Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Play

 A Meditation in Conversation w Audre Lorde

In reading Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” I was struck by her insights that were both encouraging and challenging. Challenging not in the sense of having to wrestle to understand them or to give them sympathy. Challenging, rather, in the sense that the life they call me to is one of challenge that is also deeply rewarding and human.

Lorde speaks vividly from her lived experience as a black lesbian feminist. Though her ideas resonanted with me across those differences (as she herself would likely expect them to), I see a deeply personal and meaningful current in the particularity of how her ideas speak to the use of the erotic for her sisters in liberation. It gave me pause to ask, as a white queer man who also seeks to be a feminist ally, what might some uses of the erotic be for men which can point towards a similar goal that “we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of” (57).

By way of autobiography, I have come to understand gradually that while elevating one’s own experiences as an absolute norm leads to oppression, reflection on and at times tenderness towards the contours of one’s own particular experience can lead to liberation. I was moved and then shaken when I discovered the field of masculinity studies under the subset of feminist studies, seeking to understand the breadth of possibility for what it means to be male in our times. To seek that understanding not as patriarchally prescriptive, but as refreshingly descriptive. I won’t quote studies here, but this current does inform my work, as does autobiography of my life as a bi male in general.

Lorde’s insights about the erotic as power have the potential to be liberative for many different groups of people. She paints a clear and empowering moral vision that celebrates attunement to our deepest joy and yearning while discarding the misuse of eros as “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation” (the current which she names the pornographic)(54). However, as Lorde herself names, “the erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women.” (ibid) Lorde’s reflections guard well against misuse. Though the mutuality and vibrancy of erotic power will doubtless transfigure us in powerful ways, my intuition says that if we as men are to truly tap into the erotic, we do better to not first reach for the erotic as power. As a queer man, my intuition says that for many of us it may be more liberative for us to reach for the erotic as play.

A casual partner of mine once said that, “sex between queer men is kind of like golf. It’s a way for them to get to know each other.” While I don’t intend to prescribe either promiscuity or abstinence, I think this is a powerful insight into the playfulness of the erotic, and its ties to the power of gentleness, curiosity and even Biblical meekness. Though I cannot know from experience, male heterosexual eroticism is often described to me as being oriented towards some goal. In its destructive forms, this goal is usually “conquest” or “victory.” In more ambivalent forms, it can be phrased as consummation or reaching a milestone, or perhaps having children. Only in a few straight men’s lives have I heard it described purely in terms of intimacy for its own sake, of playfulness, indeed of fun.

As men, we are often socialized to see life as competition. Who can most leverage the given resources of life to be the best, the most, the biggest, the strongest. That this message is now often caricatured in media does not mean it isn’t still a powerful narrative our society feed us. But what would it mean for us as men to consider the dynamism of our eros as that which encourages us to let our guard down, to let go of competition and to simply play? To play is to express both joy and authenticity, to be present in the moment with ourselves. More radically, playful eros may lead us to express our personality and personhood so openly that we make fools of ourselves. If we let it, eros can break down the walls and barriers to becoming who we were truly meant to be, from letting our whole selves echo and reverberate through our world unapologetically.

In my first intimate relationships with other men, I still held to this idea of competition. Rather than physical dominance, I was determined to sublimate and asceticize my eros. To get the most “spiritual” benefits out of sex as a sacramental part of God’s creation. Thankfully, my therapist reminded me before my first erotic encounter that sex can be deep, spiritual, meaningful etc, but that sex can also just be fun. There is a dignity and even a luminosity to many queer masculinities I have inhabited and encountered. Whether at the bar, watching drag, out at Pride, experiencing art, or in the bedroom, much of that vibrancy comes from a willingness to play.

Men are expected to be sexual beings and to broadcast our sexuality, but in my view we are not often encouraged to be in tune with the erotic within us. The straight man’s fear of certain kinds of sexual expression and the related fear of emasculation as a result of sexual heresy are signs to me that he is being kept out of fear from truly listening to his own eros. Socially, this can manifest also as an unwillingness to engage with emotions that aren’t destructive, like anger. To reveal oneself, to “come out” as a human being and to take joy in that self-disclosure; these are facets of the erotic as play, and it is these facets that so often are discouraged by conventional tropes about masculinity.

For the queer man who breaks the taboo of his own sexuality being seen as a form of emasculation by society and courageously self-discloses anyway, there is still potential for the erotic to be hampered. Masc4masc culture, the unwillingness to be seen beside more “femme” men, etc. Perhaps deeper and more subtle than this is that when we “look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with other, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences.” My hunch is that when we feel something is lacking in our short-term intimate encounters, the lack is not necessarily commitment so much as a lack of willingness to be fully invested our own joy and the other’s joy, to play. To be truly seen and known in an atmosphere of mutual curiosity and affection.

It is in the playfulness of eros that I begin to embody in my own life perhaps a bit of what Jesus meant when he said “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The Greek word πραυς for meek has many shades of nuance, and in my opinion the splitting hairs over shades of meaning is perhaps less helpful than a more holistic view of looking at this virtue in light of the other Beatitudes. A workable reading would be, “strength in gentleness.” And I can think of no better place where gentleness is demonstrated as strength then in eros as play. There is no pretense, no will to dominate another (even BDSM is not so much a competition as a dance of erotic give and take, push and pull, a kind of intimate sparring). There is only the self freely and fully realized, whose carefree expressiveness frees other selves to run through the sunlight and be known. Perhaps the meek inherit the earth not just through divine ordinance, but because it is the gentle, the strong, the playful who are able to open themselves up to embrace the whole world in its glorious becoming.