Touching The Holy Grail

I could never write erotic fiction because I don’t do gratuitous sex. I had no choice but to publish my memoir as erotica since in my relationship with David, sex was our means of communication, our common language. I was in the minority of (biological) women in America who had never traded sex for money – or pricey dinners, or an emotional commitment, or a potential marriage with kids, or anything not directly related to the act itself. My having sex always for the sake of the journey, the discovery, is the purest form of intercourse there is. I could never understand how my utter lack of quid pro quo, my wide-eyed innocent approach, could be seen as a form of corruption in society’s eyes.

Nevertheless, I don’t sample men like I used to. Recently, when a friend wondered seriously if I missed being a slut I had to laugh. A slut implies someone who fucks indiscriminately. I was never a slut. I was always specific, calculating in my conquests. I only fucked the men I wanted to be. Gore Vidal’s “Myra Breckinridge” – a book beyond parody, an ingenious cocktail of deep philosophy and high camp – contains three quotes that touched me deeply, reflecting my own experience beneath the drag queen bravado.

“…the dilemma’s horn: I have no clear idea as to my ultimate identity once every fantasy has been acted out with living flesh. All that I do know is that I shall be freed of obsession and, in this at least, be like no one else who ever lived.” (Page 168)

“To my astonishment, I have now lost all interest in men. I have simply gone past them, as if I were a new creation, a mutant diverging from original stock to become something quite unlike its former self or any self known to the race.” (Page 196)

“All I know is that I am now entirely fulfilled. I have lived and I have loved to the fullest! I can at last give up sex because anything more would be anticlimax.” (Page 212)

Vidal perfectly describes the feeling one has when he reaches his own Holy Grail, including the sudden flooding of life’s doubt and uncertainty kept at bay for so long by the quest. “To be possessed” by a man means to become him. Sex was my path to manhood, and I unwittingly achieved it through David. Consequently, my main drive for sex, as unwavering as any maternal instinct, had been vanquished.