Digital Photocollage | 2026 | The Closet Series — Behan
On the Nature of Gay Men Having Sex
The word symposium comes to us from the Greek: sympinein, to drink together. In Athens, the symposium was the occasion for music, for spoken poetry, for philosophical inquiry conducted among men who desired one another and did not find this remarkable. Plato set his great investigation of Eros there — not in a court, not in a temple, but at a dinner party, among bodies, among wine, among men who understood that desire and thought were not opposites.
We have forgotten this. Or rather, some have chosen to forget it.
A persistent canard in straight culture is that gay sexuality exists in abstraction — acknowledged in theory, invisible in fact. Some straight people will concede that gay men love one another. Far fewer can hold in their minds what that love looks like in physical form.
This is not a failure of imagination.
It is the error of a culture so conditioned by its own norm that variation of any kind is literally inconceivable — not wrong, simply unthinkable— self-willed blindness.
Plato’s Symposium confirmed that gay men are real, and they do have sex — their desire, their bodies, their Eros — as simply evident. Religious institutions spent centuries dismantling that confirmation, that awareness of presence, replacing it with prohibition and reducing visibility to blindness. Gay men exist. Gay men have sex. All is well with the world.
Resources
Plato. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Hackett Publishing, 1989.
