Growing up as a gay kid in Spain was an utterly daunting experience. I started out by performing my attraction to girls, as all the other boys were doing, only to later find myself actually feeling attraction toward boys. So the realization that I was a homosexual actually brought me some peace as I could finally explain myself, at least to myself. But that peace of mind didn’t last very long. Years into my faggotry I noticed that a sexual feeling was still there but in an inactive way. I felt it toward my girl friends, in fact, toward anyone and anything I liked. However, not in the sense of wanting to fuck them. It turned out it was a sort of sexual energy that, despite being passive, reinvigorates my friendships. Confusing, I know.

Of course, I could have turned to Freud for help, who’s mused about the sexuality of adults and children, but I intentionally left him out of the equation. First because he was a sexist who saw women as hysteric and dishonest, and second, many of his theories tended to remove responsibility from the subjects, which is an easy cover for all the cunts out there. Sorry that I’m a compulsive liar, but it’s because my mother didn’t give me enough love as a child.

So faced with this passive sexual attraction conundrum, I turned to art, not for answers but for relief. It’s in art where sex and sexuality are often expressed as an intrinsic part of life and our relationships with other people and the universe. It was through art that in the Renaissance people started admiring the bare body. The nakedness continued throughout the centuries and even when contemporary art hit, with Duchamp’s “The Fountain” in 1917, it was in the form an upside down urinal, which wasn’t very classically sensual but incredibly (homo)sexual. Art, whether seen as beautiful or not, has the power to unpack the sexuality of things and beings. Art legitimizes sexuality by awakening our senses and making connections we don’t come to ourselves. Look at Hokusai’s “Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” (1814), in which an octopus symbolizes the complexities of female pleasure; or at Sarah Lucas’s “Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab” (1992) – the kebab positioned below the eggs on the table as a clear reference to a vagina; or at Chris Ofili’s “Monkey Magic – Sex, Money and Drugs” (1999), in which he writes the word “sex” on a lump of dung. The aforementioned artists and others are experts in finding the sexual potential of objects, not as a sexual tools – remember The Exorcist and American Pie? – but rather as representational tools of the sexual energy existent in the world.

But what really brought me some sanity with regards to my passive sexual attraction toward my friends was Marina Abramovic and her work “Balkan Erotic Epic” (2006). In this video, the artist brings to life various tales in Balkan folklore about how sexual organs are used against sickness and evil forces. Among other advices, there’s one that suggests how a mother could save her child from the evil eye by touching her vagina and rubbing the child’s face with the same hand. What’s remarkable about this totally-not-weird video is that it gives so many examples of how sexuality and eroticism permeate life, in a passive way, in so many forms. This was one of the artworks that really helped me recognize and accept sexuality as a valid energy to exist in our relationships and to embrace them.

What might be tricky is how not to get carried away by this and actually attempt to have sex with that person you have a great sexual energy with. That thin line is hard to spot, but crossing it might well explain the awkward sex we’ve had with someone we presumably fancied, or not. Sometimes in a friendship, the sexual energy is better used in putting on events together, or on that artistic project you started doing but never finished because you started boning each other instead of working.

You see, sexual energy doesn’t necessarily have to be about having sex, even if it often is. And I still haven’t figured out how to best channel this energy in my friendships, but now that I’m aware of this I’m more than willing to try it out in all possible ways; failure makes perfect.

Image: Daily Squirt