Commentary

On Love, Sex, and All That Privacy Crap

This is the first in a series of three
articles about issues related to gays and
lesbians and the efi"ort to build community.

by Crow

Energetic, talented lesbians gather to
form awriting group. Wounded, bright and
nuturing lesbians form a support group for
incest victims. A politically commited
group of gay men and lesbians form a
newspaper collective. A group of gay men
fonn an outing club in order to provide an
opportunity for gays to meet outside the
context of a bar. All over the country gays
and lesbians gather in groups to connect, to
heal themselves from the terrible isolation
we suffer as homosexuals in a homophobic
world, to pool our talents, our resources,
our capacity to nurture so we can build a
new culture, a superior ethic than what
we’ve inherited from the competitive, war-
loving patriarchy.

Two women from different towns
meet in a writing group and fall in love.
Two men who have known each other for
years work on the gay pride march together
and fall in love. Two dykes working on a
woman's land project fall in love. Their
respective groups respond to the news with

warm smiles, teasing, congratulations,
and back-slapping. A few months/years

later the happy couple “breaks up” and this
time they can expect to walk into that same
group carrying their grief, their confusion,
their agony—and be met with silence.
Suddenly their relationship is nobody’s
business but their own, their own “private
affair.” They are expected to settle their
differences outside their group. You can
cut the tension with a knife. Everyone
squirms in their seats, disturbed, unsettled,
making damn sure they remain “nuetral” so
as not to form camps or (god forbid!) ex-
press an opinion about something so per-
sonal as a love affair.

Suddenly the feminist ethic that we are
a web connected to the world, that we are
ecologically related to the earth and to each
other; therefore, have a responsibility to
break patriarchal patterns, that we must
have the courage to confront our deepest
fears together in order to heal — all of it
flies out the window when faced with the
common occurence of a broken love affair.
The “right to privacy” is protected. The
web is broken. These men and women with
an ecological perspective on the worl “po-
1itely” avert their eyes. "Business as usual”,
like trying to ignore an elephant becomes
so excruciating to one or the other half of
this hapless couple that s(he) is forced to
quit and only then does the group see that

March1988

a loss has been suffered—that our love
affairs have a profound effect on each and
every one of us.

Patriarchal patterns insidiously effect
our lives. Same sex lovers are deeply
enmeshed in dominant-submissive roles.
Lovers start off with a commitment and
then one suddenly switches sexual partners
with the ex-lover's friend (just like in the
movies). One man jumps from one mo-
nogamous relationship to another (ad infi-
nitum) leaving a string of unresolved rela-
tionships behind him. One woman weans
herself from alcohol, drugs, cigarettes or
over-eating, can’t figure out why she’s so
jealous and controlling when it comes to
sex. Addictive patterns, failure to process,
fears of abandonment, loss of identity, lies,
manipulations (conscious and otherwise),
games, acts of revenge, outright violence
abound in our frantic couplings and yet we
have no right to express a public opinion
because “all’s fair in love and war” and
besides, it’s their own private business.

I’d like to hear from those of you out
there who have been hurt by this compart-
mentalized thinking, as I have. I'm writing
this article not as a “how to”, but to bring
the issue to the surface so we can recognize
a contradiction in our thinking that blocks
our efforts to build community which is,
after all, our only hope for survival.Next
month: Part II Sex, Privacy, and the Dys-
functional Family (Aren’t They All?)

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