A Very Natural Thing

I remember once I was at a commune for the radical faeries and I was sitting on a couch and a friend made a pass at me and it was just so unexpected. I didn’t understand the language of queer men’s culture, even though I was in a space that was specifically oriented toward that language, even though I had spent most of my adult life on the fringes of queer men’s culture, I didn’t understand anything about it, even to this day I don’t really understand it even though I have spent the last fifteen years of my life as a very openly queer person, even though I host a radio show where we talk frankly about queerness, about accepting queer identities and queer culture, I think still to this very day many aspects of queerness are still a complete mystery to me and I am trying to understand the complex aspects of queerness and how it expresses itself and it’s meaning in our culture.

I had my friend over last night and we were going to watch a program I think it was called the Celluloid Closet but we didn’t quite get to it and so we opted for something on Amazon. I don’t watch a lot of LGBTQ programming when I have the TV on we tend to keep it on PBS which does have a very little bit of queer programming. Not to knock PBS I love programs like NOVA and the British murder mysteries and of course, “Finding Your Roots” we watch almost religiously, but there isn’t much specifically queer programming on PBS and I don’t really watch television based on what is Queer, Trans or Jewish honestly my favorite show on television is probably MASH reruns just because it feels like nostalgia.

Anyhow so we found this movie from the 70s called “A Very Natural Thing” and it was just such an eye-opening experience. I just don’t know if I can really express how powerful film can be at expressing information that is taboo, that isn’t explained, and how transformative that information can be. As someone deeply interested in all aspects of culture, I just feel as if we had more opportunity to honestly experience a culture, if those cultures could just consciously help to express the essence of the culture it just goes so far toward really opening up the mind and so much of what we don’t really get to see would be easier seen. This movie just unlocked so many things for me about queer men’s culture that I literally didn’t understand anything about. Maybe it is just that I am dense and I can’t figure things out or maybe I don’t need to know anything about queer men’s culture, or maybe the culture has just moved on since the 70’s and whatever it is that I was seeing in my adulthood was the transitioning of queerness as it came out of the closet.

I was recently in a smaller mixed queer group in Portland and I was at least twenty years older than everyone there and I asked them if they still used words like gay, lesbian, bisexual to talk about sexual orientation because when I was coming of age those were the words that everyone used and those words had a power that was almost as real as the speed limit. If you were gay that was something very specific, and of course for me as a person growing up in a homophobic culture that is the lens through which I identified and understood queerness. I felt awkward as a trans woman in basically a straight relationship talking to a bunch of queer people a generation younger than me about gay, lesbian, and bisexual terms which I mostly relate to on an emotional and cathartic level and try to understand intellectually and phenomenologically rather than specifically physically. Still, the awkwardness of language is so informative as I talked to them they mostly describe themselves as queer but were willing to accede on a marginal level to this language which is already dated.

As a student of history, it is hard to understand how these categories of identity which prop themselves up against heteronormative identity could possibly be dated. How can a bisexual be anything other than what a bisexual has been for thousands of years? A bisexual sleeps with this and that, just like a homosexual sleeps with this and a lesbian sleeps with that. It has always been simple and easy to understand, but there isn’t anything simple about it.

So anyhow this movie, “A Very Natural Thing” was so eye-opening to me in particular because it explained something to me that no one had ever explained and I hate that I had to go to a documentary from the 1970s on Amazon to get any kind of any education on what it means to have a certain kind of experience of gay men’s culture. I should have gotten this education when I was in the third grade and it should have been presented to me as just another kind of media, just another way people live, another kind of cultural experience.

There is still something both revolutionary and incredibly mundane about the frank and explicit expression of gay men’s relationships on television. As a trans woman, I can relate on some level to how shocking it can still be to see gay men having sex on tv. It just is something you don’t see. You can see women fully naked all over television and film, and you can see women’s bodies portrayed as subjects of the male gaze and as products sold and marketed regularly, you can even see men occasionally framed in that same lens, but when they are it is still usually framed in a way to remind you that this is normally how you see women framed and the artist is drawing attention to the framing of a man’s body, in the same way, to show that it can be done, but what you still don’t see is you don’t see men having sex with men on television.

One day about ten years ago we went to hear a writer from “Will and Grace” speak here in Portland about how revolutionary “Will and Grace” was in the context of the time it was produced. I remember saying something at the panel discussion to the speaker that wasn’t intended I think to be disrespectful but wasn’t fully honoring the theme of the evening about how much of a breakthrough “Will and Grace” was for queer culture in the 90’s almost twenty years before gay marriage when people were still being outed in the press and before Ellen came out.

We haven’t talked about what Roe means culturally yet for the queer community, but when I see a movie like “A Very Natural Thing” I can see how the very same social and cultural forces which have tried to undermine the women’s rights movement of the 70s are going to come after everything else that they will undermine including LGBTQ rights and that we can expect the very same undermining of what we have come to see and understand as a right we had recently just gained.

Recently I had on Sandra Eder on Transpositive and we were talking about her new book about the modern invention of gender. In her book, titled “How the Clinic Made Gender” she discusses the anxiety that was generated in the 1950’s by clinical efforts to make gender normative and how this was a cultural consequence of cold war hysteria and the efforts to create a normative society that conformed to middle-class notions of consumerism which could fit neatly into prescribed categories that were part of a newly emerging world informed by science and capitalism that was deemed as socially palatable to the social scientists of that era as they were taking hold of their new tools in order to promote what they viewed as optimal social conditions for the individual.

What I am trying to say in this long, rambling essay is that watching the movie “A Very Natural Thing” was just like closing a chapter on a page in my life. It was like solving a puzzling lifelong mystery i40 years in reverse, a cold case. A serialized 1950’s detective novel full of clues about culture and identity solved forty years later in the 90s and then popularized on Amazon in 2023. Here is just one example of the cultural unpacking I have never really understood and no one has ever explained to me that I have never understood up to age 52.

I like to hike naked. It’s a thing. So I do it there are some of us in Oregon who do this. It is hard to find places to go hiking naked and of course, I can’t do it right now at the beginning of January but it gets very hot in Oregon and the best thing to do when it gets really hot is take off all your clothes. So I go where I can. One of my favorite places on earth is Rooster Rock, a great spot for casual nudism that has been set aside as a sanctuary for nudists like me for almost 100 years. A real treasure. I always respect the rules regarding where you can go clothing optional and where you can go clothing not not optional. Somehow I often end up in the way back of Rooster Rock on the out of the way trail that goes to the end of park and then I go down the hill and through the brambles and pop in on the river trail and I am suddenly back in the game with another fresh trail to hike back to the naked beach.

But this trail is not like all the other trails. This is the gay sex trail and I have never understood it. I mean I sort of understand it but this is an ancient cultural experience, something going way way back in the closet. This is like before Stonewall, before the McCarthy Era, before the Sedition Act of 1917 and the Espionage Act of 1918, this is before the Spiritualist Movement of the 1880s. This trail is going all the way back in time to some space that I don’t even know, another mystery to solve, the cultural origins of the gay sex trail. So I am not the brightest bulb in the closet and I have never totally understood the gay sex trail. I just know that it is a thing but no one has ever bothered to explain it to me. I can’t imagine how many times I have gone hiking naked on the gay sex trail, my transgender body enjoying the sunshine and the trees and the river and passing absolutely beautiful completely naked gay men and we have never had a conversation, like, “how’s the weather for you today” or anything. It is the gay sex trail and the rules are held close to the culture they are relevant to, not to a transgender woman enjoying a naked hike in the woods. The thing is I have encountered the gay sex trail many times before this, there is a gay sex trail over at Sauvie Island off of Collins Beach. I guarantee you every city and every small town in America has a gay sex trail out in the woods and if you like to get out into nature like I do every now and then you might run into a bear.

Still, no one had ever explained the gay sex nature trail thing to me and so my entire life I have never had an explanation for this phenomenon until I saw “A Very Natural Thing”. In the movie the main characters, David and Mark decide to go to Fire Island, the gay place to go on Long Island in the 1970s where queer men could go to be queer, and David (Robert Joel) goes off on the gay sex nature trail because he is trying to make things work with David and he thinks that going to Fire Island and having some random sexual experiences in an environment where sexual liberation is encouraged and sexual exploration is almost expected, that perhaps this environment will free up some aspect of their relationship which is frozen because David wants more of an emotional commitment from Mark who isn’t really able to give David the kind of long term emotional stability that he wants in a long term relationship. So David goes off hunting for sex on the gay sex nature trail but he finds that this kind of sexual experience doesn’t really draw him in and what he is really wanting is something more emotionally complex. p[;i9oSo light bulb on for me, by showing this experience in its cultural context I am able to understand the gay sex nature trail in a way I have never been able to before, but it took hunting for queer media made in the 1970s that probably nobody even is aware exists just to understand something that is still happening today in every community in America. Ergo Queers are still in the closet, how can queers not still be in the closet if it takes so much explaining just to pick up on a few clues that stretch out over four decades for someone who is mostly queer-friendly and open to hearing stories from gay men, from lesbians and from bisexuals, someone like me, a well-educated liberal who wasn’t raised with any framework for understanding queer identity, who spent my adult life going to pride festivals to show my solidarity, who befriended queers whoever would accept my esoteric personality, who hung out on the margins of queer culture most of my adult life, and still no one bothered to explain the gay sex nature trail to me, it’s meaning so I had to find it in some film that is almost 50 years old. We are still so in the closet, so so deep in the closet it is hard to find the way out and I just don’t think that most people on the LGBTQ spectrum understand that just because we have a few rights doesn’t mean we aren’t still in the closet because we are still so deep in it.

We won’t come out of the closet until people know why there isn’t anything wrong with the gay sex nature trail, why it is just a thing that has always been a thing, and if you look at it from this point of view then it is pretty understandable. That is what “A Very Natural Thing” did for me last night, it unlocked a whole series of questions I have had for almost 50 years, not quite but nearly that long about gay men’s culture that no one would bother to explain to me. Even though the priests all around my Catholic school upbringing were all gay, even though the boy scout leaders I was sent to go hiking and camping with were gay and many of them are now in jail or have served jail time for childhood sex abuse, even though I experienced childhood sexual abuse myself at the hands of a boy scout authority figure, no one from any of these repressed cultures ever explained the gay sex nature trail or anything about gay culture to me or to any of my friends and I didn’t learn anything about it from the thousands of hours of television I was exposed to as a child or any of the religious texts I read or the books I read or the people I knew in my childhood. Even as a young adult the only thing I knew about the gay sex nature trail was that was where the gay sex murderer went in the early 1990s to murder young men out seeking sex, three men were murdered on that Mississippi river trail in my early adulthood I don’t know if the murderer was ever caught or if I even remember it correctly I just remember the act of the media explaining something secret to me in a way which is meant to convey that the people getting murdered were somehow deserving of what they experienced because there was something taboo about their experience.

I have so much to write about this unpacking of narratives and these are just the gay and lesbian narratives I have inherited as an American in this culture. Something else really comes to mind about this and I understand that it is a countervailing sentiment in this conversation. On a recent episode of Transpositive I was asking a guest to explain genderqueer to me and how did they come to the process of identifying and within that conversation was perhaps the implication that some things about queerness are essentially private and belong to the culture that they belong to. For whatever reason, they are jealously guarded perhaps because they are precious and are an aspect of cultural identity, an aspect of cultural differentiation and they don’t belong in a visible space. I feel like this is a form of protection perhaps that preserves queerness.

As a transgender woman, I navigate so many spaces of queerness and heteronormativity that I see the fault lines clearly as I step but perhaps they are only visible to me. Lesbians don’t really share almost anything with me about lesbian experience perhaps because I have had a lifetime of experience being socialized male and that for many women that means I could not possibly be a lesbian and lesbian experience is if anything about preserving the essence of essentially female experience, female desire, female inter-relatedness. As a transgender woman, I also walk along the fault lines of gay men’s experience, I think often it is because transgender women are often just assumed to be gay men who couldn’t accept being gay and so chose to be transgender instead. It is one of the very uncomfortable conversations about drag culture that still needs to be unpacked without taking away anything from the authentic aspect and sacredness that drag has as a cultural identifier of gay men’s space. I also walk across the fault lines of heteronormativity because in essence, that is what I am. I suppose technically a gender purist would say that a transgender woman who is in a relationship with a woman is a lesbian but the younger generation doesn’t care about those words anymore and now we are all just queer, but somehow that doesn’t really work. You can’t really wallpaper over these real experiences of bodies and what bodies mean, and to the world outside of queerness, all of this really matters. We take our bodies with us wherever we go and our experiences inform everything about how we understand the world.

Anyhow as I come to the end of this long rambling essay there is still so much I want to unpack about “A Very Natural Thing”. The absence of people of color was a huge problem and you didn’t even begin to see people of color in the until the pride march of 1974 in the film. I can’t really explain all of this in language, you would need to have my 1970s child brain to understand how nice it was to see things that I have been wondering about for fifty years unpacked. It was a very nice movie and I definitely recommend it if you have a little bit of time to go into the way-back machine. It is an interesting vignette as well into what sexual liberation looked like for white gay men in the 1970s. It was a very touching movie about one person’s coming out story, the personal implications, and his quest for something essentially romantic and universal, the search for a true, lifelong love.