I’d expected an answer at the same level of fervor I’d offered my question. But, I confess, that afternoon, with an anxiety that, somehow, did not seem all my own but borrowed, at Modell’s Sporting Goods I purchased a pair of blue Adidas.
Two days later, when I wore them to the theater, however, Mike was not there.
Nor did I see him on any of my next dozen visits.
After a few months, I realized he had dropped the place from among his regular cruising sites. Three times over the next year I glimpsed Mike in his green jacket with the yellow letters, now on a far corner under the marquis at the Port Authority bus terminal, now by the subway kiosk at 72nd Street, now with his hands in his pockets, hurrying down 45th Street toward Ninth Avenue. But I never saw him in the theater again. I’ve wondered if our encounter in the second movie had something to do with his abandonment of the first: I can only hope that, among his friends, he might be telling his version of this tale — possibly somewhere this evening — for whatever didactic purposes of his own.
A few years ago, however, when I first wrote about Mike to a straight male friend of mine — a Pennsylvania academic — he wrote me back: “If you can explain the fascination with licking sneakers so that I can understand it, you can probably explain anything to anybody!”
My first thought was to take up his challenge; but, as I considered it, I realized all I could explain, of course, was my side of the relationship. I’d found Mike desirable — well before I had known of his predilections. Using some formulation by Lacan — “One desires the desire of the other”—it seems easy enough to understand that, if Mike’s desire detoured through a particular focus on my sneakers, it was still his desire, and therefore exciting — perhaps not quite as much, for me, as it would have been if it had focused on my hands, my mouth, over all my body, on some aspect of my mind, or on my genitals; but it was exciting nevertheless.
As I thought about it, it occurred to me that, in similar environments, I’d actually observed many hours of fetishistic behavior by any number of men over the years, though most of those had involved work shoes or engineers’ boots in specifically S&M contexts — so, therefore, I knew something quite real about that behavior. But, at the same time, I’d spent perhaps less than a single hour talking about that behavior with any or all of the men involved — including Mike.
That meant there was a great deal I didn’t know.
What could I explain?
What could I not explain?
Even though I’d responded sexually to Mike, I could no more speak for him than I could speak sexually for any of the very few women (eight, by my count) I had gone to bed with — or, indeed, for any of the many thousands of men.
The Freudian dimorphism in the psychoanalytic discussion of fetishism is one of the empirical disaster areas in the generally brilliant superstructure of Freudian insights: men can be fetishists but women are kleptomaniacs. And within the last two years I have heard at least one psychoanalytic critic state all but categorically that no one has ever found a female fetishist.
Those of you who have read my autobiography of a few years ago (The Motion of Light in Water [1988], New York: A Richard Kasak Book, 1993) may remember that my own fetish is men’s hands — especially the hands of men who bite their nails. Nor do I have any problem analyzing my particular perversion as a fetish. This critic’s pronouncement put me in mind of a gathering of artists and artisans some fifteen years ago in Greenwich Village, that included a lean, good-natured redhead, who was both a carpenter and a leather craftsman and whose hands were large, work-soiled, and (to me) sexy — and his petite, blonde wife. In the course of an afternoon, where the group was jesting with one another loudly about sex, I heard the redhead’s wife declare, “Someday Todd’s going to wash his hands, get them completely clean — at which point I’ll probably leave him forever!”
To say my ears perked up is to use a wholly inadequate metaphor for my response. At the time, I was still trying to understand my own sexuality in these matters; minutes later I’d contrived to question the young woman as to exactly what she meant. And, while the others joked on at the other side of the table, we spoke in some detail about her own attraction for men’s hands soiled from work, and how this attraction had been — and currently was — constituted into the range of her sexual life: we exchanged childhood experiences, jokes, and current observations. Granted that there were idiosyncratic differences between her object and mine, nevertheless by the end of the conversation I simply had to say: if I had a fetish, then so did she.
And unless she was prevaricating, to say it is impossible that she exists simply will not do. Nor can I think that all those leather dykes have merely snitched their jackets, studded belts, wristbands, chains, and engineer’s boots.
In other places I have written that singular, empirical examples — and that is all the particular orders of narrative I indulge here can give — are the place from which to start further, operationalized investigations. They are not the place to decide one has found a general fact. And I mean it — here, too. Certainly I would like to see such operationalized study begun. And my utopian hope is that in such stories as these such study might begin. That is why I’ve told the tales I have.
But this suggestion of an egalitarian fetishism brings us to a truism in the field of gay studies that, like any truism, it might be time to review. It is one that again and again, in other discussions, I have felt must stand at the head of any number of talks and articles on matters gay. Let me quote from the last time someone else quoted me on just this point.
Here is Teresa de Lauretis, writing in her introduction to a 1991 issue of a special number of differences, devoted to Queer Theory:
Delany opens his introduction [to Uranian Worlds] with the words: “The situation of the lesbian in America is vastly different from the situation of the gay male. A clear acknowledgement of this fact, especially by male homosexuals, is almost the first requirement for any sophisticated discussion of homosexual politics in this country.” [De Lauretis goes on: ] And, as if he were reading my mind or telepathically sharing the thoughts I put into words in this introduction, he adds: “Gay men and gay women may well express solidarity with each other. But in the day to day working out of the reality of liberation, the biggest help we can give each other is a clear and active recognition of the extent and nature of the different contexts and a rich and working sympathy for the different priorities these contexts (for want of a better word) engender.”
Then de Lauretis goes on to quote my co-introducer, Joanna Russ, in her delineation of precisely what some of those differences were in terms of literary availability.
Paradoxically, it is because I wrote that — and because I still stand by it — that I want to tell another, worrisome tale.
It is a simple one. It happened on a chill, early spring afternoon, during my middle twenties, when I sat on the rim of the fountain in Washington Square with a hefty young woman about my age, who wore glasses, black jeans, a leather jacket, and who went by the name Hank.
We talked — talked from the breeze-laced height of the day till the sky above us deepened to indigo, sharing our sexual histories. We were not talking of my adventures on the docks or in subway johns or about my frustrations at trying to establish a more lasting relationship in such a context; we did not discuss her bar life or the cycle of seemingly endless hurts that were serial monogamy.