A Primer for the Small Weird Loves

A prominent motif is the male body degraded to the status of an object by another man. It manifests most conspicuously in Stanza 3, where a man turns his lover’s body into “a piece or real estate” (Line 27), “another fallow field” (Line 28), and “a table” (Line 30). These actions teach the objectified man “how to hate” (Line 26), probably both himself and his aggressive lover, who has “made a place for himself / inside” (Lines 32-33) his passive sexual partner. Stanza 4 describes a similar relationship, in which the dominant lover objectifies his partner by “push[ing his] flesh around” (Line 39) and using him as a “whipping boy” (Line 41), streaking his body with “the hoops of flame” (Line 43), that is, whip marks. The whipping boy, the “you” of the poem, himself objectifies another man in Stanza 7: “[Y]ou pin them down with your body and pretend they’re yours” (Line 82). This implies a cycle of sexual objectification, where a man with the history of being objectified perpetuates objectification of others. While the sexual dynamic of domination and submission can be a mutually respectful and pleasurable practice, it slides into objectification when fueled by internalized anti-gay bias expressed as a hatred of oneself or of one’s gay lover.