Sexuality in CAP

[methodwriter85]

Over at the reviews, I saw a review that stated this:

 

I think Gathan is basically gay - but he fell in love with Kristen and that made that relationship seem to work - at least for him.

 

With all due respect to the guy who posted that, I couldn't have disagreed more. Gathan's not gay. He's not straight, either. It might be easy to call him bisexual, but I'm not sure about that either. What has been interesting here is that you've got a guy who doesn't really put any label on himself because he's not really attracted to the gender of the person that he falls for. Gender doesn't play a role into who he's attracted to, and I feel like that's been pretty consistent all throughout the story.

 

Which is reflective of his generation- Adam Phillips has written at length about masculine men who have an ambiguous sexual orientation, and how more and more guys are using terms like "straightish" to describe who they are, or refusing labels all together. He wrote a blog once that talked about how bi/straight guys seem to be getting dismissed by gay guys as being in denial. I thought it was interesting, and pertinent to the discussion of Gathan's murkier sexuality.

 

http://willonething.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/135/#comments

 

It makes me wonder- why exactly would Gathan need to declare himself as "gay", or as "straight", or any particular label? If Gathan was gay, he would have said so. Same if he were straight, but able to enjoy having sex with men.

 

I liked that Mark went there with Gathan. We had that somewhat with Matt, who I actually would call basically gay, but enjoys sex with women every now and then. I think the reason why Matt seems to identify as gay would probably be because he doesn't seem to get that much of an emotional attraction there- it's only physical when it comes to women. Whereas with Gathan, it really does seem like gender just doesn't factor in at all. Which is pretty cool.

 

I guess I'm going to wonder...why would it be important for Gathan to declare a concrete sexuality? It reminds me of the chapter in Millenium, where Brad ponders the sexuality of his children. "Bisexual" or "pansexual" never came up with Brad, and I remember Mark saying the reason it didn't was because there was a strict "gay" or "straight" binary that existed when Brad was coming of age as a teenager in the early 80's.

 

That starts to shift in the 90's leading into the 2000's, and I'm glad we have Gathan reflecting that.