CarnalNation

Thanks to The Colbert Report, I now know that one of California's best and brightest young rightwing congressmen is fretting over "hermaphrodites" in the military.

I'm not making this up, I promise. Representative Duncan D. Hunter told NPR that if Don't Ask, Don't Tell is overturned, the military will face a disruptive influx of intersexed soldiers. I don't know—maybe he envisions a battalion of bearded ladies going after Al Qaeda. Hell, they couldn't do a worse job of finding Osama than the forces we've already got. It's not just hermaphrodites, though, who worry him. He's upset over those pesky "transgenders," too, because, as we all know, if you recruit just one man with scars on his chest where his tits had been, the Marine Corps will crumble to shit.

Now, our boy Dunc is a SoCal Southern Baptist who majored in business at San Diego State, so I'm thinking his knowledge of human sexuality is probably pretty well limited to the well-thumbed copies of Hustler he fished out of his family's recycling bin. That, and his wife telling him what the clit is for. Nevertheless….

Oh, and hermaphrodite panic has also hit columnist Frank Gaffney of the Washington Times. That is, you'll recall, the newspaper outlet of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, between bouts of presiding at mass arranged marriages of thousands of couples, has referred to homosexuals as "dung-eating dogs." So you know that both Frank and his boss don’t hold no truck with them damned queers.

A few days later, by pleasant coincidence, I attended Uncovered, a pretty stunning dance performance by San Francisco choreographer Sean Dorsey and his troupe, Fresh Meat. In the piece, Dorsey, a female-to-male guy himself, celebrates the life of pioneering transgender activist Lou Sullivan. And that brought to mind the Great Hermaphrodite Panic, which got me wondering: What the fuck is Hunter's problem?

It's a mainstay of queer theory that much of the brouhaha over homosexuality has less to do with the nuts-and-bolts of actual sex than with issues of gender. After all, most of the men who claim to be repulsed at the thought of male-male sex would be tickled pink to get their cock sucked or to fuck butt, if only they could convince the wifey—or afford a pro who'd put out. Which is to say: It's not the actual act that squicks out the 'phobes, it's the gender of the folks involved. Or, perhaps more accurately if pretentiously, the adoption of unsanctioned gender roles. Which is why guys who get their cocks sucked by other men can claim to still be straight; they may be having sex with males, but they're still only doing what good straight dudes do: stick their dicks into open mouths.

There seems to be something in the human animal that tends toward a binary view. Of life, love, the universe, whatever. Two is simple. God and Satan, GOP and Dem, Burger King and Mickey D's. And, of course, male and female. Even the enlightened thought of the Mystic East falls back on the ol' yin and yang. Maybe it's due to neurological wiring, maybe based on the great binary of "me" and "everything else." But for whatever reason, it's always simpler to divide existence into twosomes, into black and white, Lucy and Desi.

Gay and straight, too, for that matter, which is probably why the "bisexual" part of LGBT seems so pervasively overlooked.

And war is another big binary setup, a particularly bloody one. Us versus the Enemy: it facilitates killing, gives license to Abu Ghraib guards and suicide bombers. The military likes its worldview nice and neat, but homosexuality kinda queers the either/or deal.  No more soldier boy meets soldier girl; we have met the object of desire, and they are us.