Whores exerting their invisible power to kill real manhood

There was this 'heterosexual' girl (the kind which in men's spaces we used to call 'whore') in my office who in the present heterosexualized world had quite a lot of power over men and their freedom to express man to man intimacy.

When I was new to the office, she tried to flirt with me, but I kept away from her, and made it obvious that I was not interested in her... (i do like girls but, I was looking for a monogamous bond with a guy). Being a modern girl, she did her calculations and in her mind, partly arrived at the fact that I was 'gay'. There was no way I could tell her I am not 'gay', eventhough I like men, because there's just no scope for me to talk about these things. I had to keep a 'heterosexual' image.

Anyway, I actually liked a guy in the office and we started doing the straight flirt -- and unfortunately, he turned out to be her boyfriend... I dropped that guy like anything... but not before she became aware of what was going on and got determined in her mind that I was 'gay'. Her boyfriend fell in love with me and didn't want to let me go. But, she started to guard him like anything and made sure that we did not meet in her absence. Once when her boyfriend called me in her absence she made a great hue and cry about it, though

Then a new guy came in office, and I soon reaslized he was what I had been looking for all this time and we quickly became involved with each other. He was a macho guy, and we started sitting too intimate with each other. It was completely normal in an Indian setting. And no one would have noticed, but people who suspected my 'sexuality', including another guy I had flirted with. This girl immediately knew what was going on.

She became bitchy about our intimacy and when we were sitting too intimately with each other with our legs on top of each other, she turned back from her seat and started to look at us in anger. She was looking right at my legs that were touching his crotch, and looking in a very angry, disaproving way, rotating her wide eyes, and then she asked, what is going on?

My macho friend, who was not only too young, but also very, very careful about his straight image was taken aback. He had done nothing which was outside the scope of 'straight' in India. He was taken off guard but managed to tell her confidentally that we are having a "man to man talk".

After that my friend became very cautious about how he interacts with me, and this create a big barrier between our relationship. He stopped being intimate with me after that... not in the same carefree manner, he used to do till now.

.....

Where straight men come from

This essay germinated when I caught a few minutes of a sitcom on television a few weeks ago. I don't even know the title of it; I didn't sit till the end. Anyway, the scene was one in which an advertising man, what is called a 'creative director', hired a photo-shoot crew, to take some sexy pictures (for a brochure, I think). The cameraman and his assistant simply assumed "sexy" meant they'd have a female model. They got all excited about doing the shoot. When the model arrived at the location, and he was clearly a he, the camera crew freaked out, and refused to carry out the assignment. No way, man, we're not doing it. Money's not the issue. This is too far out.
Canned laughter in the soundtrack. It was all supposed to be very funny.

To keep the story going, the creative director persuaded the crew to stay and be professional about it. OK, they agreed, turned around and set up their lights and equipment. Then the model stripped, completely, and the crew freaked out and packed up again. More laughter.

Once again, the director of the shoot had to appeal to their professional integrity to carry on.

A few shots into the sequence, they felt the pictures weren't coming out right. The model was not posing seductively enough. So they asked him to think of nude babes or Baywatch -- that kind of thing -- and flow with it. Well, he thought the thought and had an erection. Major freak-out all around. Oh gawd, can't look! For the audience, it was supposed to be side-splitting funny.

This is how boys are taught to be averse to the male body, especially a male body in a sexually excited state. Through such role models, boys are taught to be heterosexual.

Au Waipang

When my friend (who was actually a lover, but we never acknowledged it openly) left my office -- we were colleagues and met at office -- I missed him like hell. We had become extremely close to each other. He missed me too, but while I was open about it and wrote him several mails and SMSs saying how much I miss him (although, I did not talk about the 'love' aspect of our relationship, just that I missed him as a friend, terribly), he got upset and tried to keep a distance from me -- even when he was badly missing me. His love for me was overshadowed by his hatred for the fact that I had acknowledged my emotions for me, even as a friend. He was being paranoid because of the special nature of our relationship, because, another friend who had also left -- and we were also missing each other -- shared his emotions with me enthusiastically.

In fact, my 'lover' (we've not had any kind of sex, although, we did things like touching each other's crotch all the time, being physically close with each other and all that), started telling me indirectly, that he thinks I was 'gay' and that if he finds out a friend of his is gay, he will break that friendship. And he actually tried to break our friendship, and told two of our common friends that he thinks I'm gay.

I was hurt at this, when I came to know about it, and called him up to say that I wasn't, and that there's nothing in this world I hate more than the 'gay' word. I said, its an abuse for me, and I was not lying a bit.

It was only when he was convinced that I was not 'gay', that he removed his mental barriers from himself and started to be friends again. It took him more than a month of running away from me to do this.

He had started to avoid me -- avoid my calls, avoid my mails, avoid me on gtalk -- but now started to go out of the way to assure me that he doesn't want to avoid me.

In fact, for the first time, he wrote about his emotions on orkut... but not to me, to someone else. He didn't say he misses me, but said, he misses the office in general and how he appreciated a particular lady in my office who was much older than him.

I knew these were the emotions that were meant for me -- it was clear from his post. But he wouldn't give it to me. He needed to express those emotions, and so he disguised those emotions and sent it to a woman (he would never send it to a male friend), who could not misinterpret it as making advances because of the age difference, and because of the way he worded the mail.