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bundling, a dream of unlimited sub-coital intimacy which Brown calls
(in
his vocabulary the term is an honorific) "polymorphous per–
verse." And here finally is an essential clue to the nature of the
second sexual revolution, the post-sexual revolution, first evoked in
literature by Brother Antoninus more than a decade ago, in a verse
prayer addressed somewhat improbably to the Christian God:
Annul in me my manhood, Lord, and make
Me woman sexed and weak .
..
Make me then
Girl-hearted, virgin-souled, woman-docile, maiden-meek.
Despite the accents of this invocation, however, what is at work
is not essentially a homosexual revolt or even a rebellion against
women, though its advocates seek to wrest from women their ancient
privileges of receiving the Holy Ghost and pleasuring men; and
though the attitudes of the movement can be adapted to the anti–
female bias of, say, Edward Albee.
If
in
Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf
Albee can portray the relationship of two homosexuals (one in
drag) as the model of contemporary marriage, this must be because
contemporary marriage has in fact turned into something much like
that parody. And
it
is true that what survives of bourgeois marriage
and the bourgeois family is a target which the new barbarians join
the old homosexuals in reviling, seeking to replace Mom, Pop and the
kids with a neo-Whitmanian gaggle of giggling
camerados.
Such
groups are, in fact, whether gathered in coffee houses, university
cafeterias or around the literature tables on campuses, the peace-time
equivalents, as it were, to the demonstrating crowd. But even their
program of displacing Dick-Jane-Spot-Baby, etc., the WASP family
of grade school primers, is not the fundamental motive of the post–
sexual revolution.
What is at stake from Burroughs to Bellow, Ginsberg to Albee,
Salinger to Gregory Corso is a more personal transformation: a radi–
cal metamorphosis of the Western male-utterly unforeseen in the
decades before us, but visible now
in
every high school and college
classroom, as well as on the paperback racks in airports and super–
markets. All around us, young males are beginning to retrieve for
themselves the cavalier role once piously and class-consciously sur–
rendered to women:
that of being beautiful and being loved.
Here
once more the example to the Negro--the feckless and adorned Negro
