notes from the nice side of the fence

[interior. 7pm, sun beginning to set outside. boy on his laptop. three knocks on the door, door opens, middle-aged woman walks in room, places pair of sandals by the door.]

“your sandals.”

“hi. what do you knock for if you don’t wait for a response?”

[short pause.]

“it’s a warning. it’s like saying, ‘here I come’, so you know.”

“and what if I’m jerking off?”

“pah, in the middle of the day?”

“what’s it to you?”

“just like that? you need some atmosphere, after all…”

“look, please just wait next time, ok?”

[woman turns to leave, giggles softly.]

“now you can jerk off.”

[door closes.]

I snuggle under the duvet in my sister and her husband’s spare room, pretty sure it’s late enough to doze off into sleep. they live in a remote Druze village in the north of the country. I can’t seem to get warm enough. it’s very quiet. my mind starts talking. it’s on the How Can We Fix It mode.

“maybe I should jerk off. sexual release would send me to sleep. it’s like the body gets in this kind of balance, and then it’s like I don’t notice that it’s cold anymore, and then it isn’t. like it preserves its heat better or something. I could do that. and I don’t even have to corrupt my sexuality with porn, I’ll just concentrate on the sensation. having sex with myself. it would be a feeding experience, not a draining one. sensual. if I need to I can conjure up the lovely people I’d had sex with. imagine one of them visiting me again. maybe a few.”

and so far, I like the story my mind is telling me. then it takes an interesting turn.

“I’ve always had such a weak libido. that’s always been what really held me back from exploring my sexuality. I just don’t seem as interested as other people are, as passionate. sometimes I even find the idea of having sex exhausting. it’s one of my unfortunate shortcomings, my lack of sexual appetite.”

a few seconds pass, and my mind silently asks itself, is that true? is it true that I have a weak libido? is my premise for all these evaluations even correct?

in response, I get images from high school, from university - years where I would masturbate almost every day, often via stimulation from pornography on the internet. “have I always had a weak libido? well, that doesn’t seem to be very true. it seems to be truer that I have channelled my sexuality in the ways that I found most comfortable, then. for all I know it was a very strong libido. but I’ve always had such strong fears of approaching men, of exposing myself physically, of hurting someone’s feelings or being hurt myself. that is what holds me back, not my libido.”

as I’m having these thoughts, a few hidden muscles in my body relax, and I feel myself open. actually, I’m amazed. this never occurred to me. my history is not what I thought it was. I suddenly feel like I just got to know me a bit better. but then it turns on me again.

“I wasted it. all those years, wanking in the toilets. my formative years. student years. by now, I could have explored every fetish imaginable. I could have stepped into many more relationships, and could have learnt so much more. I had a perfectly healthy libido, and I wasted it.”

my muscles contract again. I feel the sadness of mourning, and my face wears a strange grimace. and I don’t know where this is going, but I seem to be asking myself again - is it true? is it true that I wasted my libido, all those years? is it even true that I would have learnt and developed to a greater extent had I done differently?

“well, looking at what I believed about sex and about my body back then, it’s hardly surprising that I did what I did. and who knows, maybe if I’d had no sexual inhibitions whatsoever when I was still living in London I would have been seduced into some very tricky situations. I might have contracted disease, or developed serious addictions that would have burnt up months and years of sobriety. I might have been so sexually active that sex itself would have become an addiction, instead of porn, and I would have still come to the same point that I’m at - trying to find liberation. perhaps porn protected me from a worse fate, or from things I just couldn’t have handled. I sure learnt a thing or two from it. not least what addiction feels like. what I certainly know is that the frustration of masturbation coupled with the belief that I should be more sexually active is what led me to confront my ideas and beliefs about sex and about people, my fears. that was my path. nothing here was wasted.”

and then my awareness comes full circle and descends back into the throne of the moment. there is silence. comfortable. another page is turned, and the canvas is freshly blank, with not even a trace of denial of what came before. whether I have sex or I don’t, I know that my libido is perfect the way it is. increasing it, supressing it, channeling it or ignoring it has never been my job. I just thought it was.

I had a phone conversation a few months ago with a Palestinian friend of mine who lives in the UK. from the few Muslim people I know, he is certainly one of the more devout - married young, doesn’t drink, prays, the works. I don’t usually find myself connecting with people of certain lifestyles, but this guy had such a fierce and thirsty intellect when I first met him, and combined with his profound all-round kindness his friendship was just irresistible. it’s a privilege to know him.

so we talked about this and that, and eventually the conversation steered to sexuality, as it does and has done before, which I’ve always felt was a kind of last frontier in our relationship - after all, if my drinking and swearing didn’t make me a dirty heathen, surely my man-on-man tendencies would, right? it was never so much a no-go zone in our chats, but more like a drop-by-but-don’t-stay-for-tea kind of zone. so that’s ok, you know, we all have our assumptions about each other. and then he says:

“you know, Shahaf, I’ve been thinking about this lately and I figured - I mean, Allah gives life to everything. nothing excluded. so if he gives life to those people [non-straights] it must mean that that’s the way it should be. so I’m fine with that.”

an internal “wow” put a very big smile on my face. this was music to my ears. what is, is. what do we get for arguing with it? what do we get for thinking we know why something is? the terror of facing an undesirable future. the hurtful manipulations we put our children through. the energy wasted on efforts to fight, to silence - against things that may only benefit, in the long run, from our attempts. but what my friend discovered was the other option. and as an afterthought to that initial “wow”, I thought, true Islam. this is true Islam, it is true surrender. surrendering to the will of God. true humility. and that’s not to say that he would not hurt if his son or daughter ever came out as gay, nor is it to say that he condones the idea of homosexuality. but evidently, this is a man who is awake to reality, and who is able to notice two things: that acceptance and support are not the same, and that accepting things makes a lot more sense than arguing with them.

in my thoughts I travel today to one of the first boys I ever kissed.

not the first one. my thoughts don’t like going there.

but one of the first.

I wore a collar shirt that comfortably hid the hair on the back of my neck. I drove.

we sat on the lawn in a quiet park in a small Israeli town. it’s amazing how few of the details I seem to remember. few images. we talked about something pseudo-philosophical, my horses of sexual insecurity probably tugging the conversation is such convenient directions. I had more hair on my head back then, and less on the rest of my body. the longer the words I was trying to use were getting, the closer we edged towards each other. I don’t recall being scared. I had a strong confidence in my ability to muzzle my sexuality and lock it in a cage, you know, just in case it made me do or say something that could be seen to be… vulgar? animalistic? passionate? out of order. but I wasn’t getting my way this time.

“I don’t wanna wait anymore. can I?… -”

and at this, his head moved towards mine, and lips met, and even though my mind was still racing (where should I put my hand? what is he going to do next? what is he thinking about?), it was too late: the beast had been unleashed. and it was heaven. it was brilliance.

*

here’s how it works for me, sometimes: I start the day, no clothes. mirror. I cannot see something I consider sexy. so instead I zoom in on features I deem redundant. a zit. a hair. a small mound of fat. then, clothes on. mirror. I look at my face. I like my face. smile. go out.

I meet someone. we drink some wine, or not. clothes come off again. and, sometimes, he says: “wow. you’re so sexy…”

and I smile and I cuddle and I’m grateful. I make happy. “you’re sexy too.”

and all the time, in my head, it’s like - “liar!”. or worse - “stupid!”. not always entirely consciously. but it’s there. because, if someone defies my own judgment they must be either or both. and since it is my own judgment it’s also inevitably the better judgment - simply because, unlike the judgments of others, I have no choice but to believe my own. they’re mine. I make them. and mirrors don’t lie, mirrors aren’t stupid. I know what my mirror says in the morning. nevermind that mirrors never really say anything. only my mind ever does.

such are the powers of dictatorship.

I have a friend who says “how can I put it” a lot. I always like it when she does that, because of the way she averts her eyes and puts on a hint of a grin, in anticipation of her own witticism. it will be like “how can I put it… let’s just say he wouldn’t know a veggie burger if you shoved one up his ass!”. we laugh.

so how-can-I-put-its can be very useful sometimes, especially if you’re afflicted to the bone with the delicate art of British Understatement, as I like to think of myself being.

I was reminded of all of this when I started thinking about a certain person whose premises I used to frequent, for purposes my older and married sister would deem (and has deemed) completely illicit. a colleague at work introduced us, we met, sat down, I ate - and before he could finish saying “so… what do your parents do?” I knew in my heart that, sweet as we both were, this would never work. there wasn’t, as such, a complete sentence in my mind that I felt I would want to communicate to him. that said, he was very nice to look at.

so I did what I almost never do: I told him exactly what I thought. it so happened that he came back with “yeah, I kinda dig that too.”

3 months later. it has been a satisfying arrangement. but suddenly the costs of taxiing across town at 1am seem to outweigh the orgasms. I consult.

“I don’t know, it’s just like, the last time I was over at his - I don’t know why, I just felt like a piece of meat. we’d had really hot sex up till then.”

“how long has your thing together been going on?”

“three months.”

“well, of course, it’s the three months thing. everybody knows it takes three months for a good fuck buddy to lose flavour.”

my Everybody Knows Friend was right. she often is. I was amazed - was this biological fact? astrological perhaps? summer blues? I mean, nothing has essentially changed, and yet, it’s just not exciting anymore.

but ah. suddenly I remembered a crucial turn-off point. I may have repressed our ideological differences, faint as they could be seen through a thick veil of small-talk, for the sake of makeshift sensuality and a hard body. I mean, what would you have done:

“of course, if they had a pill for gays to take to become straight, then everyone would take it.”

I can’t remember if I was taking my socks on or off when this little pearl landed at my feet. it should have been on.

“oh really? you mean to say, you would have taken it?”

“well yeah, think about it. everything would have been easier that way. you wouldn’t have had to suffer or.. you know.”

this was a perfect no-I-don’t-know-why-don’t-you-extrapulate-asshole moment, but I chose patience instead.

“but you know, taken to its logical conclusion, this can only mean the best thing is for everyone to be the same. and ideas like that haven’t exactly been working out in human history. I mean, kids can come down on you hard as ginger, let alone gay. would you rather dye your kid’s hair black so they can go to school, or help create a safe environment where they will be respected as an individual?”

“… yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, I wouldn’t want kids anyway.”

yeah. well, how can I put it - it’s a good thing no one’s gonna force you to have ‘em.