paul jacobs - what do you mean i’m prejudiced?

It was a typical Berkeley academic cocktail party in 1971: a handful of distinguished elder professors in conservative dark or tweed suits, at whose sides hovered their dispirited wives, ancient victims of the male professor cult, mingling with a larger cluster of middle-aged, almost-as-distinguished professors, some of them sporting mod haircuts to match their mod sports coats and slacks. Their victim-wives stood or sat scattered around the room talking desultorily with each other, while on the outskirts of the party a few younger instructors and graduate students were honored by being asked to drink with the models for their own future. And since this was 1971, two major topics of conversation drifting around the room were women’s liberation and sexual freedom. Then, despite frowns from the elderly professors and their wives, the middle-aged savants began to demonstrate their sexual liberation by discussing, determinedly and grimly, fellatio and cunnilingus.

“There’s one aspect to fellatio I never thought about until women’s liberation brought it into my consciousness,” I said, venturing into the dry and impersonal conversation. “Like every other boy, I learned from what I heard on the streets and in school that my cock would be like iron when it got stiff. All the phrases connected with it had that same sense . . .”

(The word “cock” obviously caused some uneasiness in the hitherto serious academic ambiance surrounding the conversation because I felt a disturbance around me, a nervous shifting from side to side as people looked at each other to gauge how they should react.)

“. . . of hardness. You got a ‘hard-on’ or you had a ‘stiff prick’ and you were going to ‘ram’ your ‘rod’ into some girl who was lying there panting, just waiting for your ‘steel’ spike to come into her . . .”

(By now, the group around me was in an acute stage of discomfort, anxious and queasy, moving away from me as quickly as politeness would allow.)

“. . . and so, being brought up to believe this all my life, it was a hell of a shock to me the first time I had a cock in my mouth and discovered how soft it was even when it was hard.”

That did it. The room suddenly stopped. Movement and conversation ended, simultaneously, in a sudden painful silence. They looked at me as if I had just pulled down my pants and dropped a giant turd in the middle of the room. A few minutes later my wife and I left. We haven’t been asked back.

The reaction of the academics and their wives to the notion of my sucking cock was typical of those whose views must be considered the most liberal in the straight world. Everyone in that room would favor changing laws which proscribe homosexual acts between consenting adults; every one of them knows at least one homosexual, male or female; every one of them approves of homosexuals fighting for their legal rights. And probably every one of them makes a disapproving moral judgment about homosexuality.

It was that disapproval which was so manifest in the shocked reaction of the group to what I had said. And added to their sense of outrage that I should have even said what I did so openly must also have been a feeling of fright, a sense of threat to themselves and their own orderly, structured vision of their own sexual-political personalities.

That emanation of fright is far more apparent when the straight world must deal not with homosexuals describing their homosexual experience, but with heterosexuals involved, in any way, in homosexual experiences or feelings. It is as if such heterosexuals have sold out, gone over to the other side, betrayed their class or religion or ethnic group. And linked to the notion of betrayal may be the nagging concern that if one heterosexual, no different in surface behavior from other heterosexuals, can find stimulation and satisfaction in homosexual acts, then all heterosexuals might be equally open to those feelings.

Certainly my explicit observation about how soft the hard cock felt in my mouth went far beyond the acceptable pattern of discussion in most of the straight world. Ordinarily, the heterosexual blocks out such visions even in fantasies (perhaps especially in fantasies). Suppose a man whose eyes were closed while his cock was being sucked opened them to see that the mouth enclosing him was that of another man; suppose a woman wriggling delightedly while a tongue worked its way around her clitoris discovered that it was another woman bringing her that joy—they could be psychologically destroyed, at the very least badly upset and disturbed. The sexual mores of the technological Western world, capitalist or communist, forbid thinking about such notions.

Should the straight world be thrown off balance? Should the gay world force such questions into the straight consciousness? Or should gays direct their attention to fighting for their own right to be open about their sexual identity and not suffer any penalties for it?

I don’t know the answer to these questions; I haven’t thought enough about them. Perhaps, too, I’m fearful that if I do consider them seriously, I might end up in a place where the homosexual experience would end at a level much different from simply sucking another man’s cock when the man and the mood match.

I guess I’m not so liberated either.