Probably, like me, some of you have seen those lame Dovato ads. You know the ones I mean. They feature often good looking, usually younger men with these almost drooling smiles while making cow eyes and they are all saying, "I'm looking forward." Especially that dewy eyed, Latino looking guy with the dark stubble. Oh, those melting brown Latin puppy eyes! He looks so beautiful, so alluring, so soft, gentle and kind. So heartrendingly vulnerable. And to think that most of us, when we look that way, it usually means one thing and one thing only. Even if you're a gay woman or a straight man, or an asexual, it would be hard to resist that allure, if only to give him a hug and a cuddle. We are expecting to get laid. We are really wanting to get laid. We are about to get laid. And for many that is what love is. Getting laid. Having sex. Getting yours, as we used to say in the seventies. It's also the theme chant for queer liberation: Love is love. And for love to be love, that means it has to be someone who gets our hormones pumping, with the possibility or inevitability of getting lucky. And then what?! Well, it usually means that all others are not welcome, unless you have the right look, in which case, take a number and stand in line. And to think that Dovato is a treatment for treating HIV and AIDS, and if you haven't got that formerly lethal virus from injecting drugs or from a blood transfusion, then you likely got it from whomever you happened to be carelessly shagging. So, take your Dovato, get back out into the race and hold your legs high!
"Tonight, you're mine completely,
You give your love so sweetly
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes.
But will you love me tomorrow."
Ah, but it doesn't last. It never does, even if you both happen to be happily and beautifully and eternally married. To each other, that is. It looks like love. It feels like love. But this is no Mother Teresa or St. Francis of Assis. This is just simple human desire and human need, making us momentarily telegenic enough to get into someone else's trousers or knickers or bedsheets, or wherever. I suppose we could say that is the way nature designed us, to get ourselves all lovely and irresistible and compelling to the next lucky contestant on the Price Is Right (oops, wrong TV show!)...Rather the next willing partner that will pass on our genes, immortalizing us nine months later in a lovely bundle of sprawling shit machine progeny. Ah, evolutionary biology. Don't leave home without it.
But evolutionary biology cannot explain homosexuality. I cannot think of any two men or any two women that have made love to each other for the purpose of getting pregnant. But two men or two women can get married, be married and stay married just like any man or woman. And they can enjoy sex every bit as much and maybe even more.
So, the sweet eyed little studly from the Dovato ad gets himself lucky, scores a night in the sack or at least five minutes with some reasonably presentable stranger in the toilet stall of a men's restroom, and before you know it, once they have had their orgasms, wiped themselves clean, zipped up their designer jeans and each gone their own separate lonely ways, the lovely soft eyes are going to resume their habitual dull, soulless and frowning aspect, and he just looks again like some ordinary uninteresting Joe completely unable to put down his smartphone, likely getting back on grinder checking the menu for dessert. Is that what love is? No, tell me, Gentle Reader, is that what love really is?
There has to be another way, a better way. Some way of harnessing all that kind gentle love, all that lovely, sexy erotic energy, all that beautiful and alluring vulnerability, not for personal self-gratification, but for the collective, the common good. I think that the bonobo apes have it maybe half right. Those little monkeys (actually they´re almost as big as we are!) shag each other mercilessly. Which is to say, not with whips, handcuffs, chains or leather, but with their own hairy little bodies. They resolve all their conflicts with sex. Male on female, female on female, male on male. And they get along splendidly, almost none of the tension or violence or bloodlust of their chimp relatives.
I think that for humans there is a middle way. Something more intimate and tender than a detached sense of charity because it is the right thing to do. But also an approach that is balanced, respectful and safe, that does not play favourites. I am thinking here of unconditional love. Who then is my neighbour? Someone asked Jesus, who replied with the tale of the Good Samaritan, who took a man victimized by a violent mugging, and took care of him until he recovered.
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