dan savage/ curtis/ autogynephilia

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=433857

dear dan savage,
your piece on Eastern Washington, specifically your speculations about ex-state legislator curtis caught my attention. your correspondent's guess at autogynephilia I find a useless category that asks for a dynamic explanation.

allow me to approach Curtis behavior, his enactments, acting out of his desires in the following manner:

1] it is dangerous, risky. He is accomplished; he has done this many times. the risk taking implies masochism, where there is masochism there is sadism [as in his both fucking and being fucked]. the unprotected sex he pays to impose on his prostitute also is dangerous to both parties, and is sadomasochistic. Running these dangers also implies a wish to be caught – to be helped, thus one of the possible meanings of stethoscope. However, the masochism may just be a defense, and overlay, like the sexuality of all of this, which however makes the case notorious and misleads us and thus becomes another instance of the miasma of confusion.

2] let me entertain the possibility that Curtis is not gay: i.e. that his erotic and love object choice is not a projection of something inside himself; the other possibility is, of course, not that he is a hypocrite [a useless moral judgment as far as understanding goes] but that he is split, that one side does not know, does not allow the other to know what it wishes what it is doing.

in the event of Curtis being neither gay nor bi-sexual, the cross-dressing points in a specific manner to Curtis relationship to his mother – or rather it points to a trauma in his past, possibly like a railway trauma, or of a trauma of longer duration, which then was not repaired: the entire enactment strikes me as an attempt, unsuccessful [of course],
at reparation – possibly of early abandonment, perceived or real. thus the stethoscope may be more than part of some early childhood ritual of sexual curiosity games among children – however, it also points towards childhood aside expressing the wish for a real doctor, that is: real the entire scene as a dream and interpret it as such.

whom is the rope tying down, tries to keep from leaving - aside the fantasy of mastery?

the excitement of the risk taking as well of the sex might point to a wish to return to the state of excitement induced by the trauma- not for its own sake; but that once you are in that state perhaps there will be no trauma this time? to keep the identity intact?

the identification with the figure that abandoned him might affect his identity to the point where he don's women's underwear -- if you become your mother then she has not abandoned you: it is a fetish [the sexual aspect, kink turn-on is a kind of lubricant] to allow what is fundamentally more important: the re-attachment. i can't but help suspect the oldest of anxiety, of castration, that is of disintegration, of death, absence being covered by that woman's underwear.

at any event, all of this is speculative since Curtis so far has not said more [anyway not that I know or that you report] nor did Cody, the male prostitute, reveal to you the game that they actually played prior to intercourse. if you had paid Cody, he might of course have lied, or maybe not, if you had managed to make some human contact with him, and pointed out that – aside sex and money – a human being was involved who deserved more than media exploitation. you pity him because Curtis pursuit is so lonely, well the GOP convention conviviality or anything along those lines certainly will not heal him. sincerely,


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MICHAEL ROLOFF
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