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Were gays responsible for September 11th? So said former televangelist Jerry Falwell shortly afterwards on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club." But even the apocalyptic Christian Right did not try to pin the deed directly on homosexuals who, along with feminists and abortion doctors, Falwell claimed, helped provoke 9/11's divine retribution on America. The charge about more direct homosexual responsibility for the attack was made, ironically, by more mainstream media. In a piece entitled "A World Without Women," the New York Times claimed that the fondness of Afghani men for each others' company deprived them of civilizing feminine influence. Earlier, a Times correspondent in Peshawar limned the homoerotics of a pro-Taliban rally, where the men protesting made their mascot a boy whose delicate features they enhanced with makeup and then held aloft to methodically punch the air, intoning "Death to America." Spy novelist John LeCarré, writing in The Nation, said that Osama bin Laden's video pronouncements had the airs of a "narcissistic homosexual." And the National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid whose Florida offices were targeted with anthrax, went out on a limb, declaring that hijacking ringleader Mohammed Atta was avowedly queer, a mama's boy who spent his last night on earth sharing a hotel with his male beloved after a kinky session of gay pubic shaving.

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This is not a war against Islam, the US insists. Maybe, then, it's a battle between an upright, heterosexual West and a backward, decadent, homosexual East.

Though occurring in the year 2001, long a symbol of the hyper-modern, the attack of September 11th bore marks of the archaic. The shibboleths of globalism-- that enlightened self-interest makes the world go 'round, that deep ideological disagreements disappeared with the Berlin Wall-- seemed to go up in smoke. The live TV image of the burning towers was instantly, nightmarishly iconic, as if conjured from an illuminated manuscript about Armageddon or a Greek tale about Zeus on a vengeful streak. Millions fell for an Internet ruse claiming Nostradamus had foretold the whole thing. Whoever was responsible for the horror could indeed have stepped out of legend-- a malign inversion, perhaps, of the Jews who sacrificed themselves before Roman conquerors at Masada or of Mexico's Niños Heroes, the cadets who flung themselves to their deaths from a precipice to avoid capture by invading Americans.

Can one read homoerotics into the disciplined choreography of the hijackings, the conspirators' shared blood-bond, their instrumental relation to their own bodies-- like a dancer or body-builder's-- even perhaps to their cruelty?

Doing so could get you in a tangle with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or even send you up against hate-speech laws. Sexual orientation, we are told, is a fact of individual psychology that points to nothing about character. Sex may be "socially constructed," as the academic jargon has it, like the hemlines this fall in Paris, but that's only a way of indicating sex's deeper insubstantiality, its status as mere performance. "So what if Mohammed Atta was gay?" GLAAD could reply to the Enquirer "there's a ten-percent chance of it among Air Force pilots and voodoo priestesses, as well as kamikaze Muslim terrorists." But is there perhaps a hidden kernel of truth to this linkage of homoeroticism and terror? Do the sexual dynamics of 9/11 hold any keys to its significance?

America fucked

News hounds may feel some dèja vu about the speculation surrounding gays and September 11th. A plane hitting the World Trade Center figured in an April, 1999 story also linked to homosexuality. That was when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold rampaged through Columbine High in Colorado, killing 13 fellow students. The two youths were said variously to have been queer or to have been taunted as such until they snapped. Either way, their murderous rampage was also a suicide pact redolent of twisted, tragic romance. Had they survived the carnage they began, the two had half-baked plans to hijack a plane to New York and die together crashing it into the World Trade Center.

One needn't be as sensitive to phallic iconography as Klebold and Harris to have seen the Twin Towers as leading exemplars, or to see September's assault on them, together with the Pentagon, as a symbolic castration-- an act that at once takes away the victim's manhood and shows the victor to have been in its thrall.

But perhaps the most accurate sexual metaphor for 9/11 isn't castration but forced sodomy, man to man. The naive shock of anal penetration, which never wholly fades with experience, includes awe that cock can fit through asshole. Who could believe their eyes when skyscraper absorbed jetliner in a ball of fire? This was sex negated-- sperm-meets-egg causing death, not life. But sodomy, in its most artful deployments, plays with the same dynamics, toys with the rectum as grave. The terror attack's wastage and excess, moreover, are elements in male sexual posturing-- the peacock's plumes, a duel between rivals in love, or the millions of sperm spawned every day only to die. The unspeakable rain of falling bodies from the stricken towers, an image even TV shrank from, was like some diabolical ejaculate.

Parasites up the ass

The 9/11 attack suggests sodomy also in the ways it was parasitical, as anal sex always somewhat is. Even when savored by candlelight beneath a down quilt, pushing a cock up a lover's bottom hijacks his biology. It's all part of the game. Being fucked provokes a symphony-- sometimes an agony-- of sensation and reflex. Center-stage are the impulses around shitting, but more generally at stake is the self's sense of integrity and control. The feelings are so automatic and wired that anticipation or repetition barely diminishes them.

In plunging airliners into New York's tallest buildings, the attackers turned the tools of the West against itself. But more subtly, the assault's cultural impact depended on parasitically exploiting America's fine "reflexes." These were not reflexes around elimination of waste, but rather the production of images, which our new information economy has made the end-product of social metabolism. Timing was flawless. The 20 minutes between the crashing planes was enough to insure that cameras were trained on the Twin Towers from every angle.

Decadence has been defined as the difference between partaking in an orgy, and partaking while keeping an eye cocked on the proceedings. Islamic culture is biased toward decorously avoiding looking-- its art is reticent about depicting creatures with souls and traditionally veils what it finds most beautiful. The West, by contrast, dashes headlong into visibility and exposure.

For all their actual horror, pictures of 9/11's events were inevitably filtered by media-savvy Westerners using the part of the brain that rates special effects. Unease at this automatic complicity in the pleasure of destruction prompted one terrorism expert to advise that sports events be broadcast with a five-second delay, so that if anyone blew up the stadium, folks watching TV at home could be prevented from seeing it. Score one for homeland security.

Return of the heroic

September's attack was so like getting fucked up the ass that it even captured sodomy's subtlest dualism. Male-penetrating-male hovers on a semantic razor's edge between fortifying and derogating masculinity. For the Greeks, always worried about effeminacy, being on the virtuous side of that distinction required the passive party in anal sex to be adolescent. The relationship in which the penetration ideally occurred, they argued, was one through which a boy would be taught and tended toward man's ways. Other cultures have a more literal take on the same idea, figuring sperm as a sort of Tonic of Virility. But another, not necessarily mutually exclusive, way of seeing being fucked as fortifying is to dwell precisely on the pain, considering it a challenge to be overcome. US Marines who like being penetrated-- and apparently many do, independent of any exclusive gay orientation-- want to prove that they can "take it like a man."

For America's political, financial, and military establishments, 9/11 was like getting fucked up the ass, as in "raped"-- a violation that they felt cried for vengeance, now being wreaked, predictably mostly upon people innocent of the crime. But hundreds of firemen and cops who rushed into the Twin Towers to do their duty were "fucked" as well-- as in, "killed"-- in the collapse. For them, or those who memorialize them, being fucked was something wholly honorable. So troubled is Western manhood at the turn of the millennium that this unexpected heroism has been widely noted.

Homo v. Homo

Osama bin Laden would probably show grudging admiration for New York's firefighters and police. His videos are no longer shown by Western media, so possibly he has. Bin Laden has expressed clear contempt, however, for America's push-button warriors who drop bombs from high altitudes in order to keep themselves out of harm's way. As a result, of course, the bombs often miss targets, rendering the odd Afghani hospital or Kosovar refugee convoy "collateral damage." Not that Bin Laden loses sleep over killing civilians. But by the standards set by the suicide fighters evidently loyal to him, the high-flying Americans are just wimps.

Such cluck-clucking is partly a culture clash of divergent homoeroticisms.

Every society needs to figure out what to do with its males, anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote. Males, young ones especially, cut-up more than their opposites, are less socially connected and empathetically attuned. They are dangerous if they don't find a place in the social structure, and they may not without some special attention. In almost all premodern societies-- that is, all societies until recently-- women's work centered around child care and domestic life, work tending to be continuous from girlhood. Men's labor was a wildcard, varying more by locale and station in life, and often involved skills picked up in adolescence after leaving the home.

The empathetic deficits of males have a payoff in their propensity to coordinate together in gangs. Since in most human societies, women marry outside the natal group, the males left behind in a locale tend overall to be related, which abets their potential unity, and, in evolutionary terms, justifies sacrifice within and ruthlessness to outsiders-- if my genes don't get passed on, my cousin's might.

"I am not just a human being," sex chronicler Boyd McDonald said, "I am a piece of meat." The gang, and a good deal of male social life, consists of the curious pleasures of being pieces of meat together. The traditional homoeroticism of male life-- at school, in sports, or the military-- serves to focus the power of the male gang, root its members together, coordinate and constrain them. Overt homosexual relations occur in these contexts only covertly, or at the margins. Any port city from the mid-19th century to the 1960s would offer up sailors ready for blow-job, and we all know what used to go down in the Boy Scouts.

In the West, that sort of homoeroticism has mostly played itself out, because in modern societies, those homosocial bonds are no longer necessary in economic and political life. Work involves less brawn, more information, less face-to-face contact, more global coordination.

Moreover, homosocial bonds have been proven susceptible to political exploitation. In World War 1, men were enticed to enlist with the promise that they could fight with their buddies from their hometowns, as if they were taking up arms to defend their communities rather than their national elites' moral and political bankruptcy. The result was that entire cohorts of men were wiped out in many places. Even worse, a taste for militarist regimes grew from the recollection of wartime's heady camaraderie, memories which, for many survivors-- such as Adolph Hitler-- were cherished as peak experiences in the interwar gloom. By the end of World War 2, with the nuclear age dawning, the significance of military bravery and solidarity was waning. As just another technology-intensive service industry, armies in the West heterosexualized, and with old homosocial bonds less significant, could contemplate at least a tepid embrace of people avowing gay and lesbian identity.

The modern Western system, the free-market, and the diminishing importance of locality and its homosocial ties have brought widespread material prosperity and technological marvels. Labor-saving devices and birth control have achieved something approaching sexual equality, and vastly increased individual autonomy. This is the context of the lesbian and gay movement's success. But the freeing of homosexual relations has a curious foundation-- their new cultural irrelevance.

The freedoms gained in the West during the long post-War transformation have peaked, and are now clearly reversing. Hannah Arendt noted that totalitarianism was the only new form of authority to emerge in the 20th century. Though fascism and communism were vanquished, the West shows disturbing signs of totalitarian creep. The transformation is driven in part by the peculiar dynamics of life saturated in media-imagery and short on the real, long-term, concrete human relations. Whether the danger is drugs, kiddie sex, or terrorism, the threat could be lurking anywhere. Their miasmic omnipresence demands a steady increase in state power. The liberation movements of the 60s, rather than protest, have generally joined the victomological gravy train.

But if the West's market system shows signs of strain at home, there are huge cracks around the world. The Asian tigers' success story of export-led growth is not about to be repeated in the Middle East, Africa, and large swathes of Asia, where millions of young men have no jobs, or earn next to nothing for backbreaking labor with no prospect of improvement. They have nothing to lose, find their societies run by corrupt elites in hock to America, and find their cultures awash in Western imagery all at once alien, alluring, and threateningly revealing of how far they are-- materially at least-- behind. Such people are ready prospects for a message of violent radical transformation that offers purpose, claiming a basis in a purified form of their own culture's bedrock, and is suffused with a beguiling homoerotics.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com