Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16^th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very important.

Seri­ous domestic/intimate part­ner vio­lence trig­ger warn­ing in the first few para­graphs of this post.

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover — who’s come to visit dur­ing my first year of grad­u­ate school — tells me that she’s at last made her deci­sion: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m sud­denly lis­ten­ing from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leav­ing her mouth no longer coa­lesce into mean­ing­ful units. There is a moment of blank­ness, and then, as if some­one else has taken con­trol of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself get­ting up from the chair where I’ve been sit­ting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, hold­ing her against the wall, and slap­ping her face back and forth with my other hand until she is sense­less and bloody. I see myself scream­ing in her ear, let­ting her drop to the floor, and kick­ing her in the stom­ach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hear­ing what she has to say, my lover con­tin­ues talk­ing, ges­tur­ing to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implor­ing me with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the vio­lence in my mind begins again. Real­iz­ing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bath­room. Lock­ing the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. I wait till I feel cer­tain the vision will not return, and I flush the toi­let and go back to the bed­room where, thank­fully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, know­ing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just hap­pened, tell her I have work to do in the library and there­fore won’t be back until just before we’re sup­posed to go out for dinner.

The after­noon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of tak­ing the bus. After a cou­ple of blocks, how­ever, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing vio­lence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some out­side force has taken con­trol of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly par­a­lyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance hav­ing this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I set­tle into one of the chairs on the sec­ond floor, is to write out what I’m feel­ing, a strat­egy that has helped me fig­ure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, how­ever, what comes out of me is the begin­ning of a poem:

I want a bearded man, shirt­less,
in faded jeans, to come one bare­foot night
and take me in his mouth.

Like the vio­lence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from some­one other than myself, but the shock of recog­ni­tion I feel when I read them – not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them – is in direct con­trast to the sense of alien­ation I expe­ri­enced while wait­ing in my bath­room to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was wait­ing for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also real­ize I am sud­denly calm, as if I have found what writ­ing was sup­posed to help me look for, and I am cer­tain – I don’t know how I know this, but I know this – that in these lines lies the key to under­stand­ing why that vision of vio­lence came to me.

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What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reser­va­tions about say­ing she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year pro­fes­sor in Intro­duc­tion to Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture had made Whitman’s work cen­tral to the course. When I told her one day as we were walk­ing out of class that I admired her hon­esty, she smiled, said some­thing about how most lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors had more hot air in them than sub­stance, and walked off to wher­ever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sit­ting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next month or so, we met every few days at a table in the back cor­ner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drink­ing tea, eat­ing bagels, and talk­ing. One after­noon, just as we were get­ting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bot­tle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it.

She was already sev­eral glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up with the wine, our talk turned to a sub­ject we’d never before dis­cussed, love and rela­tion­ships. We cir­cled the ques­tion of our own bud­ding involve­ment war­ily, let­ting it drop in and out of the con­ver­sa­tion, each of us wait­ing for the other to risk say­ing, or doing, some­thing first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”

“Yes,” I answered, “why?”

She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, “No, I mean do you really like your body?”

“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned for­ward and asked her ques­tion even more emphat­i­cally, “Are you truly sat­is­fied with every part of your body?”

Con­fused, and begin­ning to feel a lit­tle threat­ened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, “What are you talk­ing about?”

Maria smiled to her­self, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, “You know, do you think you mea­sure up physically?”

Finally I under­stood, but what I under­stood only con­fused me more since the chal­lenge implicit in Maria’s words – or at least the chal­lenge I felt to be implicit in Maria’s words (she might not have meant them as a chal­lenge at all) – seemed to shift the basis of what was hap­pen­ing between us from the mutu­al­ity of friend­ship to the adver­sar­ial stance of per­former and critic. I knew that big­ger penises were sup­posed to be bet­ter when it came to hav­ing sex, but I was inex­pe­ri­enced enough that I didn’t really under­stand how “bet­ter” was sup­posed to work. How big did “big” have to be to make a dif­fer­ence, I won­dered, and what pre­cisely was the nature of “bet­ter?” More plea­sure? For whom? These were ques­tions I’d asked myself and been unable to answer every time the sub­ject of penis size and sex came up, and now that Maria had asked me the ques­tion directly, I was speech­less, caught in what felt to me like a damned-if-I-did-damned-if-I-didn’t sit­u­a­tion. Any­thing I said — yes, no, maybe, let’s find out — seemed to me a pick­ing up of the gaunt­let I thought Maria had thrown down, and since I didn’t think I knew enough to com­pete, my first impulse was to remain silent. On the other hand, to say noth­ing was prob­a­bly to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. “I don’t know. Do you mea­sure up?” I asked her.

Maria’s face changed imme­di­ately. The gen­tly mock­ing antic­i­pa­tion with which she’d been wait­ing for my response van­ished, and she searched my face with eyes that were sud­denly sad and deeply sus­pi­cious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was look­ing for and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Some­times,” and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.

Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, try­ing to recap­ture the easy ban­ter from ear­lier in the evening, but she was sud­denly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all Maria did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sit­ting. We saw each other on cam­pus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to under­stand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.

When I went home at the end of the semes­ter, I told this story to my mother, ask­ing her what Maria’s rea­sons might have been for try­ing to seduce me in the way that she did. My mother’s answer only added to my con­fu­sion. The size of a man’s ego, she explained, could be mea­sured by the size of his penis. To illus­trate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insis­tent, she grew more and more annoyed until, hav­ing had enough, loudly, so that the peo­ple around them could hear, she told him that unless he had a “base­ball bat” between his legs, she wouldn’t have any­thing to do with him. He, of course, protested that he’d “never had any com­plaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t, well, he knew what to do.

Need­less to say, the man walked away.

It was hard to know how this story answered my ques­tion, so I asked my mother if she thought Maria’s chal­lenge about whether or not I “mea­sured up” had been intended to put me in the same posi­tion as she had put the man in the bar. My mother’s response con­fused me even fur­ther. “Only small men,” she said, “say size doesn’t matter.”

///

“Next time,” my mother is laugh­ing — but the smile on her face is a thin line of con­tempt, and when she leans for­ward to tap the pol­ished nail of her right index fin­ger in rhyth­mic empha­sis on the wooden sur­face of the din­ing room table, her eyes smol­der — “Next time, tell your father you don’t have such prob­lems. Tell him you wear a steel jock­strap.” I am six­teen, four or five years younger than I was in the story I told you above, just home from a visit to my father in Man­hat­tan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walk­ing from the restau­rant where he’d taken me for lunch to the sub­way where I would catch the train home, he’d put his arm inti­mately around my shoul­der, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, “Do you have a girl friend?” I told him no, which was a lie. “Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dat­ing, you’re going to run into sit­u­a­tions you won’t know how to han­dle.” He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, search­ing my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talk­ing about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”

“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the sub­ject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my vir­gin­ity, but know­ing that he didn’t know and real­iz­ing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel supe­rior, and it was this feel­ing of supe­ri­or­ity that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. “What does he think he’s going to teach you, any­way?” she asks, let­ting her smile loosen into a softer, more con­spir­a­to­r­ial grin. “You prob­a­bly know more than he does already.” She laughs again, but some­thing in her tone makes me uneasy, and so, when I laugh with her this time, it’s more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny.

The dis­cus­sion in this Nice Guy™ thread over at Alas reminded me of some­one I had not thought about in a very long time, a woman – I’ll call her Kim – with whom I was close friends in col­lege, whom I lost as a friend after she decided to marry a man I was con­vinced was no good for her, not because I dropped her as a friend, but because she dropped me. We’d been class­mates, but not more than that, in sixth grade and had not seen each other until we met again as Eng­lish majors dur­ing our sopho­more year in col­lege. I have no mem­ory of how we became close friends, but we did, quickly, and, even­tu­ally, I wanted very much to turn that friend­ship into some­thing more.

I don’t remem­ber if I ever told Kim how I felt. I do remem­ber, how­ever, very clearly when she told me how she felt about me. We were at a beach not far from cam­pus and she had just come out of the water and plopped down on her stom­ach. We started talk­ing, most prob­a­bly about some­thing we were read­ing for class, when sud­denly Kim sat up and faced me. “You know, Richard,” she said, “you’re like a brother to me.” I don’t remem­ber what, if any­thing, I said in response, though it was cer­tainly not what I wanted to hear. Still, our friend­ship was far more impor­tant to me than the pos­si­bil­ity of a sex­ual rela­tion­ship which might end up not work­ing out, so I swal­lowed my dis­ap­point­ment and accepted her, and loved her, as the inti­mate friend I assumed she was say­ing was the only thing she ever wanted to be to me.

Before Kim met the man she mar­ried, she had one boyfriend that I remem­ber, a guy I thought was a jerk long before they became a cou­ple, not so much because he was arro­gant, though he was, but because he epit­o­mized that arro­gance, at least this is how I remem­ber feel­ing about it back then, by braid­ing and bead­ing his hair in imi­ta­tion of Bo Derek’s hair­style in the movie 10. The semes­ter Kim went out with him, she also moved to a dorm across cam­pus nearer to where he lived. In fact, she might have done that to be closer to him, but I am not sure. Once – and this is what con­firmed him in my mind not just as a jerk but as a true ass­hole – he came back with her to her old dorm room to pick up some things. I walked by the open door on my way to leave a note on another friend’s door down the hall, saw them out of the cor­ner of my eye as I passed and fig­ured I would pop in to say hello on my way back. At first, I didn’t think they’d seen me, but then, when I was still just a cou­ple of doors down from where they were, I heard him say, “See, I told you that once you moved across cam­pus, he’d for­get about you.” I put the note on my other friend’s door and hur­ried back, but by the time I got there, Kim and her boyfriend were gone.

I know she even­tu­ally broke up with that guy – it’s funny, I remem­ber his name, first and last – and that she, too, decided he was a jerk; and I have mem­o­ries of going to at least one clas­si­cal music con­cert with her dur­ing our senior year (if I remem­ber cor­rectly, she played the vio­lin) and of there being that night what I thought might have been some sex­ual ten­sion between us, though noth­ing came of it. Indeed, I didn’t even real­ize it might have been sex­ual ten­sion until the fol­low­ing day, and then it con­fused me because it was so at odds with the sub­stance of our friend­ship; and I remem­ber how ambi­tious she was as an aspir­ing jour­nal­ist and how much I respected the integrity of her pol­i­tics and her belief that she could make a real dif­fer­ence in the world. Mostly, though, I remem­ber how much I liked being with her. Just being with her. She laughed a lot, and I don’t think there was any­thing we could not talk about. Her friend­ship enriched my life, plain and sim­ple. It made me happy, and I was deeply grate­ful for that.

Then, in our senior year, a speaker came to cam­pus, a man who’d writ­ten a tremen­dously pop­u­lar book on “how to woo and win a woman.” The school news­pa­per assigned Kim to cover his talk, and when she did – at least this is my mem­ory of the story she told me the next day – she asked him dur­ing the Q&A about some­thing that, if true, would call into ques­tion the valid­ity of his claim to be the kind of man who could write the kind of book he’d writ­ten and be taken seri­ously. His response, in front of the entire audi­ence, was to invite her out to din­ner that night with the rest of the press, where he promised he would answer her ques­tion. At the din­ner, he offered to give her an exclu­sive, pri­vate inter­view back in his hotel room. She went with him. At some point, if I remem­ber cor­rectly what she told me, I guess it became clear to her that he was inter­ested in giv­ing her a good deal more than an inter­view and she asked him to take her home, or to call a taxi. He refused and she ended up hav­ing sex with him that night.

When she told me this, I was, for obvi­ous rea­sons, hor­ri­fied, and I told her so, and I pleaded with her not to see him again. Even if she did not think that what he did was date rape, I said – because she didn’t – a man who behaved like that was not some­one she ought to trust; but she did not lis­ten to me, and she started going out with him. This inevitably meant that she and I saw less of each other, though we still talked on the phone pretty fre­quently, and then, after what seems in my rec­ol­lec­tion to have been a very short while, and I mean a very short while, she told me he’d pro­posed mar­riage and that she was think­ing of accept­ing. I asked her if she loved him, and while she did not say no, she very point­edly did not say yes. I don’t know how much time passed before she agreed to be his wife, but she did finally do so, and that was the end of our friend­ship. I remem­ber try­ing to call her, to write her, but she did not respond at all. I was not sur­prised not to be invited to the wed­ding. Sev­eral years after we grad­u­ated, I was talk­ing with some­one who had also been her friend when we were in col­lege, and he said that she’d told him she wanted to cut out of her life com­pletely any­one she’d known dur­ing her col­lege years. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him why.

I googled Kim’s name today and was sur­prised to dis­cover, given her one-time desire to be a writer, that she has almost no online pres­ence. There are a cou­ple of ref­er­ences to her and her hus­band, recent enough that I assume they are still mar­ried, and a cou­ple of scanned arti­cles she wrote for our col­lege news­pa­per back when we were under­grad­u­ates. I read them wist­fully, remem­ber­ing the strength of her voice and of her char­ac­ter. I hope – despite every­thing that what I have writ­ten here implies about the man she mar­ried, because I would wish her noth­ing less – that her mar­riage has been a good one, happy and chal­leng­ing in all the right ways, and most of all lov­ing; and I hope that she has found ways of mak­ing her life as mean­ing­ful as she once thought being a jour­nal­ist would make it; mostly, though, I wish there was a way I could find out if those hopes are true, because I never had the chance to say good­bye to her, to grieve the loss of her as a friend, and I guess I would also like the oppor­tu­nity to tell her that a part of me still misses her.

They say it’s a shame we didn’t do it
when we should have, that prob­a­bly you’ll need it
later in life, when it’s more com­pli­cated,
more painful and, worse, you’ll remem­ber it.

They say women won’t want you, that you’ll not
for­give us, ever, espe­cially me, and that
the Jews who’ve died for what it means to be cut
will have died in vain because we left you complete.

And I know I can’t not bur­den you with that.
You have to, have to, res­onate with what
your body would have meant to all that hate,
and you will — but sit­ting here alone tonight,

my ampu­tated life aching anew,
I’m grate­ful for all that’s merely whole in you.