Sexual appeasement is overblown It's hard to keep desires at bay

“I have a small penis”, Edmund White announces as he introduces his sex memoir, Loves of my Life. But this shortcoming, as the self-styled paterfamilias of queer literature reminds the reader again and again, has not prevented him from racking up a body count approaching that of an unexpectedly virulent flu season or short land war. By his own estimate, over six decades White has slept with 3,000 different men.

White’s prolific sexual career took place during the “golden age” of homosexual metropolitan promiscuity. This was a time for “tribal love”, a time for exchanging the shackles of “grim American “morality”” for shackles of more specialist kinds, a time — as White reports in one of the antique strings of camp verbal play he has hoarded from the era — for “falling heels over head in love”. Or, more prosaically: a time when one wouldn’t think twice of “taking a break from writing at two in the morning to saunter down to the piers and have sex with twenty men in a truck”.

Like most gay men of his generation, White is an unreconstructed sex-positivist, at least avant la lettre. Needless to say, in today’s ideological climate, sex positivity — the view, roughly, that the only significant evaluative constraint on sex is the consent of the parties involved — comes in for a hard time. The publicity stunts of OnlyFans camgirls such as Lilly Phillips, for example, who managed to sleep with 100 strangers in one day, rightly strike most people as grotesque for reasons that have little to do with the willing agreement of everyone taking part.

Of course, next to the body counts of Edmund White, and indeed many gay men, Lily Phillips and her colleagues are banking amateur numbers. But because it is invariably developed under a female lens, the critique of sex positivity is often implicitly treated as though it does not generalise to the gay male case. If it is not being politely ignored altogether, the gay sexual market is treated as a sui generis and lawless domain where strongly sex positive norms enjoy a kind of local legitimacy, if only because no alternative seems possible. Yet between Lily Phillips and Edmund White, it seems the more interesting question, at least psychologically, is why someone like White — an intelligent, cultivated, reflective person with a rich inner world and the apparent capacity for self-control — would live as he did.

White is, in the truest sense of an over-used term, a survivor. An anomalous immune response prevented him from developing Aids, despite an HIV diagnosis in 1984. In consequence, he lived long enough to write dozens of novels, memoirs and plays, a gay sex manual, a literary biography of Jean Genet, and win the Pulitzer Prize. His atypical longevity has also given him free reign, in his memoirs, to preach what he so enthusiastically practiced in the original all-you-can-eat gay heyday. The result, in this case, is a memoir so sexually graphic as to be at points booby-trapped against direct quotation by reviewers in the mainstream press.

It is impossible to turn more than a few pages without being confronted by yet another “dick as big as a child’s arm”, or “as large as something that would have saved the lives of three Titanic passengers”, darting out from within another pair of “piss-stained denim jeans”. We hear of the male prostitutes White has employed all his life to meet his surplus sexual needs. This, he admits, is an “expensive hobby”, but worth it if you have a “gout exclusif” for “Nordic blonds” or “young but legal”, or, more innocently, if you happen to find yourself in New York, famously the bottom capital of the world, and quite reasonably want to hire someone who will at least agree “to impersonate a top from the outset”. The best in the business, White notes, will even “crush my head between Transformer biceps” and “obligingly ridicule my tiny penis”. Throughout the Eighties, White particularly liked holidaying at a favourite beach resort in Crete, because there “everyone was available for a price, even the mayor”.

White’s style of self-revelation shares something of the sexual exhibitionist’s fascination with provoking his audience. That, and at the age of 85, perhaps the occasional touch of the rapt self-involvement characteristic of senile disinhibition. White and his partners, we hear, drank one another’s urine: “like seals begging for fish”. Other anecdotes are so gruesome as to make the above adventurism look quaint by comparison. One surreal story unfolds at a fisting colony in Normandy. There, an acquaintance of White’s, Robert, “pushed an entire football up a Frenchman’s rear; the man had to visit a local surgeon”. The real kicker, however, as we are informed with glee, is that the next day “a whole queue of ass-hungry men were lined up before Robert’s door at the colony. They, too, wanted to be worthy of a serious operation… greedy glutes!” Such goings on stretch, among other things, credulity.

In fact, his blasé presentation of the consequences of embracing minimalistic sex-positive norms often seem like an open invitation to call that theory’s bluff.  Despite what sex positivists insist, there is more to the evaluative appraisal of sex than a thin, rigoristic condition of consent. The uncritical live-and-let-live view that sex, alone among valuable things, cannot be seriously degraded if pursued in a self-destructive way is hard to sustain, when given a moment’s thought.

Of course, one shouldn’t downplay the substantial differences of male psychology, and the physical and emotional parity of male-on-male sexual relations, that reduce the attendant dangers of allowing sex positivity to reign in the gay sexual market. Men prize sexual novelty more. They are less physically vulnerable to one another. There is more common knowledge, making the exploration of extreme practices safer. It is, at least to my mind, considerably easier to think of a woman like Lilly Phillips as straight-forwardly self-deceived than it would be her hypothetical gay male counterpart. Still, there remain serious risks, as Loves of my Life inadvertently reveals, in organising one’s life around the satiation of a single impulse, one’s sex drive, while driving other reactions to the margins.

Sex positivists have a hard time accounting for the value of sex because they are committed to thinking that all it takes for sex to count as good is for it to be authentically willed. According to this view, one’s sexual practices are presented as at once central to one’s life and self-identity, but oddly resistant to any satisfying evaluative appraisal. White is a case in point. He writes that what has “mattered most” to him in his long life are his many thousands of often anonymous, fleeting and ungentle sexual encounters. And, yet, “in the cold polar heart of old age”, he comes to see his sexual adventures as “comical and pointless, repetitious and dishonourable”.

Though an aesthete in his artistic and intellectual life — a self-described “epicure with high standards” — White makes a marked exception when it comes to sex, where he becomes defiantly undiscriminating: a “clumsy slut” with a “pair of warm holes”. He claims to have felt “intimate and tender” love for his thousands of partners and fallen “in love ten times a day”. But it is difficult to think of this as anything other than kitsch exaggeration when elsewhere he describes his sexual life as “sequential and hyper-horny”: “one-sided, aspirational and impossible, never domestic and mutual”. This is not just a matter of catching White out; such inconsistencies reveal a deep tension in his view.

To give him credit, White clearly has enough self-knowledge to pre-empt the bleaker revelations that threaten to undercut his book’s official tone of sexual triumphalism. He invites the reader to witness his later sexual misadventures, but only on the condition that he is able to cast himself in a knowing or comic enough role: one able to absorb some of the instability that comes with having to share his self-conception as liberated, while at the same time recognising him as helplessly degraded.

In his old age, pursuing younger men with fetishes for sadism, White feels a vivid indignity: crawling obesely across the floor, “as big and awkward as Mr Snuffleupagus in Sesame Street, a muppet so large and unwieldy that it takes two people to operate him”. Does White’s very detachment from sexual reality itself take on an erotic thrill? And with the arrival of Aids, his continuing pursuit of casual sex comes to seem to him like “Russian roulette”. Nor does old age stop him from “feeling like a starving dog at the door of a meat locker”. By this point, he attracts complaints that he is “somehow too experienced, too slutty, too quick and adept in assuming the position”.

Though it bears pointing out that many of those who lead less adventurous sex lives than Edmund White might be disappointed and unfulfilled, attempting to double-down on the opposite sexual strategy is no guarantee of securing what’s of value in life either. Helplessly caving to impulse might seem to provide a handy model for liberation. But it is an obviously fallible one. Appeasement, so often a bad strategy for avoiding conflict, works no better when deployed to keep one’s own desires at bay. Deceiving oneself about the profundity of casual sex is not a means to happiness; it is means to being overblown.

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John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

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