MSM
The acronym “MSM” in some contexts stands for “Men who have Sex with Men.” It escapes the assumptions and implications of “gay” or “homosexual” or “fags” or whatever. All the debris of culture and just a simple fact.
By accident I’ve known different kinds of men considered “gay” without me having any idea whom they had sex with or why or where. Some suggest that monomaniacal Playboy heterosexuality is what created by exclusion the reciprocal concept of “gay.” Another of those troubling binaries that set up arguments and eliminate evidence.
I can understand loving all the kinds of bodies of men. I incline that way myself, though I am female. I even love their clothes, both high end suits and denim workshirts. I have petite female friends who have been brutalized and scared by big violent hairy men so choose partners who are Asian, small and smooth. And I know women who are unusually big and boisterous who are relieved to find Black partners who love that style. I’m saying there is more to desire than genitals.
One “type” of MSM is a man purporting to be happily married, even with children, who deliberately seeks settings that are all men, even big tough men, like convicts or heavy equipment operators or hobos who hitch rides in boxcars, or truckers in far places like Africa or Siberia. The opportunities in anonymous places where men get relief where they can are good for an MSM.
Then a few write a book about it, but don’t quite mention the more colorful parts and emphasize the adventure of it all, which implies that they themselves are tough. Enough signals can be slipped in to invite certain types to have private conferences. I’m not talking about people who write for the gay culture.
I heard about a guy like this who blundered. Got his signals crossed. Thought his intentions were welcome when they were not. The problem was that his day job was as one of those theory professor types who believed every meme and myth and assumption that comes floating by. In this case he had accepted the idea that Native American culture, “pan-Indianism”, universally embraced gay men and that they might welcome a little MSM from an educated professional white guy. Closeted.
When sailing ships first discovered “other cultures”, some of which did accept MSM and other ways of handling gender matters, it was a great wonderment to suppressed men in cultures that killed “buggers” for the crime of sodomy, that they could be safe somewhere else. This idea persists in a watered-down unexamined myth, a variation on the Garden of Eden. In fact, some indigenous cultures are as Puritan as England ever was and quite as harsh.
Maybe accommodating indigenous MSM guys are out there, esp. in the drug culture, but the old intact indigenous systems are gone. Maybe the persisting gender arrangements have been ceremonialized so they are private.
This professor picked the wrong approach. He and his favorite student were in LA where they met a glamorous movie maker. That man was not interested in action of their kind but he had a grudge against an indigenous novelist because he had tried to buy the person’s novel for a movie and had been refused.
The story was about a handsome warrior and his companion cougar, his spirit animal. So the three schemers took a reporter for an alternative newspaper to a liquid lunch and convinced him that the novelist was committing a sin: pretending to be an “Indian” while actually being white. Then they sat back and waited for Oprah to call.
When the story broke, it backfired. The novelist, who had used only her initials to escape sexism, turned out to be a woman. Rather than identifying with the warrior, she was the cougar. And she was truly enrolled in a big powerful tribe. The consequences were drastic: loss of job and family. Maybe they were already gone.
This is a revenge story. Part of it is true. Now I’m going into nondisclosure mode. I could say I was a cougar.
