The Lost Tapes, Part I (Sept 20th)

I wrote this on September 20th. I have decided to publish it as is, I don't really feel like spell checking it. I thought it was an interesting observation. Especially after a rum and coke.

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It is about 8:00 am. I have been up since 5 in the morning watching news, doing laundry and finishing up this or that. Couldn't really sleep. I am going to give my new clients a call and see what I can do in terms of marketing research for them. We will meet this weekend in the city, probably in the Bronx. It will be great, yesterday the tensions started to rise in the house for just one second.

Saw McGeevey yesterday and I must say that I was really proud and touched by his confessions. I was kind of pissed off with Oprah a bit when she started to ask question about his feelings during sex with his wife. She was asking him if it was real or not, and as usual she took him to task with all the women clapping at the definitive moments of women's truths.

Now the thing I want to ask all the women in the audience and everywhere is why they find it so hard to accept why he got married. He talked about having same sex feelings when he was young but after reading all the materials available at that time he figured that it was a perversion and that is not what he wanted to be. So, the social programming started. Oprah then asked him why he got married any. Duuh! When will women start to ask questions about how they perceive masculinity in our society, and how they emasculate gay and bisexual men in their way of address, in their expectations of us and their clear denial of certain types of intimacy, or in other words being casted into effemicacy. Many women believe that since I have relationships with men that I am gay, and on top of that, there is no way I could know about an engine or what is wrong with the barbaque grill. Stuff like that.

McGeevey was receiving all his cues on self worth through the idea of being a knight in shining armour to someone and he played the role. But I don't get why Oprah and the studio audience can not deal with the fact that their expectations and social training also feed into the betrayal. That is all I am saying. It is the viciousness of the down low witchunt. Now, I think McGeevey is brave, and I think that his actions were at moments pretty bone chilling. Not so much the anyomous sex in dark alleys and video stores; but, sleeping with his male lover in the same bed that he shared with his wife while she was recovering from a difficult labor was hard to hear. But, I am pretty clear with all the women I am with concerning my sexual preferences and practices. Some dismiss me as gay a guy until they figure out that I am a top, then they want to know why I am not with women. Some say all I need is a good woman and I will be cured. Interesting.

The only thing I do have a problem with concerning the confession is Oprah's knife turning on the notorious page 228 where he made him read about the affair and then cornered him on sex with his wife. I thought it a bit vicious. And, on the flipside, McGeevey talking about those dark same sex places where the presence of women is negated was interesting. It was like revealing a secret from a coven or clandestine society. I remember a friend of mine from Germany who was originally from LA. He said that men should keep certain secrets to themselves. I am sure he was talking about the woman he loved and the brothel he visited. And strangely enough, I think he meant the woman I loved and the bars that I visited. Something about secrets, the reality of monogamy for men, the economic and social stability of marriage and the emotional and pyschic cost of a long term relationship with a woman. Oprah's bird's eye view and subsequent excitement about places where men gather is the demystification of a certain practice that I am sure you can find from the banks of the Great Lakes to an overcrowded bus in Calcutta. But it is this gaze that is unnerving to me. Oprah's commentary is speckled with judgement, "The men are lying to the women." Maybe, but how are women participating in this lie? I think through expectations of what a man should be for them, yet we have years of practicing the active liberation of women from certain roles and models of behavior, not to mention learned desire.