An Ideal
Partner -
The Search Is On
by
Perry Brass
[Editor's
Note: While this article is written for gay men, its
principles and insights apply to all, homosexual or not.]
Much
of the romantic inner feelings of gay men revolve around
an "ideal partner". He is the sexualized
version of the "ideal friend" who will give
you everything, be everything you can't be (butch, rich,
powerful, adult), and satisfy all your narcissistic
needs to find someone whose value either reflects or
increases yours. Although this is not at all limited to
us (the aging executive's need for a trophy wife who is
tall, gorgeous, and twenty years younger than the first
wife is hetero narcissism), gay men often have a fear of
going outside their narcissism: what they feel as
"marrying" beneath them. Their own
internalized homophobia makes it difficult to see
someone else for what he is, and so they end up with a
"type", a template of desire that turns them
on like a light switch: every time. And it is from this
template that they expect to find -- every time --
the "love of their lives."
I find
this "love of your life" idea fascinating in
that it expresses perfectly the gay need to find that
mirror image, that narcissistic fulfillment, that keeps
many gay men on a constant romantic merry-go-round. As
with the heroines in old 1940s MGM two-hankie
"women's" movies, we think of the love of our
lives as the tall, dark, handsome stranger who finds us
sitting out on a park bench, lonely, forlorn, with just
a half pack of peanuts left. He gives us everything: the
mink, the house, the car, the dick. He has it all. He
excites and satisfies us -- and asks from us (just as he
would from any real movie heroine) the most complete,
draining and one-sided love any testicled animal will
ever get.
To put
it another way: we are prepared to love the living doody
out of him.
Millions
of gay men will be looking for the "love of their
lives" until they die. They will be sitting on that
park bench, or cruising until four A.M., or complaining
at brunch, and then gyming and shopping and dieting, and
then cruising again. They will look and look and look,
and never realize that real love might already have
found them.
Why is
that?
How
could it happen right under their noses? Is it possible
that this "great love" could originate from
someone else? And in an amazingly open, touching,
down-to-earth way? Is it possible that it could be
there, and still escape them?
Uh huh:
it's possible.
And it
would escape them, because the truth is: they never,
really find themselves lovable.
Loving
someone else, being hurt by someone else, running after
the next love material and the next (and the next) --
all of this is preferable to being loved. Why?
Because
being loved means owning up to the responsibility of
being loved, which is -- in the long run -- more
difficult than asking for (or looking for) love.
Although many of us love to be adored, being loved is
different. Being loved on an adult level requires that
you feel worthy of love, and also that someone else's
feelings be responsibly respected. It also means looking
into your own need for love and realizing how vulnerable
that makes you, since we are sure that our own unlovable
selves will be denied any love that is being offered to
us, at any moment.
I refer
to this chronic insecurity as "looking into the
mouth of the volcano". Looking directly into that
cavernous, frightening need we have to be loved; a need
that goes back to childhood; a need that most people
will spend their entire lives attempting to avoid.
However, if we marshal the courage to look directly into
the "the volcano" where so much inner turmoil
lies -- remember that volcanoes are actually weak spots
in the earth's ancient crust -- we will find the love
that is ours: ours to give as well as to receive.
The love
may come by uniting us with absent fathers, difficult
mothers, rejecting brothers -- by uniting us with all
the painful, threatening fires within ourselves -- but
it is there. It is deep within the mouth of that
volcano, that fearful place where our need for love is
hidden. And there, if we can finally look into it, we
can learn to accept love and, indeed, authentically
(without histrionic "sacrifices") offer it.
Loving will then be a natural part of our imaginative
soul and personality. We will be able, in short, to
realize the intention to love and be loved.
We will
be able to say: "I am worthy of being loved, and of
loving."
(The
opposite, flip side, of this is the man who never feels
that his love is worth having. "Why would he want
me? What do I have to give?" Because he has felt
genuinely unloved, he feels that his love is unworthy.
This cycle is again broken when we realize how precious
love is. By questioning a feeling that is presented,
often unbidden, to us, we are demeaning ourselves. It is
important to see love, then, as an ultimate gift. Or, as
the poet W. H. Auden said, "If equal affection
cannot be/ Let the more loving one be me.")
So one
of the most direct ways of avoiding looking into this
need (the "mouth of the volcano") is to spend
your life "looking for love": for someone to
invest your own narcissistic needs in, rather than
accepting someone who, at that point in his own
emotional development, can love you. What I'm asking
for, then, is to be able to see and accept emotional
richness in another person, rather than the other things
that we have programmed ourselves to look for in a
"Personals" ad way: that
"template-of-desire" appearance (what is
referred to, basically, as "my type"), manner,
sexual technique, or position. We keep looking for these
things more and more specifically ("smokes cigars;
has a mustache; does not smoke; no facial hair. .
."), while rejecting men faster and faster.
Again,
this harks back to the cruising games most of us have
played for years. What makes cruising such a waste of
time is our fear of rejection. After all, in cruising,
everybody is out for the same thing, correct? But the
sting of rejection becomes, for most men, much more
painful than the pleasures of acceptance. This is
especially true now in our culture of rejection, where
we find ever more reasons to find men unacceptable.
So when
you think of all the time you've wasted cruising because
of your own fear of rejection, you may realize that some
of that time went into your own fear that your cruised
"object" just might not be "worthy"
enough for you.
"True
love" then, could be around the corner. It could
very well be in someone else's true feelings about you.
And although many of us have had relationships that
"did not work out" -- that is, another man did
not give us everything we felt we deserved -- we cannot
deny that someone else might have loved us with an
intensity that was palpable and indeed beautiful: with a
veracity of love that was as deep as his soul was
capable. But this was not the "true love" we
wanted as a narcissistic ideal. This was not the place
where we saw ourselves at the mirror, with Prince
Charming staring back at us waiting to ask us in.
For many
of us, this date with a Prince might be terrifying.
After all, the first question is what does he see in
us?
This is
something that many gay men have a difficult time with,
especially younger ones, who often internalize the idea
that there is nothing interesting about them except
their youth and bodies. For them, the idea that you're
interested -- or even capable of being interested -- in
any person beside yourself, comes with a little slip
attached that says: "Beware, this guy has got to be
as self-obsessed as I am. So how can he be genuinely
interested in me?"
The flip
side, once more, is the man who feels that since he is
going to lose anyway, why bother?
Rejection,
certainly, is one of the hardest feelings in the world.
It brings to mind all the rejection we had as children,
and those reactions of helplessness and pain it caused.
But once you have let that feeling out, and seen it
working among others, you realize that you can prevail
over it. Rejection itself as a feeling will not kill
you, but the pain of rejecting yourself can: the pain
that comes from not owning up to what you are, as a
valuable person, who has weathered so much, including
rejection, including pain, grief, and hurt. This will
not ever protect you from actual rejection. But it will
strengthen you so that you will be able to go through
the kind of normal risks that make life exciting and
allow relationships to happen.
In gay
relationships, without the preset husband/wife
patterning, risk was a regular part of our lives. An
awareness of risk produced an openness to change that
kept many relationships going. Although the down side
was that with such a high level of risk (no laws to
protect, or restrict, either party), breaking up was
easy to do; the up side was that it became easier to go
from one relationship to another without feeling marked
as a "loser", which many divorced
heterosexuals feel.
I felt,
while coming out in the mid-60s, that I had one gay
quest and it was the hardest thing for me to do: to find
a man who did not hate himself so much that my own
fragile sense of self-worth was not destroyed with his.
I had been through so much damage growing up in a
bigoted, homophobic South with a disturbed mother, that
I was not about to connect with a man who showed me that
even though he hated himself, he could still love me.
This
"hating ourselves but loving you" model was
prevalent then. (It also seems ready for a comeback, as
internalized gay homophobia has come roaring back out of
the closet.) You could not go out to a bar or a gay
party and not feel it. It was to a great degree what the
generation older than I was set on, and it set them
apart from us, a generation that proposed to change the
world through, of all things, love. Often I felt that
men from the older, self-hating 50s generation had
nothing to say to me, and this is a feeling that younger
gay men now have: that we, men in our forties and
fifties, are cut off from them, as they have cut
themselves off from us. Yet I know that we are all
looking for the same thing: some clue, model --
or even a pattern -- for how to survive our own
gay lives.
 This
article is excerpted from:
How
to survive your own gay life
by Perry
Brass.
Reprinted with permission of the
publisher, Belhue Press, 2501 Palisade Ave., #A1, Bronx,
NY 10463.
Info/Order
this book
About The
Author
Perry
Brass edited Come Out!, the first gay liberation newspaper in the
world, published by New York's Gay Liberation Front, and with two
friends founded the first health clinic for gay men on the East
Coast. His 1985 play, Night Chills, won the Jane Chambers
International Gay Playwriting Contest. He has written two poetry books: Sex-charge
and The
Lover of My Soul, a gay science fiction thriller, Mirage,
followed by two sequels, Circles
and Albert
or The Book of Man. He has also authored a novel, The
Harvest, a gay "science/politico" thriller. He
is an accomplished public reader and exponent of gender and gay-related
topics, and is available for public appearances. The author can be
reached at
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