Editorial from The Guide	Editorials Archive

A professor at a Boston area university reports that he likes querying members of his classes whether they've ever enjoyed homosex. Very few souls are brave enough to raise their hands. He then asks whether anyone has masturbated. Amidst nervous giggles, almost everyone nods yes, they have masturbated. He then asks how the class can resolve the contradictory polls: no one admits to homosex, yet all acknowledge masturbating-- and isn't masturbation a quintessential homosexual act? After all, it is sex with someone of the same gender. The curious professor reports that classes can spend hours then debating whether gay guys appreciate jerking off twice as much as straight guys since they can enjoy the dick in their hand as much as the hand on their dick.

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Whatever the relative levels of pleasures derived from masturbation, gay guys have a head start on their straight counterparts in enjoying solo sex.

Roman Catholics are still taught that any non-procreative sex damns one to eternal hell, while fundamentalists are likely to site Old Testament prohibitions about spilling ones seed on the ground-- religious taboos both born of antipathy to pleasure-giving activity. But gay people have already had to challenge and discard organized religion's deadening sex strictures. Thus freed of anti-sex dogma, masturbation's pleasure potential is more easily embraced by gay people.

While the medical community no longer endorses the view that masturbation leads to nervous disorders or a weak character or blindness, doctors generally take a neutral position regarding solo sex. The best they usually do is to say that masturbation is not harmful. When then-Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders went further-- to actually advocate masturbation as a sensible and low-risk way for pubescents to vent their enormous sexual energy-- she was quickly fired. As gay people, we have learned that the opinions of doctors and "experts" regarding sex are influenced by prevailing prejudices and political considerations. Just as we learned to trust our own bodies and minds as to the benefits and pleasures of gay sex (no matter what doctors or psychiatrists said), we can understand that masturbation can be a positive good in our lives-- providing pleasure, stress-release, fantasy-exploration, and wide-eyed wonder that something so much fun is absolutely free.

While gay people may be less likely to be crippled by religion's condemnation of masturbation and more likely to appreciate jerking off as a wonderful gift of nature, many gay guys still harbor a nagging belief that their is something inferior about solo sex. Jerk off sessions can be followed by a twinge of guilt, a feeling that the pleasure derived was somehow a bit wrong.

Where does this residual guilt come from?

We've all grown up in a culture that still views sex as inherently wicked. To redeem itself and thus avoid social condemnation, sexual expression needs an ulterior and unsullied motive-- if not making babies, then at least furthering an intimate, romantic relationship. Masturbation, which produces neither children nor connubial intimacy, is left "unredeemed" and thus morally dubious in a culture where pleasure itself is suspect.

Let us use our experience as gay people to recognize that pleasure-giving is justification enough for any human activity, including sex. We fuck because it's fun, not for babies. We do not expect to marry each of our sex partners, for sexual pleasure can be shared with a once-seen stranger as well as with a lifelong partner. And we need not apologize for enjoying sex with ourselves, for learning to like ones own body and the pleasure it can give only makes us more human... and more gay!