Daniel Curzon:
Apparently John Lauritsen has never met a foreskin he didn't like, to judge from some comments in his latest book, A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love. But is circumcision really “mutilating the penis” (84)? I personally can think of other things that make a better case for male beauty than a wrinkled prepuce. I can certainly do without them, and don't miss mine own one little bit.
Still, whether you're for foreskin or against, you should have this little book in your library, It has, first of all, an admirable clarity of style, a quality much to be lamented for its absence in much of contemporary analytical writing. Lauritsen is straightforward(you should pardon the expression), succinct, and even pithy. You will find no tortured Foucault-like deconstructions here, only some thoughts about love and sex between men. And as Stuart Smalley has so wisely said, “And that's . . . okay!”
What is best about the book is the summarizing of various intellectual concepts over the centuries and how these have created today's thinking. Ideas do matter. They matter intensely. People behave in certain ways rather than in other ways because of the ideas they carry around in their noggins. And it's quite evident that most human beings haven't a clue where their ideas came from or whether these are worth preserving or merely the detritus of a whole bunch of ancestors, from Christian theologians like Philo Judeus (boo!) to Father Ratzinger, bully boy of the current Papacy right this minute.(Three big boos for him!)
Lauritsen hankers for the glory days of ancient Greece, when all men were encouraged to be All That They Could Be, and, fellas, that meant more than slapping a towel at some adolescent's heinie in the locker room. Then, alas, along came Mean Old Christianity, once the Emperor Theodosius and others got convinced that homosexuality causes earthquakes, and the homo-boys started getting really bad press, as they have for some time now, right up through Brilliant Spiritual Leaders like Tommy Boy Aquinas and Pat Robertson.
I love the way Lauritsen spells out the belief systems that have caused so much needless pain for the Homoerotically Challenged. For the author, that includes most men because he feels they'd be truer to their actual sexual impulses if they weren't so Homoerotically Deprived by Christian-based ethics. I wish rationality alone were enough to make people behave well and do the right thing by us gays. Unfortunately, people aren't that clear headed. Yet I do believe that a book like this can help make people see where they stand in intellectual and religious history. Buy a bunch of copies of this short book and leave them in motels all over the world!
The author feels that the modern gay liberation movement has gone awry in its polygamous marriage to feminists and other groups, the so-called minorities, and he's not too happy with Queer this and Queer that either. I'm not crazy about these things either, but movements have different components—the historians/philosophers like Lauritsen, the coalition-building politicians, the exploiters, the hacks, and the hangers-on. It's messy as hell and great for a novelist, this thick broth of seething humanity. Lauritsen strikes me, though, ultimately, as an aesthete. I don't know if he will convert anybody to his brand of celebration of Male Beauty (Indeed, there are some lesbians and maybe some Popes I can think of that he'll never persuade).
Nevertheless, he may convince some people that gay attractions are not weird,neurosis-driven shameful misfortunes, but, rather, are long-standing, time-honored (if you take the Really Big Overview and ignore the last 2000 years!), natural, and wide-ranging when not suppressed by hogwash and the hogwashers.
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