Friday 15 April 2011

Why I love

Via Richard Jeffrey Newman comes this really moving post called "Why I love my straight boyfriend":

So what exactly does a contemporary relationship between a gay man and a straight man look like? I don’t know. This is a love affair and it looks like this. Every day we email and text back and forth about who we’re sleeping with, how we’re sleeping with them, and if we should continue to do so (in his case it’s just one girl in Paris who he’s in love with). We email poems to one another (this is less gay than it sounds since we’re both poets, which is more gay than it sounds), we have event nights, non-event nights, and date nights where we get together for really expensive drinks we can’t afford and remix Chrissie Hynde with Camus and (oh my god) our feelings.

[...]

I kind of knew things were serious with D when he sent me a love poem he wrote for me some months ago. I think it may have originally been a kind of, I wrote this for you what do you think of it thing, but I wasn’t about to give him any edits. Please. Send that shit to The New Yorker stat. I can’t remember a time when a man wrote a poem for me and called it a Love poem, capital L. And it better be capitalized twice because I like those kind of typos. Give it all or don’t give it at all. I hope all the gay men I’ve slept with are reading this.


It's just beautiful, and powerful. Lots of politics, lots of love. Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing.

This is something we don't talk about enough -- love between men. Well, love between anybody that doesn't fit a "there's a mommy and a daddy and then they love each other very much" kind of pattern. But perhaps especially love between men, and the heteronormative requirement that men shut down so much of their psychoemotional lives seems such a terrible price to pay.

--IP

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