I suppose it really shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s amusing to see just how fascinated some folks are with the mechanics of gay sex. It wasn’t that long ago that Phil Robertson treated us all to a sermon the advantages of sticking your penis in a vagina rather than into an anus. No, I’m not talking about his more recent rape fantasies. I’m referring instead to Phil’s interview with GQ Magazine, the one in which he shared this little gem:

It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.

Countless conservative Christians came to the man’s aid in the dust-up over that interview, most praising him for taking a Biblical stance on the issue. Okay, so the Bible has some interesting passages, I know, but somehow I just don’t think Phil got that comparison from scripture. But of course what counts as a Biblical stance in some circles would seem to mean whatever most holds some folks feet to the fire. Celebrity Christians don’t curry favor with cultural conservatives by talking too much about anything Jesus said or did. (The Prince of Peace bores them to tears.) No, to get in on that market you have to hurt someone in Jesus’ name.

If the American movie industry has taught us anything, it’s that sex and violence go together like bees and pollen, or better than bees and pollen, I guess, cause, well that’s a damned tragedy too. Anyway, the point is that it shouldn’t surprise us that an industry celebrating verbal violence would invariably sex-up the narratives, albeit with an ironic angle on the topic.

So it should come as no surprise that Phil Robertson is not the only one to add a little pornography to his apologetics. Take for example Brian Klawiter, one of the latest folks to put his business on the line against homosexuality. It seems that Brian’s auto repair business won’t be serving those of an homosexual orientation. According to Media Matters, Klawiter has the following to say on the topic:

My company will be run in a way that reflects that. Dishonesty, thievery, immoral behavior, etc. will not be welcomed at MY place of business. (I would not hesitate to refuse service to an openly gay person or persons. Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.)

He later offered that he would repair a vehicle, apparently even for gay customers, providing they didn’t make a display in his shop. …which is almost reasonable, or at least it would be were it not for the rather irrational fear that his business may soon become a hot-spot for make-out sessions among the homosexual community. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is; look at that man’s poetry!

Putting a car together with nothing but bolts?

Nailed it, bro!

But seriously, does anyone else get the idea that some people are just a little overly concerned with the mechanics of other people’s sex lives? I’m not just talking about the moral question about what other people oughtta do. That’s old hat. What I’m talking about is a rather insipid interest in just how the act gets done.

As if we all know what act we’re talking about to begin with!

It does seem a common assumption amongst straight people that gay sex means butt-sex. If you remind straight folks that gay sex could also mean lesbian sex, well that just throws a wrench in the whole works, and then some guys start to pine for their late-night cable sessions. That standard bit of hypocrisy aside, what the fuck would any of us straight guys know about it anyway? There are lots of ways to get down, even among the square crowd, so why is anal penetration the heart of this issue?

…perhaps we could even ask why love isn’t the heart of the issue, at least for gay marriage, but that would just be way too mature. People would yawn and wander off to talk about something else. So, it won’t be the way folks talk about gay rights three beers into a Friday night, and it won’t be the way they fill the seats of a straight-shootin’ church on a Sunday.

Love? …yawn!

Pat Robertson will get us right back on track with a little bit of porno-preaching here (compliments of the Huffington Post). According to Pat, the gay rights crowd won’t stop at acceptance or equal rights, they want us to do it too, and by ‘it’ I mean whatever icky it your mind can iterate! …or his anyway. You can give the whole rant a listen on the Huff Post link. It’s a “weird world” we live in, Pat assures us, and I almost agree. It certainly is a weird world that he lives in.

You’re gonna say that you like anal sex, you like oral sex, you like bestiality,” he added. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to conform your religious beliefs to the group of some abhorrent thing. It won’t stop at homosexuality.

Yep, there you have it, gay rights means anal sex for every-one, and that’s just the start.

No doubt the whole thing leads to dancing!

Not to worry though Pat, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association assures us that God and humanity are both naturally disgusted by the very act of gay sex. Check out his speech, quoted here on Towleroad. According to Fisher (and I’m using Towleroad’s transcription), God himself can hardly stand the site of gay sex:

When God sees it, it causes him to recoil. And when we think about the actual act of homosexuality, we have exactly the same reaction. Most people think about that, they don’t want to think about that, they don’t want to visualize it because it is disgusting. And if people aren’t politically conditioned to accept it, their natural reaction is that’s just not normal, that’s just not natural, that’s not what human beings were designed for, that’s not what they were made for.

…so, yeah.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve certainly heard enough of this argument from other sources to get the impression these guys are hardly working a novel line of reasoning here. And I’m continually amazed that so much free-form sex-fantasy counts as Biblical reasoning. Some of these guys really are dancing to the beat of a different drum here; they just don’t seem to know it.

My point is that there is actually something a bit perverse about all this, not the gay sex of course, but the narratives these guys tell about it. Long before these crusaders get to the politics, read the scriptures, or try and address the psychology of the issue, a good number of them have already defined the entire thing in terms of the sheer physical act of anal sex. If that is what the issue means to them, it certainly isn’t because gay rights advocates have been framing the issue in those terms. Quite the contrary! It’s almost as if some folks might be using their attacks on the gay community to explore a few creepy themes of their own. And no. I’m not suggesting that this is latent homosexuality. That would be a tired old cliché. Homophobia is it’s own kink. It’s one that some folks seem determined to share in the most public of places.