While doing research on the subject of gay marriage I got sidetracked onto the topic of monogamy in homosexual relationships. I began with the assumption that gay relationships valued monogamy in the same way as heterosexual couples.
Silly me.
The topic doesn't appear to be very popular in the gay community. After hours of searching, I was only able to find one full-length article from a 1998 issue of Advocate. Still, human nature doesn't change much in six years so I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the more informative areas. Initially, I was tempted to add my comments but then I realized these quotes say it all:
Monogomy: Is it for us?
The Advocate examines the controversial subject of monogamy from many angles
One of the hottest debates in today's gay world involves the m word. Is it for us, we wonder, or is it just aping straight society? Is it a basic human drive or a dumb social construct? And, of course, each of us wonders, Is it for me?
But this m word is not marriage. It's monogamy. Etymologically, the word means "one marriage." So how can it possibly apply to a group of people who are not legally allowed to wed?
…
"A commitment is something made by two people, not by a minister or license," Carmichael says.
But, in fact, two men or two women making a commitment is different from a man and a woman doing it. Evolutionary scientists say males and females set different standards for sexual partners. They argue that since sperm is cheap, males instinctively want to spread their seed among many partners, but eggs are precious, so females seek copulation with one mate who will be a good provider. Socially, that results in compromises--marriage and adultery--but what happens when two people of the same gender don't have to meet in the middle?
One result might be the old joke: What do two lesbians take on their second date? A U-Haul. What about two gay men? What second date?
Thus, says neuroscientist Simon LeVay, gays and straights can be seen as biologically similar: The males share an interest in casual sex, while the females want to settle down. He cites studies from San Francisco in the pre-AIDS 1970s showing that the average gay male had had 500 partners up to the time of the survey interview; the average lesbian, fewer than ten.…
Michael Cohen, a psychotherapist in Hartford, Conn., thinks monogamy is a social construct derived from religion and may or may not be natural.
…
Others disagree. Frances Donovan, who has "experience on both sides of the monogamy fence" and ducts workshops on that topic at educator and youth conferences, believes nonmonogamy is a negative definition. She prefers polyamory--the ability to love more than one person at a time--and says the key to successful polyamory is open, honest communication. At one workshop, participants listed several benefits of polyamory, including freedom, love, happiness, and trust.
Which brings us to two specific types of polyamory: threesomes and open relationships. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the strongest advocates for monogamy view threesomes with equanimity.
"They can be shared experiences that couples go through together," Berzon says. "The key is that it has to be both partners' choice. If it is, my job becomes helping them think about the best ways to make it work."
"There's a difference between emotional monogamy; and sexual monogamy," argues Cohen. "If a couple have threesomes occasionally and are still committed to each other, they can usually separate the two."
…
Most people draw the line at cheating--that is, having outside relationships without the knowledge or consent of one's partner. "The rules are simple: If you are in a monogamous relationship, you don't cheat," says Jeffrey Denke, 26, a video producer. "It is a matter of self-control and will." The best way to combat the desire to cheat, he says, is to "explore a variety of sexual encounters together. Third partners and other couples are a great way to add variety to sex."
Yet Ann Northrop, a lesbian activist and coanchor of the Gay USA cable TV news show, sees the debate about monogamy as "a window of opportunity" for gays to be honest about our behavior--far more honest, in fact, than straights, who from U.S. presidents on down have never been paragons of monogamy.
"We don't have the hypocritical, hierarchical heterosexual system of rewards" that flow to folks in monogamous, committed relationships, she says. "However, we also have not talked openly about what we want from a relationship, where sex and intimacy fit in, and what may or may not work for us." Now, Northrop believes, is the time.
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Way to go Joe. You hit the nail on the head here. This is the key I think, even with the marriage debate.
The marriage debate is more about monogamy than about children (where it often derails). This is why seniors past child-bearing age still marry.
I have seen quotes from homosexuals who have stated their desire to see polygamous, homosexual unions recognized as official marriage. Maybe this is anecdotal, maybe it is part of the larger goals of the gay rights movement.
We shun, rightfully, heterosexual married swingers in our society. And they are far, far in the minority. Adultery is far too common of course, but it is almost always done in secret.
I find it refreshing to read this article for its honesty. We hear about the gay couple that is committed and in love with each other, yet why then is there a need to bring in this third party?
posted on 02.17.2004 9:12 PM2
This sort of discussion is hardly rare, or new, in the gay community. There are many gays and lesbians who strongly value the right to marry, but few (none, more or less) who think of it as a gay ideal to have relationships that are as close as possible to the traditional hetero myth/ideal. The possibilities for different types of relationships have been common currency in the gay community and gay press for as long as there has been an open gay community.
I don't see what this proves about whatever issue you have in mind in raising the point. I honestly don't see what this article means to you at all. From your extensive quotes with no commentary, you obviously believe that the article "speaks for itself" - and that it articulates some sort of argument against gay rights - but what exactly you think it is saying I can't imagine.
You seem to imply that this kind of thinking is some sort of secret, or that some might claim it has disappeared in the last 6 years and isn't "really" how some people in the gay community talk about relationships. You seem to think that you have made a "discovery" in posting it. I can assure you (speaking as a gay-friendly, reasonably aware straight guy living in a city where it's hard to be ignorant of gay issues) that this kind of article is perfectly mainstream in the gay press. (Usually it's bewildered straights who drag in the evolutionary reproductive-strategy angle, but otherwise I see nothing above that I have not seen many times before in gay-targeted venues.) Such thinking is neither rare, nor secret, nor regarded as embarrassing among gays, nor is it among the many straights who are willing to consider relationship issues with an open mind.
But I still don't get what you think it means. The article, as I read your quotes from it, is a survey of differing attitudes toward relationship types within the gay community. Some seek monogamy, some seek "polyamory" in various forms, some look to generally-monogamous relationships with room for experiences outside the central couple. This is hardly earth-shaking. It is what almost anyone would have told you to expect if you had just asked what the range of attitudes toward sexual relationships was, among gays. And, perhaps more importantly, these are all very common attitudes in the straight community as well. "Open marriage" is a term that arose in the straight community (it could not be otherwise), and it is hardly new and hardly rare. The polyamory community is heavily hetero (a threesome, of course, has to include at least two members of the same sex, but in many polyamorous relationships the same-sex members do not have sex with each other; all-gay groups are rare). Do a Google search on these terms and you'll see. If you think this article proves that gays are "weird," or somehow unfit for marriage, then you simply haven't been paying enough attention to straights.
What this article really shows is that gays have - openly and for a long time now - been engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about what kinds of relationships can work and what kinds people ought to seek. It is a given in the gay community that one-partner-forever hetero marriages are not necessarily a model for gays, or even a healthy model for straights either. As "sexual outlaws" to begin with, legally denied the sterotypical relationship even when they ask for it, gays are in a position to look across the board and choose more freely. They have had the chance to think carefully about what relationships they most value, and try to find ways to make them work. And in seeking to broaden the accepted legal definition of marriage, not all of them want to stop at the obvious first step - monogamous marriage for gays - but choose instead to take the opportunity to create legally-recognized relationships that fit the various ways in which humans combine. You may think some or all of these are a bad idea, but there's nothing shocking - and nothing at all new - in taking the time to stop and think about it.
The article you quote simply proves - as anyone who reads the gay press already knew - that the "queer" community has been thinking and talking about such issues. The answers they come up with, not surprisingly, range across a wide spectrum - but one no wider than that also under discussion among many straights, and between straights and gays who share a common interest in defining relationships in healthy human ways, not merely by tradition.
What I think does characterize the gay community, vis a vis straights, is the lack of an overwhelming socialization into the expectation that only one possible answer to these questions is right, or moral. Gays, freed from straitjacket social expectations and faced with a range of answers to the question how to build fulfilling relationships, are quick to accept that many such answers - not just one - can be valid, and to seek social institutions, official or private, that make such answers livable. That strikes me as a very healthy approach to the issue. To assume - still less to insist on, and to impose upon others - a belief that only one possible answer is permissible, and that that answer can only be applicable to part of the community, while no other answer is permissible for the rest, seems to me both unhealthy and highly suspect on logical grounds alone.
What your article proves is that many gays are far ahead of many straights in thinking openly, creatively, and freely about human relationships - and that the rest of us have a lot to learn from that.
posted on 02.17.2004 11:25 PM3
What your article proves is that many gays are far ahead of many straights in thinking openly, creatively, and freely about human relationships
posted on 02.17.2004 11:44 PM