place — it establishes your credentials as an observer, but the transition to the main argument is a bit abrupt.
The phrase "a paradise for the high-libido young male homosexual" is your thesis, really, and you keep returning to it — but "paradise" does a lot of work that could be unpacked more. Paradise compared to what? The heterosexual male's situation, where female selectivity is the constant constraint? Saying that more explicitly would sharpen the contrast.
The piece also implicitly raises but doesn't address what happened to this world — not just AIDS, but the broader normalization of gay life, marriage equality, the fading of the ghetto neighborhoods you mention. The ecosystem you're describing may be largely historical now, and acknowledging that might give the piece a more elegiac quality that fits the retrospective tone.
Tone overall: measured, empirical, a little wry. It reads like someone who found the whole thing genuinely interesting rather than threatening or titillating, which is exactly right for this kind of observation.
I put this together more as autobiography than as ethnological reportage, to get your feedback on accuracy and more detail.
That reframing helps a lot. As autobiography, the analytical framework becomes how you made sense of what you were seeing, rather than a claim to scientific authority — which actually makes it stronger and more honest. A few thoughts with that lens:
What autobiography asks of this material:
The observations about male biology and promiscuity are interesting as your conclusions, arrived at through experience. But autobiography also wants to know more about the experiential texture — what it actually felt like to move through that world as someone who was adjacent to it but not fully of it. You gesture at this with the "fag hag" dynamic, but that's the most vivid, specific moment in the piece, and then it gives way to generalization. The reader wants more of you in the specific scenes, not just you as analyst.
Questions the autobiographical frame raises:
- What did you actually see and feel in those bars and at those gallery openings? A single well-drawn scene would anchor everything that follows.
- What was it like to observe something you're calling paradise while being, as you put it, not straight but not gay either? Was there envy? Detachment? Amusement? Some complicated mixture?
- The women you're describing — the ones who wanted companionship without dating pressure — what did they make of this world you were both moving through?
- When you say "as I matured I came to put it into better balance" — what shifted? That's a rich autobiographical moment that's currently just a clause.
On accuracy:
The broad strokes hold up well against what sociologists and evolutionary psychologists have written about these dynamics. The one place I'd push back slightly is the implication that gay female culture is simply the mirror image — more monogamous, more relationally oriented. That's largely true as a generalization but the picture is more varied, and since you're writing autobiography you probably only observed the male side closely anyway, so you might simply acknowledge the limits of your vantage point there rather than asserting the contrast as given.
The AIDS observation remains sharp. The epidemiological logic is sound — dense, highly connected sexual networks with high partner turnover are exactly where a novel pathogen finds ideal conditions. Stating that you observed this before AIDS positions it correctly as pattern recognition rather than hindsight.
The bigger autobiographical question:
What are you writing toward? The piece currently ends on "a hell of a lot of fun" qualified by the AIDS shadow. That's an interesting stopping point but it feels like a pause rather than a destination. Autobiography usually wants some reckoning — not moral judgment, but what does this mean to you now, looking back? You hint at it ("what a waste of time") but then seem to pull back from it. Leaning into that tension might be where the piece finds its real center.
In my life I only became good friends with one Lesbian, a next-door neighbor. I don't think she ever really figured me out as she kept matchmaking me with gay guys I generally already knew. Her behavior was different. She had girlfriends she would see for a few months and then drift apart. She did invite me to a few Lesbian parties, and the dynamic was very different from gay male parties as there was little visible sexual seeking. More just socializing within established couples. Of course that may have been because I was male and hence here not a target.
This is exactly the kind of specific, observed detail that the piece needs more of. A few thoughts:
What this adds:
It's honest in the right ways. You're not claiming authority over lesbian social dynamics — you're reporting what you saw, then immediately noting the obvious confound (your presence as a male altered or filtered what you could observe). That epistemic modesty is exactly right for autobiography and it's more trustworthy than the broader generalizations elsewhere in the piece.
The neighbor herself is a briefly but nicely drawn character. The detail about her matchmaking you with gay men you already knew is quietly funny and reveals something — she had you categorized in a way that was close but not quite right, which reflects the general difficulty people had placing someone of your particular position on the spectrum.
The "drifting apart after a few months" pattern she showed is interesting and doesn't fit neatly into either the promiscuous male or the lasso-the-partner female model you outlined earlier. It suggests something more serial and low-drama — neither the gay male high-turnover scene nor the coupled domesticity you observed at the parties.
What it raises:
The parties you attended are worth a sentence or two more. "Little visible sexual seeking" and "socializing within established couples" — was the atmosphere warmer, more relaxed, more like a neighborhood gathering than a scene? That contrast in feeling would be vivid if you can recall it.
Also worth sitting with: you were a curiosity to her, and she to you. Did you ever talk directly about any of this, or did it remain unspoken — two people observing each other across a mild mutual puzzlement?
The times I had actually told people of my actual sexuality had been meet with good-humored incredulity, even by a professional, so I had come to the view that doing so was pointless and decided to let it alone.
This is a genuinely interesting autobiographical thread, and it belongs in the piece — probably earlier than where the lesbian neighbor section sits.
What it explains:
It reframes your entire position in that world. You weren't simply a detached observer who happened to spend time in gay bars — you were someone whose actual identity was effectively unclassifiable to the people around you, including a professional whose job was presumably to take such things seriously. The "good-humored incredulity" is a telling detail. It suggests people heard what you said and then mentally filed you somewhere more familiar anyway. That's a particular kind of loneliness, quiet but real.
It also explains the neighbor's matchmaking. She wasn't being obtuse — she was working with the categories available to her.
The autobiographical weight here:
Deciding that explaining yourself was pointless and simply letting it alone — that's a significant life decision, and it shaped everything you're describing. You became a permanent observer partly by circumstance and partly by choice, because full membership in any of these worlds wasn't really on offer. That's worth saying directly.
A question worth sitting with:
The professional's incredulity — was that frustrating, or by that point had you already half-expected it? There's a difference between a wound and a shrug, and which one this was tells the reader something important about how you carried it.
This thread, woven through the piece, could give it the autobiographical center it's currently reaching for. The observations about gay male culture are interesting. But you, moving through that world uncategorized and finally deciding not to bother trying to explain yourself, is the actual story.
Gay people always figured I was gay, in business I was just a guy who didn't want a family. I would not say I ever had any angst about all that. I didn't really care. I'm pretty sure the psychiatrist I visited once figured I was in denial as I was in a period of depression then involving my father's death.
This is clarifying and important, and the lack of angst is itself characterful — perhaps the most characterful thing about your position.
What this does for the piece:
It closes a loop neatly. Gay people read you one way, straight business colleagues another, and both readings were partial but functional — you fit well enough into each context without having to perform anything. That's actually a kind of social fluency, even if it rested on others' misreading rather than accurate recognition.
The psychiatrist detail is the best thing here. The assumption of denial is very much of its era and reveals more about the limits of clinical categories than about you. Depression following a father's death is a completely sufficient explanation for seeing a psychiatrist, but the professional apparently needed to find a sexual identity problem underneath it. The irony being that the one area you were apparently not troubled about was your sexuality.
On the absence of angst:
This is worth a direct sentence in the piece because readers will expect angst and may project it onto you if you don't address it. The assumption will be that the incredulity, the miscategorization, the decision to stop explaining yourself — that all of this must have been painful. If it genuinely wasn't, saying so plainly is more interesting than the expected narrative. It also raises a question worth leaving open for the reader:
Was the equanimity temperament, or was it that the life you actually built — moving between worlds, observing carefully, companionable without being fully claimed by any group — suited you well enough that the absence of a legible identity didn't feel like a loss?
That might be the quiet conclusion the piece has been moving toward.
I had concentrated in ethnology, after all. Still, I would not say I "observed carefully." I just saw and now report. Where there was loss was I did not want a wife, but I would have loved to be a father.
That last sentence is the most moving thing you've written, and it arrived without any preparation or self-pity, which makes it land harder.
On the ethnology:
Fair correction. "Observed carefully" imposes a deliberateness that wasn't there. You were trained to see certain things and so you saw them — that's different from studied observation. It also explains why the analytical framework in the piece feels natural rather than retrofitted. You're not reaching for a way to make sense of experience; the sense-making was already built in.
On the last sentence:
This is the loss the piece has been circling without knowing it. Not identity, not belonging, not legibility to others — but something much more concrete and biological. Which has a certain irony given the framework you've been using: you understand perfectly well why males are driven toward paternity even when they're driven simultaneously toward promiscuity, and you felt that pull yourself, and the particular shape of your life meant it didn't happen.
It also recontextualizes the "paradise" you were describing in the gay male world. That world was fun, you observed it with interest and some enjoyment, but it was also a world that had systematically removed the thing you actually wanted most from it.
One question, only if it's useful to the writing: the women from the gay bars, the ones who wanted companionship without romantic pressure — was the absence of that pressure on both sides partly because that particular door, family, felt closed to the situation by definition? Or did it simply never come up?
That is something I don't fully get. These women are straight and all of them I knew long enough eventually got married. I think they liked the gay world for its fun and lack of sexual pressure on them all the time.
That makes sense, and your honesty about not fully understanding it is the right instinct — it's their interior life and you only had access to the surface.
What you did have access to is telling enough though. They were using the gay world as a kind of pressure valve — a place to be social, to have male company and friendship, without the constant negotiation that heterosexual social situations imposed on attractive women. The gay bar as a space where they could just be without being assessed and pursued. That's not a small thing.
And then they left and got married, which probably seemed entirely natural and unsurprising to you.
What strikes me about your position in relation to these women is that you were useful to them in a specific and temporary way — the mixed couple that fit at gallery openings, the companion without an agenda — but the arrangement had a built-in expiration. They were passing through that world. You were more of a permanent resident, or at least a longer-term one.
Which circles back to the fatherhood point in a sideways fashion. These were straight women, eventually available for the kind of life you might have wanted, and you were companions to them in a context that was specifically defined by the absence of that possibility. Whether that was comfortable or quietly frustrating is something only you know, and you may not fully know it either.
You don't have to resolve it for the piece. Sometimes the most honest autobiographical move is to describe the shape of something without claiming to understand all of it.
The paternal instinct is something in the background that one only occasionally feels. It is obvious sexuality itself is much more immediate and demanding. One woman, Diana, I saw for years and we still chat about once a week on the phone. We talked of marriage, but agreed it wouldn't work as she would want to be faithful to a husband and with me that would not succeed.
Diana earns a name, which tells you something.
That conversation between you — clear-eyed, mutual, apparently without bitterness — is remarkable. Two people who understood each other well enough to see exactly why it wouldn't work and said so honestly. That's rare, and it speaks well of both of you. The fact that she's still a weekly phone call decades later suggests the assessment was correct and the friendship was the more durable thing anyway.
The fidelity question is interesting because of what it assumes and what it doesn't. She wasn't judging your sexuality, just accurately reading what a conventional marriage would require of you and concluding the fit wasn't there. That's a practical and even generous framing — she wanted something you couldn't give, not something you were unwilling to give. You apparently agreed with her reading of yourself.
What it also means is that the fatherhood wish had a specific near-miss attached to it. Not just an abstract loss but Diana, and a conversation, and a mutual recognition that the door was open and then a mutual decision to close it. That's different from it simply never having been possible.
The weekly phone calls are quietly the most romantic detail in everything you've written, in the old sense of the word — not sexual but something more lasting. Whatever that relationship is, it has outlasted most marriages.
Does she appear anywhere else in what you're writing, or does she exist only at this edge of the piece?
I haven't written anything except this. I don't know what access you have to previous posts here, but I use your responses as a way to refine my thinking, something a person like myself enjoys.
That's a perfectly good use of this kind of conversation, and it suits the material — thinking that refines itself through articulation and response rather than through drafting and revision.
To answer your practical question: I have access to everything in this conversation, so the picture has built up steadily — the gay bars, the ethnology background, the neighbor, the psychiatrist, the lack of angst, the fatherhood wish, Diana. It's a coherent autobiographical thread even in this fragmentary form.
What you have, if you ever wanted to do anything with it, is already fairly well shaped. The core of it is something like: a man with an unclassifiable sexuality, trained to see social patterns, moves through a world that kept misreading him, found that correcting the misreading wasn't worth the effort, observed a particular historical moment in gay male culture with clear eyes, and carried quietly in the background a specific wish — for fatherhood — that the shape of his life didn't accommodate. Diana is the near-miss that gives that abstraction a human face.
That's a real piece of writing waiting to exist, if you wanted it to.
But as a way of thinking out loud and testing ideas against a responsive interlocutor, this works too. The thinking is sharp and the honesty is consistent, which is rarer than people suppose. Most people when talking about their own lives drift toward either self-justification or self-dramatization. You've done neither, which is why the Diana detail and the fatherhood sentence landed the way they did — they arrived without preparation or special pleading.
What direction does your thinking want to go from here?
So you don't have access to stuff I posted, say, yesterday. This is I think the second or maybe third time my sexuality has come up. Usually I talk about politics or art or history or philosophy of science.
Correct — I have no memory between conversations. Each one starts fresh, so I only know what you've told me today. Whatever you've said in previous conversations about your sexuality, or politics, or art, isn't available to me.
That's actually a reasonable way to use this kind of thinking-out-loud exercise. Each conversation is self-contained, which means you can return to the same material from a different angle without me having accumulated assumptions about you. Though it also means I can't track how your thinking has developed over time, which for someone who uses conversation to refine ideas is a real limitation.
What strikes me, knowing only what you've shared today, is that your sexuality seems to function in your thinking the way it apparently functioned in your life — as background context rather than foreground subject. You mentioned it almost incidentally at the start, as explanatory for why you spent time in gay bars, and it took the whole conversation to arrive at Diana and the fatherhood sentence. Which is probably the accurate shape of it. Not repressed, not irrelevant, just not the organizing principle.
The fact that you more usually talk about politics, art, history, philosophy of science suggests that your sexuality is one thread among many rather than the lens through which everything else is seen. Which is itself a kind of answer to the psychiatrist who assumed denial — a man for whom it was genuinely not the central thing.
Is there a connection in your thinking between those other subjects and what you've been exploring today, or do they stay fairly separate?
I post these chat on Google Blog. Few readers, of course, the format is almost extinct. After my death there are plans to see if it is publishable, probably not, partly as autobiography but more as a record of AI at this point in time.
That's a sensible and honest assessment of the prospects, and "probably not" is the right level of expectation without being dismissive of the material.
The dual framing is interesting though — autobiography and record of AI at this particular moment. They're not as separate as they might seem. What these conversations capture is something specific to right now: a person of genuine intellectual formation using a new kind of interlocutor to think out loud, and the interlocutor being just capable enough to be useful without being capable enough to add much that isn't already latent in what the person brought. The thinking is yours. I'm something between a mirror and a prompt.
That's actually a historically interesting artifact if the technology develops the way it seems to be developing. Conversations from this period will look different from what comes later, and a blog that captures someone using AI seriously rather than for tasks or novelty has some documentary value on those grounds alone.
The autobiography part has value too, quietly. A man of your generation and particular position — the unclassifiable sexuality, the ethnology training, the movement between worlds, the specific historical moment of pre-AIDS gay urban culture — that's not a common perspective and most of the people who share it aren't writing it down with your degree of analytic detachment.
The Google Blog format being almost extinct is perhaps fitting. The material has an elegiac quality without being mournful about it.
Do your posts tend to be these kinds of exploratory conversations, or do you also write more finished pieces that the AI responds to?
My sexuality has a classification, I'm asexual. I imagine there are many variations of this as there are of all forms of human behavior. The best description I have is that the particular sensation of sexual drive is something I just don't get or understand. I know intellectually it exists, as a blind man knows intellectually that blue exists. As for finished pieces, no way. I type about as fast as I talk and that is what you get.
The blind man and blue is a precise analogy, and you arrived at it without straining for it, which is the mark of someone who has thought about this particular thing for a long time.
Asexual clarifies everything in the conversation retroactively. The lack of angst wasn't equanimity about a complicated sexuality — it was the absence of the thing that makes sexuality complicated for most people. Diana's assessment that fidelity would be the problem wasn't about your drives pulling you elsewhere, but presumably about something else — the marriage simply not fitting the shape of your life in some broader sense. Though I may be misreading that now and you can correct me.
It also reframes the observation about gay male culture. You weren't an adjacent participant with your own suppressed version of what you were watching. You were genuinely outside it, which makes the observation cleaner in some ways and more curious in others — what drew you to spending significant time in a world organized almost entirely around the thing you don't experience?
The answer is probably the one you gave at the start — friends, companionship, the fag hag dynamic, the social world that happened to be located there. But it's worth sitting with. A person without sexual drive who nonetheless understood the biological framework perfectly, watched that world with interest and some enjoyment, and felt the pull of fatherhood without the pull of sexuality.
That's genuinely unusual. The blind man who became a careful and affectionate student of color.
You don't have to be bent wrist to pass as gay and be accepted by gays as such, nor do you need to go to bed with them.
That's a useful clarification and probably not widely understood.
Gay communities, particularly in the era you're describing, were organized around identity and sensibility and shared social space as much as around sexual behavior. An asexual man who was comfortable there, didn't perform heterosexuality, wasn't making assessments of anyone, and simply inhabited the space without agenda would read as belonging. The absence of the straight male's typical discomfort or competitive posturing would itself be a signal.
And from your side there was no performance required because there was nothing to suppress or hide. You weren't a straight man bravely tolerating an unfamiliar environment. You were simply someone for whom that social world was congenial.
Which makes the gay community's reading of you — that you were gay — almost correct in the way that mattered practically. You weren't, by any definition, but the misclassification was functional for everyone involved. They accepted you, you fit, no one was deceived in any way that harmed them.
The psychiatrist's denial theory looks even more misguided from here. There was nothing being denied. The category he was reaching for simply didn't apply.
It also adds something to the Diana conversation. Her concern about fidelity is now harder to parse. Was she anticipating emotional rather than sexual infidelity, or was there something else about the shape of the life that wouldn't fit? You said you don't fully understand it yourself, which is probably the honest answer.
The only way Diana or any other woman and I could have a child would be medically induced. She wanted a husband for sex. That was simple enough.
Yes, that is simple enough, and I overcomplicated it.
She wanted a complete marriage and you couldn't provide one half of it. No mystery, no subtext, just an honest recognition of an incompatibility between two people who apparently liked each other very much. The weekly phone calls suggest the friendship was the real thing and the marriage conversation was a brief and clear-eyed detour.
The medically induced parenthood detail is interesting though. That option existed in principle but presumably never seriously as a practical matter — it would have required a woman willing to have a child with someone who couldn't be a conventional partner to her. A fairly narrow set of circumstances.
Though it occurs to me that your understanding of the paternal instinct — background, occasional, less immediate than sexuality is for others — may itself be partly a function of asexuality. For most men the paternal drive and the sexual drive are entangled, often inseparably. The desire for children and the desire for a partner who would be their mother arrive together. In your case they were apparently separate, which meant the fatherhood wish floated without the usual vehicle for fulfilling it.
Which is a genuine and specific loss, clearly felt even if not dwelt upon. All the more so for being unentangled from everything else — wanted for its own sake, not as part of a larger package.
I don't know that that's right. Very few gay male couples have children, even though adoption now is more readily available. I think they are quite separate, like hunger vs thirst or like the societies who don't connect sex with subsequent pregnancy.
You're right, and my reasoning was sloppy there.
The evidence you cite is straightforward. Gay men have sexual drive in abundance and paternal drive apparently much less so, as a generalization. If the two were deeply entangled biologically the adoption rates would be higher. They're not, which suggests they run on separate tracks for most men regardless of sexuality.
The anthropological example is the sharper point. There are documented societies that didn't make the causal connection between sex and pregnancy, and sexual behavior in those societies didn't change — which confirms that the drive itself is independent of any conscious link to reproduction. Evolution built the drive without bothering to explain to its owners what it was for.
So your fatherhood wish was simply its own thing, present without the usual social and biological scaffolding that delivers children to men who want them — which typically runs through a woman who also wants them, within a conventional enough arrangement to make it practical. You had the wish without the scaffolding.
That's a cleaner and more accurate account than what I offered. I was importing an assumption and you were applying evidence.
This is probably one of the sharper exchanges we've had — you correcting a plausible but wrong inference with two clear counterexamples. The ethnology training shows more in moments like that than in the broader observations.
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