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"'Normal' phallic, penetrative sex is limited by the duration of the male erection and is spent at orgasm. It is limited in time and physical, bodily territory. Ecstatic, continuous sexuality that does not end at a single orgasm rejects the authority and control of the penetrator male. And that is just what happens when the hairy, muscled male spreads his buttocks and releases himself to penetration by another. He has ostensibly relinquished control over the course of his own pleasure to the man who is entering him. But because his pleasure is not directed toward a spending orgasm, he is in his 'powerless' submission capable of outlasting, and forgetting, his top man, who, upon orgasm, can be replaced and replaced again. Like the 'wanton whores' who so upset the blue-blooded reformers of the 19th century, the penetrated man is, in theory, insatiable, and as such is an enemy to maleness itself..." Bersani argues that public health policy about AIDS stems from horror of penetration, horror of seemingly uncontrolled promiscuous penetration -- challenging the phallic male and lording the supremacy of the insatiably receptive male butt.
Bersani acknowledges that there is nothing inherently liberating in the classless nakedness of bathhouse and park orgies -- or, as Armistead Maupin put it, one of the things bathhouses teach is how to identify a bastard in the dark. The pursuit and recovery of the sacred and the ecstatic in contemporary life is a journey separate from the path to equity, democracy and justice. It promises only a quality of knowing unavailable to the Rousseauistic mind of social
contracts.
-- Frank Browning in The Culture of Desire, paraphrasing Leo Bersani's essay
"Is the Rectum a Grave?"
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