The Domain of Eros

The following is excerpted from Brian Pronger’s The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

___________________

Homosexuality, in our culture, rather than forming an identity, is best understood as an unusual way of looking at the world, a paradoxical mode of being in the world. The paradox presents a special sensibility through which some men understand themselves and the world they live in. It is a sensibility that they can employ at various times, depending on the personal and social circumstances. A homosexual man is not just someone who has had a certain number of objectively homosexual experiences. Nor is he someone whose life can be understood primarily through his homosexuality. He is a man whose paradoxical intuitions of the myth of gender have given him a special sensibility.

I [draw] a distinction between objective and subjective homosexuality. Objective homosexuality is merely a matter of two persons of the same sex engaging in sexual activity. Objective homosexuality describes observable, physical behavior. Subjective homosexuality, on the other hand, refers to the psychic dimension of sexual experience. This psychic dimension . . . is the domain of eros. So, subjective homosexuality is the psychic world of homoeroticism. It’s possible for two men to engage in objectively homosexual behavior and not experience it as homoerotic. This is often the case in boys’ schools, prisons, the military, and other exclusively male environments where men engage in homosexual acts without finding it homosexually significant; they don’t think of themselves as homosexual and often don’t consider their objectively homosexual behavior as a homoerotic expression. It is just a substitute for sex with a woman. This is not to say that there aren’t men in prisons and the military who experience a homoerotic dimension in their sex with other prisoners, soldiers, or sailors. The point is, the act does not necessarily define the individual’s psychic experience.

Homoeroticism lies in the individual’s paradoxical interpretation of the myth of gender. . . . One of the effects of being paradoxical, of being gay, is estrangement. Gay men are estranged from the culture from which they themselves have emerged.

– Extracted from Pronger, B. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 81-82.