Here’s one written for Hot Press on 21st August 2009, just after Caster Semenya won her gold medal, and before any official “results” on her sex-testing. And before I attended the Electric Picnic Leviathan debate on gay marriage, with Senator Ronan Mullen and others. More than once, he said that “God doesn’t make hermaphrodites”. I had to correct him.

Central to the Catholic ethos is a notion of the “complementarity” of male-female relationships, and this notion of public policy being conservative for the “greater good”. And yet the current civil partnership bill, by ignoring children of same-sex couples, does exactly what Catholic teaching has always done – sacrificed the well-being and family security of children at the altar of dogma. Catholic teaching punishes children. And by Mullen saying that “God doesn’t make hermaphrodites” I was left aghast. On average, there would have been thirty people at Electric Picnic who would have been incensed had they been in earshot of his pontificating. Not to mention hurt. But Mullen immunizes himself against how his words hurt people’s feelings by telling himself and others he believes they make for a better society.  If Catholicism could point to one example of its teaching on sexual morality that had been proved correct or for the greater good I’d like to know about it.

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As we go to press, the “results” of the “sex test” for 800m gold-medal winner Caster Semenya have not been released. However it turns out, the way the organizers of the world athletics championships in Berlin have treated her is nothing short of shameful, by making the process a publicly humiliating one, instead of employing a modicum of discretion and tact. And the way that South Africans have rallied around her in support is a matter of pride for her and her country.

As Germaine Greer pointed out in the Guardian recently, in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, genetic testing was required  for all female athletes. After more than 6,000 tests, no one was found to be a man masquerading as a woman, but quite a few women discovered they had developmental sexual disorders that they weren’t aware of before. It succeeded only in embarrassing a lot of people, and was discontinued.

Evidently, the authorities have decided to bring back testing (this time involving a whole panel of “experts”) because of Caster’s unique winning physicality. The South Africans naturally put it down to envy. (However, the envy may be a manifestation of another kind of suspicion, to wit the none-too-subtle comments in the press about her “recent dramatic improvement in performance”, which is usually code for “we think someone’s been doping on the sly”.)

Notwithstanding that particular thorny issue, she is a striking woman, and indeed with her low voice and masculine physique, she does make one wonder about how the binary construct of male and female in our culture fails to describe adequately the variations that occur naturally in our species. Her family, from an impoverished village in Limpopo province, affirms that she was born a girl, and also that she was a classic tomboy, loving soccer and showing no interest in girly things. In other words, her story is not of a young man deciding to cheat and enter the girls’ races so he could win; her narrative is one that many women the world over can identify with, and certainly, I would imagine, a large proportion of women who are sporty. While many tomboys grow up into lesbian or bisexual women, it is course not reliable to infer sexual orientation by the degree to which one displays “masculine” or “feminine” attributes. That is, to fall into the binary trap, to see everything as one thing or the other. Human beings have always been somewhere in the middle. Aren’t you?

Neither, it seems, is it reliable to infer gender by appearance alone. Statistics are easy to manipulate, but it is fair to say that somewhere between one in a thousand and one in a hundred people are born with a certain ambiguity in their gender. (This figure of course is multiplied many times if one includes those that aren’t 100% heterosexual). This may manifest in something as obvious as being born with genitals that are a mixture of both male and female, or something less clear cut like a very large clitoris or a small penis, or it may only manifest in adolescence, when things don’t turn out the way they are “supposed to”. The variations from the binary norm can manifest in our genes, in our hormones, and/or in our genitals.

Intersexuality is separate to the experience that is classified “gender dysphoria”, in which a person in adulthood comes to the realisation that they were born into the wrong sex, in the wrong body.  And indeed this is also separate from the experience of growing up gay or lesbian, in which one’s chosen love-object is not the cultural norm. In many societies, being a gay man is synonymous with being effeminate, such as the ladyboys in South-East Asia.

Any of these natural variations can lead to a deep questioning about gender, about sex roles, about what is expected of us as a man, as a woman, as a human being. For many of us it is a journey of self-discovery that is like trying to work out a puzzle, to which there is no solution. Because the problem is society’s, not the individual’s.

In wealthy families, or families with good public health systems, the parents of children born with ambiguous genitalia are often offered early surgery to “correct” the “abnormality”. This is why we don’t hear so much about intersex adults, certainly in Ireland or the UK – the “correction” is made early on in life, and as long as adolescence proceeds without a problem (I mean without more than the usual problems), then the natural variance in body shape remains a private matter. Of course, the awful possibility exists for parents that they choose the “wrong” sex for their child, ie one that the child eventually decides is wrong for them. However, in Caster’s case, her parents had no such recourse. Presumably, therefore, her body as a little girl raised no suspicions or fears.

One in a thousand Irish people works out at around 6,000 people on this island. It is of course impossible to know how many of them as adults were informed about their surgery in infancy, if they had it; I would guess that, so embarrassed are we about sexual difference, many Irish parents have chosen to keep such matters as secret as possible. Parents have an understandable wish to protect their children from feeling like outsiders; but, sadly, the more they do so, the less likely that things will change for future generations.

The limits of a circle define it – by which I mean those who test the boundaries of human experience create more of a sense of security for those who find themselves comfortably in the middle. But we tend to demonize and scapegoat those on the edge, as opposed to show them gratitude or respect for the difficult path on which they find themselves. Because we fear difference, it unsettles us. And those who are most fearful, most suspicious, most hostile, tend to be the ones who have their own secret fear of letting their differences be known.

Given that, the programme was a decent presentation of the latest research, and the subject himself was as genial and anodyne as one might expect from his teatime TV persona, complete with his equally dashing long-term partner Scott.

He checks himself in to a Chicago research establishment, where he undergoes a test while viewing all sorts of erotica, a sort of lie detector. A natty little piece of equipment is tethered to Barrowman’s own equipment, a plethysmograph. The penis doesn’t lie, apparently: it twitches. Then he underwent a 90 minute MRI scan, studying blood flow in the brain, again while viewing various pornographic images. The slightest arousal could be seen, in real-time, his brain flashing red when he’s turned on.

Afterwards, the researcher gives him the results, but teases Barrowman first by informing him  deadpan that the results prove he’s straight – and he fell for it, in great confusion, the big girl’s blouse. But, whew, to much relief, the tests “prove” what Barrowman always knew.

Tests only prove what they set out to prove: in this case, that a man who says that he finds men attractive is telling the truth. However, the converse is not proven – a man whose brain and dick registers arousal on viewing male images may not identify as gay, or even bisexual. And, a man who, for example, likes getting blowjobs (and it’s top of the list of favourite sexual practices among men) may not need to open his eyes to enjoy the experience. Sex is not only about visual stimulation; sexual expression is not the same as conscious orientation, nor gay identity.

The next question is when did his homosexuality start – what “caused” his feelings to be this way.  We’re on rockier ground here – because of course human consciousness is not merely causal, it’s fluid, elastic, responsive. He explores the hoary old chestnut that gay men are the “result” of overbearing mothers and absent fathers. He goes to see his Scottish parents, who now live in the American midwest, and asks them what they think about that theory – but of course they deny it. It’s an impossible one to prove or disprove in a TV programme, because its origin is psychoanalytic, and therefore a matter of Barrowman’s subjective experience, not whether or not his mother is a harridan or his father is a shrinking violet. Neither of course was evident, they both seemed pleasant, ordinary people.

Barrowman’s boyhood room was revealed to be still preserved neatly, in a slightly disturbing way – his entire Barbie collection was still in storage, in his closet. In its original, immaculate packaging. Oh dear. The shrink in me suddenly became extremely interested in his mother; but, alas, it was not that kind of programme.

The research switches to “gender non-conforming children”. There’s a study now under way which is examining old home movies of children. In one, a little girl plays with a truck and gleefully breaks things. Then, we see the woman as she is today – a cross-legged dyke with a boyish haircut and glasses. In another, a teenage boy dances camply to New Romantic music, a queen in the making. Of the boys in home movies who were judged to be extremely “feminine”, 75% of them grew up to be gay, and even then that figure, we hear, is viewed as conservative. However, the corollary is not explored: what proportion of gay people exhibited “gender non-conforming” behaviour when they were children? And is identifying as gay the same thing as having sex with members of the same sex?

We are introduced to two 12-year old brothers, twins.  In Jared’s room, there are cars, planes, footballs, typical boys’ stuff. In Adam’s room, far pinker, he happily shows off his My Little Pony, cuddly bears, Barbies, and unicorns. Their mother Danielle comments on the two boys – Adam was always into the pink pyjamas, the “feminine” stuff. She insists he was born this way, and said that she was never a girly woman herself in any case. Happily, the two brothers are content in their differences and in their family.

As for the theory, espoused by the likes of Iris Robinson et al in our very own Bible Belt in Northern Ireland, is being gay is a choice? Barrowman found it hard to get any ex-gay to talk on camera – thirty turned him down. But one man came forward. Ron Wolseley was once a gym-bunny gay, with sultry pics of his semi-naked body to prove it. He is now a frumpy married man with 2 kids. What was the turning point? “My life was hurting people, my parents were weeping. If I wanted to be Christian, I could set that part of me aside. It was a matter of retraining my mind.” He equates it with liking cigarettes and chocolate – he still desires them but doesn’t consume them. I don’t doubt him. People can do all sorts of impossible things.

“Gay” and “straight” brains seem to be different, we hear. Barrowman’s spacial abilities are tested – and a test to see how good he is with words. According to this research, there are recognisably “gay” brains – gay men perform in these tests like heterosexual women. Barrowman snorts – he doesn’t want to be like a “big woman”. (There’s an element of misogyny in so many gay men; I often wonder why). The tests show that gay men are more verbose and expressive, and perform in a “female-typical” way. Barrowman’s own results were so “female” they were off the scale.

When do these brain differences arise? Symmetry in the brain is organized in the middle of pregnancy. It is hard-wired before birth, Barrowman is told, and he greets the news with emotion: relief. He sees it as confounding the idea that it’s a choice that we behave this way.

What about why there’s a difference? He searches for a DNA marker, to see if there’s a “gay gene”. In his own family, the test is inconclusive. There is another theory: that low levels of testosterone in the womb create “female-typical” brains, which then would make them more attracted to males. (That’s such a heterosexual way of looking at sexuality – will science ever rid itself of its bias?) Another marker for intrauterine testosterone deficiency is the shape of our hands. A ring finger that is longer than the index finger indicates that one may have been exposed to higher levels of testosterone in the womb. Gay men tend to have shorter ring fingers, more like a woman. Barrowman trolls around a Gay Pride festival in Long Beach to take handprints – and 60% of those men’s hands had “feminized” fingers.

Another theory: if one has older brothers, a man is more likely to be gay. If one has 4 older brothers, the likelihood is a whopping 71% that one will be gay. The theory is immunological: it’s as if her body mounts an immune response to heterosexual male infants.

Barrowman searches with enthusiasm for scientific validation – he wants a “ticket” for being gay.  But as history has shown, if there’s a ticket for being gay, then there are dark forces in the world that would dearly love to punch it. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine, given the extent to which fundamentalist religion is taking hold in the world, that at some stage in the future a woman might choose, for example, to inject herself with testosterone if she is pregnant with a male infant, to ensure he turns out a “real” man.

I don’t have older brothers. My ring finger is long and butch. I sincerely doubt that I ever lacked testosterone, at any stage of my life. I’m a slob. I don’t chat for ages on the phone with friends. I’m good at DIY, outdoorsy stuff such as camping, and fixing things. Despite those characteristics, instinctively, I feel that I was born gay, and indeed that in some ways I have a “female-typical” brain. My aversion to sports when I was growing up, my playing with dolls as a boy, my sense of the dramatic, my interest in the emotional, the relational. I’d never describe myself as “straight-acting” – but as an actor I could play straight, and there are a hell of a lot of gay men out there who are actors, putting a lot of energy into the performance of playing “real” men. But, it’s not only gay men who do that. And there are also a hell of a lot of men out there having sex with each other who aren’t “gay”. As Mark Simpson writes, there is one obvious flaw in “the popular, consoling and time-honoured view of gay men as women’s souls trapped in men’s bodies”: why do so many of us have emotion-free sex with each other, the antithesis of “female-typical” behaviour?

The questions that scientists are asking now are more interesting than they used to be, less damaging, but the results simply throw up more questions. I would imagine, however, that  researching the “causes” of heterosexuality would be equally as fascinating. But I can’t help wondering if that would be less easy to find funding.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jay Brannan’s first album “goddamned” is out this week, and is a must-download. He financed it himself – he is one of the growing number of singer/songwriters who are managing to start their careers with money earned from tracks released on iTunes and CDBaby and Napster, and whose reputation spread on MySpace, Facebook and, in particular, YouTube, where he has over 13,000 subscribers to his simple boy-sings-with-guitar-in-his-bathroom videos. While writing for the album, he kept his day job as a proofreader in New York, and saved the money to produce it himself, and pay for the promotional tour. (He’s playing 2nd September 2008 at Crawdaddy). He has not done a “record deal”, there are no executives in the music industry pulling his strings. He’s his own man.

Brannan first caught my eye playing the ethereal Ceth in the stunning 2006 indie film “Shortbus” (showing in Panti Bar, Wednesday October 22nd), by Hedwig’s creator John Cameron Mitchell, a film that is ostensibly about sex but reaches far deeper into the human heart than most; a provocative, moving and ultimately life-enhancing experience, in which Brannan sings his own song, “Soda Shop”.

In his wistful track “I Want to be a Housewife” he dreams ironically of a life washing dishes, scrubbing floors, with his mythical man outside in the yard, suburban-stylee, working on the car, and tending to the barbecue, while Jay is doing his laundry for him. (“What are boyfriends for?”) “Crazy about each other/ we both have fucked up pasts/ but when we are together/ we have a fucking blast”. “I want to be a housewife” he asks. “What’s so wrong with that?”

Sadly, plenty. The more “feminine” of us, (does that correlate to those of us who are looking for love?), who yearn for the easy naturalness of simply stepping over the line into predefined traditional gender roles, our “straight-acting” guy un-self-consciously doing “guy things” out in the world, yet at the same time loving us at home as if we were a precious and irreplaceable part of his life, don’t have it easy. To a large degree, this is something to do with how we men relate to the “inner feminine”, for want of a better phrase. (Yes, I do want a better phrase. Trying to discuss gender is loaded with pitfalls and distractions and prickly sensitivities – we have yet to establish a way of talking about gender that isn’t steeped in esoteric and/or potentially divisive value systems – ie Jungian archetypes, astrological symbols, queer theory, feminism, gender studies etc).

Of all the times I have heard men speak about love, I have yet to hear a gay man speak of his long-term male partner with the same tenderness and awe as I’ve heard heterosexual men talk about their wives or girlfriends, with my dear old Dad leading the way in my book. This isn’t homophobia – lesbians outdo men in their capacity to speak of love for the women in their lives. (By the way – I’d love to hear testaments to redress that imbalance from men-loving men). It’s a guy thing, it’s our emotional illiteracy, and those who love women tend to learn and develop that literacy the longer they are in relationship with them. Across the board, I believe that anyone who looks to women to form loving relationships with has it easier than those who look to men. That may seem an outrageous thing to say; I’d just point out that not every man unambiguously looks for relationship in the same way that women do, we are far more ambivalent about them than is good for us. This is what prevents me from easily slipping into being the token gay at a bitchfest with “other” single women, complaining bitterly that all men are bastards, that men are the root of all evil in the world, the whole controlling aloof commitment-phobic lot of them. They’re criticizing me. I’m criticizing me. I am betraying myself, my gender if I do so. I feel uneasy when I am in those sorts of conversations – I am not sure whether being a traitor to my gender is something of which I should be proud. Or am I betraying the woman in me? Damn. So much treachery, so little reward.

Brannan comes from a hellfire-and-brimstone fundamentalist family that doesn’t take kindly to his being queer, which can’t have helped. He says he has spent “so much time trying to be comfortable with being a feminine person, a feminine guy.” He could work on countering it, he says, get coached, in which case he “would probably get laid more. Sad, but true”. Is it any wonder that he says he has the “lowest self-esteem on the planet”?

He’s not the only one. Plenty of men struggle, right across the scale of orientation, with how to prioritize love over sex. With his references to leather, however, I would guess that Brannan has had enough of a taste of the sex-as-sport world to make the life of a housewife just that little bit less unambiguously attractive. If we fall for sexual players, we don’t settle down with the “nice” guys. Settling down with the sexual players may seem like a fantasy come true, having our beefcake and eating it, but those dogs don’t stay in the yard at night, and resent being tethered. And, usually, it’s women who get away with tethering, who know how to do it; once a man starts sounding like a scolding wife, he’s history.

There’s a real problem when it comes to how men express that soft side of them that needs/yearns/longs for love. Some gay men bury it, play the game just like the rest of the lads; some act it out literally, with drag-queen subpersonalities that are like alter-egos, singing torch songs of unrequited love; but there’s an edgy element of parody and misogyny that often distorts the impulse, mocks the tricks and traits of femininity without allowing the vulnerability and tenderness any room. And, as Panti has bemoaned in her one-woman show, trannie-lovers are a rare and curious breed, and not exactly given to settling down with a mortgage and 2.2 cats.

A queen may feel liberated getting in touch with her inner diva, feel more complete, get more attention and laughs, but it ain’t gonna bring her love. Indeed, in the increasingly sexualised “straight-acting” gay dating scene, such effeminacy is treated with suspicion and, at times, hostility, oddly reminiscent of the early homophobic bullying and teasing we received at school. It’s as if some gay men resent those who remind us of our own “inner feminine”, that which we’ve worked hard to suppress and cover up in adolescence, and work hard to be just as “straight-acting” as the lad next door, just as “normal” when we’re “grown up”. Because “real men” have all the sexual capital to spend.

Looking at the current cover of Gay Community News, in which seven well-known drag queens pose in their full glam splendour and proclaim: “Throw the Pride Bouquet, girls! We want gay marriage!” I am, perhaps mischievously, drawn to wonder how many of them actually have partners lined up to be their husbands.

Of course we deserve full equality and the right to marry – but perhaps it’s only when we do have that right will we men begin to honestly reflect on why it’s not quite as simple as the song says.

This beautifully written and thoroughly well-researched book is Beard’s searingly honest attempt to understand what his friend had gone through to arrive at this momentous and (to him at least) astonishing decision.

They agree to go walking across Wales together again a few months after Dru’s surgery. Along the way, Beard attempts to put the pieces together about Dru’s past life in the body of a boy and a man. This is no ghost-written autobiography, however; this book is as much about Beard himself as it is about Drusilla.

It is deliciously un-PC, unpreachy, refreshingly free of sentimentality, and, at times, drily comic. Beard’s admirable choice to be as forensically probing about his own feelings and thoughts as he demands of his subject, gives voice to what so many people think – but dare not say out loud – about transsexual people. Not the knee-jerk sensationalism of the tabloids, but the quiet internal gnawing anxiety that is an often authentic response to when our gender conditioning is challenged, because we know so little about transsexualism.

He admits, at the beginning, to wondering: ‘‘Is it catching?’’ He sets out to discover if Dru is real or if she’s some kind of trick or joke. What’s funnier than a bloke in a dress?

He speculates about all the possible motives that might make someone claim to be transsexual, which is, perhaps uniquely, a condition that requires self-diagnosis. ‘‘Isn’t changing sex, by definition, a superficial act?” he wonders.

Travelling with Dru, he admits to feelings of sourness, prickly suspicion, embarrassment, exasperation and, at times, fear of the way she looks. In a crowded pub along the way, he agonises; he wants her to pass, to fade away, to fade out, to be silent.

He realises his own sense of manhood hinges on what sort of woman he accompanies in public and is dismayed at what he learns about himself and about his own masculinity. He doesn’t want to be seen out with ‘‘that kind of woman’’.

He realises, endearingly, that he’s sexist.‘‘On a bad day’’, he writes, ‘‘transsexual women look so awful they’re embarrassing, if only they’d go away. On a good day, transsexual women look so convincing, they’re dangerous – they might trick us – if only they’d go away.” He makes the point that most autobiographies of transsexual people (transsexual is an adjective, Dru reminds him) are written by that peculiar species of human being, the writer, with that peculiar combination of narcissism and exhibitionism that sets us aside.

Those that catch the public eye, like Nadia in Big Brother, are driven by more than a need to change sex; they wish also to draw attention to themselves, a form of validation through celebrity; a dubious enterprise, to say the least, and one which distorts our understanding of the psychology of it all.

Beard’s search for a past life of tortured and suppressed effeminacy in his friend fails. He realises that there’s no major truth out there, no clearly defined three or four-act episodic structure upon which to hang a tale. There is no exotic revelation, no dramatic denouement; but in this tender biography, it would have been completely inappropriate.

There are too many jewels of insight along the way to dismiss this as an unexciting or mundane journey, however. Dru’s femininity, he concludes, is no more or less a mystery than anyone else’s.

This book’ s genius is to tackle the life of Drusilla Marland and give us a sense of her lived experience, her ordinariness as a woman, born in a particular time, under a particular set of circumstances, in a particular culture; he gently portrays her inconsistencies and foibles, her talents and weaknesses, her courage and nobility – in other words, her humanity.

But it is only achieved by Beard’s own willingness to deconstruct everything he knew about himself, as a man. Beard’s graceful admission of love and humility, at the end of this gentle tribute is touching and life-affirming. This book left me marvelling about human nature. There aren’t many of those kinds of books about.

Becoming Drusilla: One Life, Two Friends, Three Genders. By Richard Beard, Harvill Secker, €16.50

Dru Marland’s blog is here.

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post on 1st June 2008.

It’s a while since I’ve seen such a compelling, emotionally naked, inspiring evening in a theatre, and the immediate standing ovation at the end was richly deserved. (Irish audiences rarely do this, I’ve noticed.) He is profoundly political in a way that only truly brave genderfuckers can be – out on a limb, challenging, defiant and subversive. This is but a short rave mention as I was loath to take notes which would have attracted attention, sitting as I was in the front row, which in Taylor’s plays is asking for trouble. And I was enjoying the experience of this wonderfully crafted piece too much – it was, in turns, poignant, sad, chilling, energising, optimistic and bawdy; there wasn’t a moment without a scintillating and yet tender energy, and he had us eating out of the palm of his hand. Chatting with him afterwards was a real treat, he is a real gentleman. And damn good looking. He says he’ll be back in Dublin next year, but you can catch him tomorrow in the Galway Arts Festival in Cuba at 9pm. Don’t miss him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But what a cold, twisted heart was beating in this show. The central storyline: a woman, suffering from post-natal depression, left her five-week-old baby, Karl, in the care of her husband, and emigrated to the US, married again, and never saw them again. We see her returning, nearly twenty-one years later, in search of the child she abandoned, who has just got a job as a security guard in McBirney’s department store. In her main monologue, set bizarrely in a church, she is bitter at how her second husband “tried to suppress her spirit too”, so she took him to the cleaners in the divorce court; despite the fact that she was still married to her first husband. But she is unapologetic. She’s glad she went to America, otherwise she’d have ended up like her – and she points with disgust at a woman scrubbing the church floor. “At least she speaks English” she says, in a “comic” aside. “These non-nationals are everywhere, they’re taking over the place”. In the reunion with her enraged husband, she sings in explanation how she walked out the door, not wanting to “live a lie”. She hurls abuse at Karl’s stepmother. When she is just about to meet her son, she says that she’s not worried that he won’t like her, it’s more that she mightn’t like him. When she sees that he’s a mawkish melancholy lad, she snaps at him, “why can’t you grow up, and think about me?” It’s a funny line, but by then I’d long ceased to see the joke.

If only this Frankenstein’s monster of a human being, this cruel, snide, narcissistic, victimy, fraudulent, self-aggrandizing, child-abandoning, xenophobic, bigoted bigamist bitch was being sent up in this show, I would have found it funny. But, to my horror, I think this heartless woman was being celebrated, in this poorly thought-out script. Or, whoever was playing her was being celebrated – for in amateur theatre, of course, the personalities of the players are known by the audience, which adds to the in-joke. The curious thing is that the character was played so defiantly and earnestly, without a hint of irony, but with a sour sort of pettiness, that it wasn’t camp. A monstrous bitch can be a fabulous comic creation, but only if she’s camp, and knowing, pace the ballsy Joan Collins in Dynasty.

There were plenty of other characters played by an energetic cast of six, and whoever played Mr Jay, manager of McBirney’s, is a little singing and dancing bundle of talent, reminiscent of Stubby Kaye in Sweet Charity. The rest acquitted themselves admirably, although they could have done with a microphone between them.

In this show, the jokes, the cultural references, were oddly, pervily, heterosexual; a leering Mr Jay sniffs the coat collar of Jenny, a woman who is hoping he’ll employ her, Karl’s buxom stepmother tries to have her wicked way with her little balding husband, Karl’s Dad, who has difficulty saying “no” to her. It’s The Benny Hill Show. Unreconstructed. From the 1970s. Please don’t tell me that I should make any allowances for the quality of a script because the writers are transgendered. And making cheap jokes about foreigners? I couldn’t believe my ears. Do I need to point out, as if it mattered, that, among others, there were Polish and Dutch people in the audience? (Including a newlywed lesbian couple from Amsterdam, here on honeymoon at the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.) I was embarrassed.

Only two or three of the six actors would “pass” on the street in their chosen gender; the rest would raise questions or doubts, which does of course put them in danger. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a catwalk or a freak show, it was an exercise in community morale-boosting, visibility and solidarity, and it must have done them a power of good. In principle they have every right to be included in the festival, as Brian Merriman’s interpretation of the word “gay” includes everyone in the rainbow alphabet of LGBTQ. Next time, however, I’m not sure I’ll be so willing to extend my support to this group, Shopfloor Productions, unless they can at least show some heart, some irony, and the barest minimum of respect for the sensitivity of others.

There is something liberating about the travesty of drag, the mockery of sex roles, the atmosphere of carnival where nothing is as it seems. For many of us, our gender can feel like a trap, a prison, because if we have qualities in abundance that are traditionally associated with the opposite sex, it leads to a conflict that can be hard to bear. The first description about myself I remember hearing as a boy was “he’s very sensitive”, from my mother to my aunt, as we were in my grandmother’s house on a Sunday afternoon, before the Riordans. The winter sun was shining in from Phoenix Park through the living room window, and I was engrossed in a world of dust motes floating around the white smoke from my grandmother’s Gold Bond.

Sensitive. That was a phase I never grew out of.

Personality eclipses sexual orientation every time. In many ways, it is my emotionality and sensitivity that has been the hallmark of my life, and those are qualities that in many ways are problematic for me as a man. Those who would suppose that a sensitive gay man would have an easier time of it compared to other men, because gays are supposedly free of the restrictions of adhering to traditional gender roles, miss the crucial and exasperating nature of sexual desire. I have dear friends who value me for exactly these contra-sexual qualities, which of course are universal and genderless at their core, and which serve me well professionally. But when it comes to sex, it gets complicated. My emotionality means I can identify very well with women in relationship, the subtleties and nuances of love and nurturing. But my very male sex drive pulls me in a completely opposite direction, the force of which is alien to most women I know. The funny thing is, I know just as many heterosexual men with this split as gay men – it’s not about orientation, it’s about finding a balance between the need to relate and the need to have sex. (Some women might find it odd to consider them as polar opposites, but I think most men know what I’m on about.) One wise old man I know, a hippy still, is a fluid floating man with wispy white hair, as ethereal and gentle as you could imagine. He believes that one chooses either sex or relationship at some deep level – and he chose to marry and stay committed to his wife, even though there’s a part of him I know that has very different cravings.

I think because I am so evenly split this way, I tend to see-saw, occasionally quite wildly. In London, the type of men I fell for were masculine in both temperament and sexuality – which left me bruised more times than not. I could not be the hard man, both emotionally and sexually, to match them; I could not play the hard sport of gay sex with them, and stay in relationship. My relationship needs didn’t fit with the “no-strings” world of the London scene, and I floundered. In Dublin, I am realising, to my pleasure, that “no strings” is not an easy attitude to maintain, and there is much more of a friendly decency here. If you know you are going to bump into people fairly regularly in the city, that sort of London arrogance just doesn’t wash. In larger capitals, anonymity, which allows shameless imaginative experimentation and exploration – and exploitation – to flourish, is next-to-impossible to maintain here.

For other men, the split works very differently (for there is always a split). For those men who are both emotional and less phallic in their sexuality, cross-dressing and drag offers a way of expressing both sides of their nature in a way that is congruent. Admiring the ladyboys performing at Alternative Miss Ireland, all feathers and glitter and cheeky passivity, I imagine that their sexual partners tend to be men more along the bisexual side of the spectrum, who like the male body but also appreciate the symbols of femininity and what they represent, a quality of relatedness. There are plenty of men who desire such she-males, and who are willing to play the traditional masculine protector role. Whether or not such relationships are acceptable in a fully open way in Ireland is less certain, because transvestites and transexuals don’t have an easy time of it here, running a real risk of personal attack in our lovely hospitable land.

It gets more complicated, however, if one is heterosexual and yet also finds it erotic to cross-dress. Transvestism is far more common among male heterosexuals, and in a way I have a lot of sympathy for their plight, in terms of finding honest relationships, because they are my opposite, with a mirror-image dilemma about sex roles – they desire relationship, and yet their sexuality runs counter to what their prospective sex partners find attractive in them. Whereas I desire sex, and my relationship needs run counter to what my prospective sex partners find attractive in me. And I know lots of gay men like me. It must be difficult for women to tolerate, let alone encourage or desire, partners who cross-dress. The fact that so many women do is a testament to their capacity to see beyond sexual attraction and value the person inside, which is not something that men are renowned for.

The antidote to all this complexity and struggle is, however, humour. That’s why Alternative Miss Ireland and drag acts are so important. It is why the good ones like Panti and Lily Savage and Shirley Temple-Bar serve such an important need. They help us to laugh at ourselves, at the absurdity of gender, the complications of desire, and the expectations that we place on ourselves as men and women.

“In what is an otherwise ‘gender neutral’ Bill, one section makes clear that if an underage boy and girl have sexual intercourse with each other, the boy commits an offence but the girl does not.

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell told reporters last night that the Government had decided on this so as not to ’stigmatise single motherhood’. He said that without this provision, every 16- year-old who had a baby or was pregnant would be either a victim of a rape or would have committed an offence.”

What a blind, idiotic, senseless, infuriating position to take. What’s the point of criminalizing a 16-year-old-boy? How is that going to encourage him to take an active role in the fathering of his child, if the sex he has results in a child? We can’t stigmatize our sainted teenage mothers but the dirty letches that are our boys – just lock them up and throw away the key?

Has anyone seen teenagers recently? Compared the girls with the boys? Boys of fifteen or sixteen are so much less emotionally and sexually mature than girls. It’s a confusing time for everyone, adolescence, but how can this law bring clarity? I’m all for protecting children from older people abusing positions of trust and power, that’s common sense. But if it’s ok for girls to have sex with each other at any age, and they don’t get threatened with jail, what on Earth is the point of criminalizing 16-year-old boys, having sex with each other or with girls? Could someone please explain to me the benefits? This is Queen Victoria all over again – let’s ignore the lesbians, because we don’t believe the sex they have is important enough to legislate against. The prick is evil, so throw the book at anyone with a prick lucky enough to get any action under seventeen. This is Marian culture at its worst.

And all this is being decided in a day? ]]> http://bonhom.ie/2006/06/legislating-folly-sexually-active-16.html/feed 1 http://bonhom.ie/2006/02/mark-simpson-on-male-bisexuality.html http://bonhom.ie/2006/02/mark-simpson-on-male-bisexuality.html#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:26:00 +0000 Dermod http://81.17.252.110/~dermod/2006/02/mark-simpson-on-the-male-bisexuality-deniers.html

I hate to break it to you guys, but most of the evidence, historical, anthropological and sexological, suggests that if anything, male ‘bisexuality’ – it’s a terrible word, but it will have to do for now – is much more common than the female variety.

Mark Simpson, on top form, telling it like it is. When is he going to give in and start a blog, I wonder? It would be so much fun…