Amputees are very sexy
I once laughed to hear someone I know picked up another guy and was shocked to find him detaching a prosthetic leg before getting into bed. Then one summer day outside Comptons gay pub in Soho a guy with a missing left arm smiled at me as he carefully balanced his pint on the windowsill. To my surprise I had to admit to myself that I fancied him, not out of sympathy, but in spite of his disability.
Gay advertising bombards us with images of near physical perfection.If we could imagine widespread acceptance of Tom of Finland men drawn as amputees in gay publications, then the transmutation of a taboo might just be possible. Or would the S &M element that is an integral part of the muscle academy school invite accusations of sick art and decadence?
It’s easy at this point to strain the boundaries of social acceptance and enter the realms of paraphilia. It may help us to remember that the Nazis, with their own emphasis on physical virility and the ubermensch, sought to expunge the imperfect, disabled, mentally handicapped, and homosexual. We’re discussing a social taboo here which while still extant is far removed from that monstrous era, in a time when being gay in itself is thankfully no longer classed as a psychiatric disorder.
J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash (published in 1973 and made into a movie by David Cronenberg in 1996 ) is a controversial tale about a group of people who are sexually aroused by dwelling on wounds, scars, and physical deformities caused by road accidents, a fetish known as symphorophilia. When actor James Dean suffered his fatal car smash some fans in their disbelief imagined he was still alive in a secret sanitorium, where the film studio hid his terrible facial scars from the world. A book devoted to his last hours revelled in measuring skid marks and other minutiae of the death scene. In Crash, Ballard describes one character making love to a woman by penetrating one of her automombile accident -inflicted wounds in preference to her vagina. This kind of morbidity is far removed from the love of two gay men who are able to look beyond the constraints of severe disability.
Examples of a healthier, positive approach to the subject have lately become far more accessible. The conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan has brought the fate of our nation’s young soldiers into daily tv news reports. I was struck by recent scenes from Headley Court, the military rehabilitation centre on Epsom Downs in Sussex. A room full of multiple amputees excercising was quite startling to behold. One soldier interviewed who had lost his legs expressed his thankfulness at only having half of both his hands blown away as well. Courage of that sort can imprint the beauty of an adonis onto a shattered body.
Going back to the one-armed guy I met outside the pub, I regret now that I didn’t make an effort to talk to him. My first impulse was to ask him how he had come to lose his arm, though it seemed wrong to talk about it initially. At what point should I introduce it into the conversation? Could my interest in him be construed as prurient by onlookers in that sunny afternoon gay crowd?
So I smiled back and moved off with a variety of uneasy thoughts, instead of chatting to him as I would any other fanciable stranger. How easy it is to disable our natural emotions and to cut off the springs of love. All I know is, it wouldn’t happen again if I met him now.
By John Hartley
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
