Let me be clearer about what I meant when I wrote:
"There seems to be no advantage to suppress people's desire. And unlike race, gender, ethnicity, etc., sexual desire is not socailly constructed."
My desire for cock exists in me. It has no social construction. It acquires social construction when sexual categories are invented. Whether I am considered a criminal, a sexually diseased person, a homosexualist (Vidal), a queer or anything else, the desire is there and will exist whatever social construct is arrived at.
The same with melanin. We all have a certain degree of melanin in our skin. It is socially constructed into the concept of race.
We all have gentalia of one sort of another. These attributes are then formed into the social construct of gender.
What puzzles me is the elimination of the erotic from so much Marxist thought (see Simon Edge's "With Friends Like These.")
Audre Lorde put it best for me:
"The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel"
To me part of being human is to have sexual/erotic desire. This desire gets constructed in a whole lot of ways, but seems to be part of being a human being. I remember reading a while back that there were 4 desires that all human beings had: for salt, water, sex and I forget the fourth. I do not know if this has been debunked, but I think a lot of revolutionary thought is intentionally desexualized, which often renders it homophobic.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Resister