[Sex] Banned in Boston

Ira Glass did a great segment on This American Life yesterday, You Are So Beautiful to Me, about a woman who falls in love with a macaw while in her teens, and over the course of five years, working odd jobs, is able to save up enough money to buy the bird. Now, flash forward, the woman is married, the mother of two boys, and the macaw is becoming more jealous, and more aggressive. And besides, it's fucking loud, okay? I mean, it won't shut up! The kids don't understand why mommy won't get rid of the bird, or why she would have paid $1500 for it in the first place. The bird keeps attacking them, for fuck's sake! Mom, for her part, is afraid that if she does get rid of the bird, it will die without her ..... it's actually produced an egg, which only happens when it's mated for life, and ummmm ..... well, here is where I guess it starts to get a bit queasy.

Of course, many of those opposed to gay marriage — Sorry! Favorite new quote from John Waters here: "I became gay so I wouldn't have to get married!" — anyway, opponents are always saying that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to pedophilia, incest and bestiality, with the implication being that those things are bad for you too. Well, maybe.

There's this great scene in the documentary Heavy Petting. People like Spaulding Gray, David Byrne, Abbie Hoffman, Laurie Anderson, Sandra Bernhard, Judith Malina and Julian Beck are asked to recount their first sexual experiences. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs are framed in a shot, posed like some alter-American Gothic. Ginsberg is recounting his sexual conquests, which began early and were quite extensive — from age 13 -15, he seems to have proceeded house by house and block by block through his entire neighborhood; thorough — and Burroughs just stands there, saying nothing. Finally, when Ginsberg stops to take a breath, Burroughs leans slightly into the camera and says in that wonderfully gravelly nasally monotone, "I ... like .... cats." Turns out Ginsberg is the conservative one.

Of course, some cultures are more broad-minded when affairs of the heart take a detour down the inter-species highway. Friends of the British writer J.R. Ackerley proved very accepting of his committed relationship to Queenie, his Alsatian bitch — see Ackerley's semi-autobiographical novel My Dog Tulip — even when she spotted their carpets. Ackerley did not have sex with Queenie/Tulip — he was very open about being a serial human-on-human homosexual — but at the end of the day, it was Queenie/Tulip he came home to. And isn't that what true love is? Where you wind up at the end of the day?

So whether you've only "experimented" — I used to practice tongue-kissing on our dachshound, and I can't say I'm the worse for it — or whether you've found True Love rutting in the backyard....Well, in the immortal words of Kander and Ebb:

Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs,
Ladies and Gentlemen-
Is it a crime to fall in love?
Can we ever tell where the heart truly leads us?
All we are asking is eine bisschen Verstandnis-
A little understanding-
Why can't 'leben und leben lassen'?
'Live and let live'...