A Writer
Protests
Note:
The following letter, edited to omit the last sentences,
was published in the August issue of Details Magazine.
This is the uneditied version:
To the editors:
Mark Simpson is entirely right that the arrests of seven
paratroopers facing discharges for appearing on a gay
sex site is nobody's business but that of the participants.
His point that real crimes are committed, and left unpunished,
even uninvestigated, in the course of the many obscenities
of war is a strong and accurate one. But he is entirely
naive when he upholds the absurdity that "straight
men" who perform, for pay or otherwise, in mutual
gay sex remain straight even though aroused by each other
to the point of orgasm. That is strictly a lure by the
cunning operators of those sites to gullible clients who
want to believe that fantasy. It is not unlike the hetero
sites that hire middle-aged women to dress in school-girl
uniforms and wear their hair in pigtails to pretend they
are real school girls. Those seven paratroopers should
not have been prosecuted, but neither should they claim
to be "straight." By doing so, they compound
the dishonesty of the whole situation. My gay friends
now frequently quote Simpson's reason for joining a gay
sexual fray when he was writing his article: "To
not join in would have felt ... unmanly."
John Rechy
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Original material by John Rechy appears
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