Swinging on a Slow Pendulum

by Giselle Renarde

Songs from your childhood make you feel young again.

I forget where I heard that. Probably on TV. But it makes me think of documentary I watched about music therapy. They interviewed a guy whose job was to visit long-term care facilities and lead singalongs with the residents, many of whom had dementia. This singalong guy figured he'd learn a bunch of songs from across the decades, but he found that when he played popular music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, the residents weren't interested, or they didn't remember the tunes.

It was only when he started singing songs from the 30s and 40s, when the elderly residents were young, that everyone joined in. From then on, it was all WWII era music all the time. Even residents whose dementia was very advanced remembered the old songs word for word.

I'm not exactly elderly, but lately I find I'm drawn back to the music of my youth. I didn't have the easiest childhood (in fact, I lived through a lot of what they're now calling Adverse Childhood Experiences), but I was lucky enough to find an escape hatch in the family record player.

When I was a preteen, I fell in love with Broadway musicals. Don't ask me how I got my introduction to musical theatre. My father was obsessed with Elvis. My mother never listened to music at all. My dad's record collection was vast, but it didn't include any Broadway. I used to go to the library and flip through the record stacks and check out every soundtrack I could get my hands on. I'd bring my records home and copy them onto cassette tapes so I could listen to them in my bedroom. I had a tape player of my own, but not my own turntable. Vinyl was on its way out. (Now it's on its way back in--funny, that.)

I think one of the things I most loved about musicals was that they were stories I could get lost inside. I would play my tapes over and over and over again. It's a wonder they didn't snap. I would listen until I'd memorized every lyric to every song. I could have sung the entire Phantom of the Opera soundtrack to anyone who was interested. (No one was.) And I recall a weirdly obsessive crush I had on some girl at my school because she looked (in my mind) like the actress who played Jenny in Aspects of Love.

After finding a bunch of my old tapes in my mother's basement a few months ago, I discovered something pretty amazing: all these years later, I still remember the lyrics to all those soundtracks. I haven't heard them in ages. Doesn't matter. The music's locked in my brain and the words are there with them.

I've read that as Carl Jung got older, he would go down to the river and carve tiny rivulets into the earth, leading the water off in different directions. This was a favourite childhood activity of his, and he came back to it in old age. 

More and more, I feel like life swings on a slow pendulum. I'm going back to the place I came from, and maybe I'll get there one day. There's a word I learned in university, a word I no longer remember--it means nostalgia for a past you never actually experienced. I've got a case of that, big time. My childhood was full of trauma, and yet there's something about it I want back. I'm not sure what. Maybe just the music.

Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies, including prestigious collections like Best Lesbian Romance, Best Women’s Erotica, and the Lambda Award-winning collection Take Me There, edited by Tristan Taormino. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, Cherry, Seven Kisses, In Shadow, and The Other Side of Ruth.

Love =/= Sex

I find the concept of non-monogamy intriguing.

Being who I am — a gay male — I’m fairly immersed in the local gay scene and gay culture. It’s been a slow discovery and understanding to learn that a lot of the openly gay guys I know in long-term relationships or marriages have sex on the side.  And, like, it’s not even something to hide or feel ashamed about.

One married friend came back from an LGBT conference and talked about the hook-up scene he was involved with at the hotel. Another friend who’s relationship is as solid as marriage has talked about the “dates” he goes on with men that are not his partner. And another friend has mentioned that he won’t have unprotected sex with his boyfriend because he doesn’t “trust” him.  (He loves him, but doesn’t trust him.)  These are just some of the recent examples.

It’s not cheating, but as far as I know, they’re not in open relationships or poly relationships, either.  It is what it is, apparently.

Perhaps what’s thrown me off about this is that I didn’t come to understand my sexuality until my late twenties, so until then I was immersed in “straight culture” and heteronormative values. So, to me, you fuck the one you’re with and no one else.

But the more my friends and the people around me open up to me and tell me what they get up to when their partners aren’t around (or perhaps while their partner is around or even with their partner), the more I find that monogamy isn’t widely practiced in gay culture.

I wonder, though, if this non-monogamy happens just as often in “straight culture”, but it’s talked about less openly.  I do, after all, know of at least one woman in a poly relationship. In our patriarchal culture, women are to be seen as chaste and devoted, whereas men are not. So perhaps this is why it’s not spoken of among straight couples but is widely and freely discussed among gay couples?

I’ve had to do a lot of thinking on this. It might seem strange given that I’m an erotica writer, however, most of my fiction has been of the monogamous or the “single people hooking up” variety. I believe there’s a separation of sex and love. (This is probably something all of my colleagues on this blog have long understood.)

Sex does not always have to mean intimacy and love — it can just be a carnal act of pleasure.  And love doesn’t always have to be expressed through sex.

My partner and I don’t have the most active sex life and at first I worried that meant we didn’t have the strongest love. However, over time, I’ve come to understand that he sees our other forms of intimacy — holding hands while watching TV, always eating dinner together, and our shared hobbies — to be a vital act of love.  Sex is the icing on the cake, but the cake is still satisfying and substantial even if there’s not much icing.  I’ve begun to also see the act of sex as being separate from love — they are often together, but they can exist separately, too.

Will I be a swinger?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  What I will be, though, is more understanding of how swingers and those in open and poly relationships approach the topics of love and sex.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is The President And The Rentboy (co-written with Sandra Claire). He is also the publisher and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, a publisher of erotica and high-heat-level erotic romance. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.