Sodomites

Why do good writers, good authors who write "literature", use sodomy as a topic?  It's all over the literary map.  Faulkner used it in his Nobel-prize winning novels, and at the other end of the literary spectrum, O'brien used it in tales of high adventure.  Back in my adolescent bar - hopping days, sodomy was a favorite topic, good for snickers and loud guffaws.  That was in another century. 

In My More Than Sister, available in two weeks for Kindle, I made the heroine work with a homosexual.  They become friends and finally, when he saves her life, their relief and excitement brings them to sex and the heroine gets pregnant.  The reader is told in the epilogue that their daughter has two daddies and one mommy, and life is good.

At first I didn't know why I made that character a homosexual.  But apart from my positive personal experience with gays and lesbians, as I wrote that first scene which called for his presence I needed contrast to the bad guy, who was in love with his own testosterone.  Et voila!
I doubt that any writer writes about sodomy for humorous content any more, and I don't think they necessarily include it for good drama, either.  Good drama is available everywhere; on radio and television, in every hospital waiting room and police car, and even in restaurants where people are supposedly having a nice time.  There's a school of thought which says we write books containing deviant sex because our deep, dark, forbidden, hidden desire tends in that direction.  There is another school that says we're just curious about how the other half lives (that is, if the other half is the one that does NOT indulge in deviant sex and we DO).  Yet a third school of thought says that we need the education and like research.  That's nonsense, but I have heard it said.

The love of my life, and my most faithful love, was a homosexual man.  For 12 years he and I shared a mutually confiding relationship which was closer than many brothers and sisters enjoy, even when we moved hundreds of miles apart.  Often during that 12 years we literally saved one another's sanity.  He was a dignified New Englander and a fun loving, deeply religious, baseball-loving sodomite.  He died of AIDS.  I miss him.  If there's anything to the theory about wish fulfillment in the writer's work, maybe that's why I made my heroine fall in love with a sodomite. 

As I said, et voila!