Douglas Messerli | "Sleeping with Yourself: Two on Twins" [Introduction]

sleeping with yourself: two on twins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gay men—I honestly have no idea whether or not it is true of lesbians as well—have long been fascinated by the sexual allure of the identical twin. One might immediately jump to the conclusion that this attraction has something to do with the Narcissus complex that underlies so much of gay mythology; for many decades psychiatrists attributed homosexuality as being a manifestation of a severe condition of narcissism which explained the attraction to the same sex. I think, given the crippling self-hatred experienced by so many gay men throughout history, however, that we can quickly dismiss that notion.

     Perhaps it is just the possibility of finding someone of the same sex who shares so very many things in common without having to go through the difficult process of finding a compatible other in a world in which, given the LGBTQ minority, there is so much less possibility of selection that attracts us to the twin—someone who knows and loves you completely from birth—makes everything else so easy. And if you like your own appearance, that makes it even better. It is certainly the most succinct example of the metaphor of falling in love with someone “at first sight.”

     Moreover, identical twins are themselves born outsiders, a minority that seems queer to the normative world simply because of the deep bond and interconnected thinking of brothers unavailable to others. As I’ve often written, the idea of doubles and doubling have long been intertwined with gay consciousness.

      And finally, since a 1980 study of twins and homosexuality—as I have noted elsewhere in these pages—found that 65.8% of monozygotic twins (identical twins) were diagnosed as having a homosexual orientation, while only 30.4% of dizygotic twins showed that orientation, there is not only evidence “supporting the argument for a biological basis in sexual orientation,” but some statistics arguing that identical twins “have a shared genetic predisposal to same-sex sexual behavior.” In short, identical twins not only seem to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic but that monozygotic twins themselves are prone to same-sex desires. 

      Gay porn, with its many famous twin sexual performers, might certainly seem to argue for their gay appeal: the early Bruce Weber shoot of the Carlson twins (who later claimed not be sexually active with one another), and the numerous porn films featuring the Peters, Mendez, Goffney, Fischer, Studding, King, Aston, Boston, Stax, Mercury, Odyssey, Rosso, and Otov twins, as well as the Visconti triplets—twins are a staple of the gay-porn diet.

      Several films have approached this topic, but in 2010 German director Florian Gottschick rather straightforwardly took on the subject in his Zwillinge (Twins), not to be confused with Ivan Reitman’s 1988 comedy of the same title which improbably paired Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, about to be, so I read only today, revisited in a sequel.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).