DO OPEN MARRIAGES EVER WORK?: Brian Palmer

in Slate:

It works for some people. There has never been a scientific study of the success rate of open marriages, because different couples work out their arrangements in different ways. ...

According to psychologist Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, gay men are more likely than any other group to practice polyamory. For a forthcoming study, she asked 120 cohabiting couples in the Salt Lake City area whether they had explicitly agreed to have sex outside of their relationships. Almost one-quarter of the gay male couples said they had a polyamorous arrangement. That’s compared with about 7 percent of the heterosexual couples and 3 percent of the lesbians. Previous studies have suggested similar proportions, although none is large enough to state the prevalence of open marriage with any certainty. The character of the arrangement also differs between the groups. Among gay men, polyamory most often involves discrete sexual trysts. (Some of these arrangements are very specific, for example, allowing sexual infidelity only when one of the partners has crossed an ocean.) Lesbians are more likely to have a long-term second partner. The polyamorous couples in Diamond’s study reported the same level of relationship satisfaction as those who were monogamous.

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Labels: culture, gay couples, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, lesbians, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, polyamory, women

posted by Eve at 10:23 PM VOTE

ABORTION AND GAY MARRIAGE: Eve

I wrote about the pro-life/pro-gay-marriage stance, including its origins and a possible tension within it, about a year ago here.

Labels: abortion, culture, Eve Tushnet, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, women

posted by Eve at 10:26 PM VOTE

HOW TO STAY MARRIED: Anne Kingston

in Macleans:

Cynthia is a 68-year-old woman in a 45-year “committed marriage” who has figured out how to keep it that way. Every other month or so she goes out to lunch with her college boyfriend Thomas, who is also married and has no intention of leaving his wife. Usually their outings end in a hot and heavy “petting session” in his Mercedes. Sometimes, he rubs Jean Naté lotion, the scent Cynthia wore in college, onto her legs and compliments her beautiful feet. They’ve never consummated their relationship, nor do they intend to. Being with Thomas is “like a balloon liftoff,” Cynthia reports, one that eases some of the tensions between her and her 74-year-old physics professor husband. “I’m a nicer, more tolerant person because of this affair,” she says.

Cynthia’s story is one of more than 60 confessionals from long-time wives that punctuate Iris Krasnow’s new book The Secret Lives of Wives: Women Share What It Really Takes to Stay Married. And what their stories reveal is that marital longevity requires wives to establish strong, separate identities from their husbands through creative coping mechanisms, some of them covert. Krasnow spoke with more than 200 women, married between 15 and 70 years, who report taking separate holidays, embarking on new careers, establishing a tight circle of female friends, dabbling in Same Time, Next Year-style liaisons and adulterous affairs, and having “boyfriends with boundaries.” Yoga and white wine also feature predominately.

The 58-year-old Krasnow, an author and journalism professor at American University, writes she was “stunned by the secrets and shenanigans” in her journalistic journey through American marriages. She comes to the subject from the vantage point of her own 23-year marriage to an architect she loves but admits to “loathing” occasionally. She credits summers spent apart, separate hobbies and her close relationships with male buddies for some of their marital stability.

It’s a theory that builds on her previous books, Surrendering to Motherhood and Surrendering to Marriage, which extol the virtues of sublimating the self to a higher ideal.

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Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, Marriage, open relationships, women

posted by Eve at 10:11 PM VOTE

MONOGAMISH: Ari Karpel

in the Advocate:

When birth control pills were making Megan’s sex drive almost nonexistent, she told her boyfriend, Colin, what many gay men in a similar position might say to theirs: “If you want to have sex, feel free to sleep with someone else; just don’t tell me about it.”

Last year, after six years together and a year and a half of marriage, Colin’s chronic back pain was making sex less than fun. So he returned the favor: “Sleep around all you want,” he said. “Just don’t do anything stupid, and don’t tell me about it.”

That’s how Megan, now 25, and Colin, 26, college sweethearts who live in Minneapolis, came to fashion a committed, nonmonogamous marriage. They don’t flaunt their unconventional lifestyle (they requested that their last name not be used), but they are hardly alone. By designing a relationship that doesn’t fit a typical married couple, Megan and Colin have joined a small but growing number of straight couples who are looking to gay male relationships as the model for long-term, nonmonogamous unions.

Anti-equality right-wingers have long insisted that allowing gays to marry will destroy the sanctity of “traditional marriage,” and, of course, the logical, liberal party-line response has long been “No, it won’t.” But what if—for once—the sanctimonious crazies are right? Could the gay male tradition of open relationships actually alter marriage as we know it? And would that be such a bad thing? With divorce rates at an all-time high and news reports full of famous marriages crumbling at the hand of flagrant infidelities (see: Schwarzenegger, Arnold), perhaps now is the perfect time for the gays to conduct a little marriage makeover.

Welcome to Queer (Roving) Eye for the Monogamous Straight Couple Lie, brought to you in part by writer Dan Savage, who coined the term monogamish to signify committed relationships in which the partners are, he explains, “mostly monogamous, but there’s a little allowance for the reality of desire for others and a variety of experiences and adventure and possibility.” ...

Even many gay male couples, who Savage describes as having “perfected nonmonogamy,” fear disclosing that their relationship is anything but one-on-one. Gary (not his real name) is out in every area of his life, and his family is completely supportive. “But I don’t tell my family, even my brother—who I’m incredibly close with—that I have sex outside of the relationship with Ben,” his partner of 14 years, he says. “I have never said that to him.”

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Labels: culture, gay couples, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 9:33 PM VOTE

SCOURING THE GLOBE FOR SEX ADVICE: Salon

interviews Judith Stacey:

This is part of an ongoing Salon series of conversations about monogamy.

Whether in need of examples to bolster the fight for same-sex marriage or boost one's spirits in the face of disillusioning high-profile failures of monogamous marriage, one need only look to Judith Stacey.

The sociology professor at New York University is something of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest China. The result is her fascinating book, "Unhitched." It doesn't simply offer a mind-bending cross-cultural perspective -- you can find that in any Anthropology 101 textbook. Instead, Stacey uses her observations to underscore just out how stifling and unstable the Western romantic ideal of marital monogamy can be for some people, as well as the vast array of romantic arrangements that are already out there in the world. ...

I'll tell you about a very different society that I write about in my book, and that's the Mosuo people of southwestern China, an ethnic minority culture that does not insist on or value monogamy, nor does it care about biological paternity. It's a maternal extended family system in which adult children stay in the mother's extended family compound. They have "night visiting," there's no double standard of sexuality, men and women are each free to have as many or as few lovers as they wish. They can have exclusive long-term lovers, they can have multiple partners, they can be chaste, whatever. And all of the children that are born to the women belong to that family's household; the biological mothers and fathers don't live together. They don't have marriage, and the children are brought up by basically aunts, uncles and grandmothers. ...

I do think we can learn a lot from that culture. One of the things that's interesting is that because you don't have marriage, you don't have divorce or singlehood or widowhood or orphans. Everyone has a family and family security. In a culture that is so divorce-prone, I think there is a lot to learn from being able to imagine different ways of providing childcare and stability.

It seems harder to challenge our notion of romantic love than monogamy.

Absolutely. As I've written in the book, it's curious that the notion of fidelity should come to mean sexual exclusivity when it's really about faithfulness. I think it should mean integrity. For many, many people, including many of the gay men I studied, monogamy is absolutely essential and they wouldn't have it any other way. But plenty of others, including my gay male friends who have had 30-year, 40-year relationships, feel that sex can involve very little emotion and that it's OK to have a few escapades on the side without threatening their relationships. That idea is threatening to a lot of people. I've had some disagreements with a number of feminists who are afraid I'm giving men permission ...

more

Labels: adultery, beyond marriage, culture, gender differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships, polyamory

posted by Eve at 8:00 PM VOTE

THE FUTURE OF GAY MARRIAGE: Ross Douthat

in the NYTimes:

In 44 states, the future of gay marriage still depends on legislatures, governors and voters — and eventually, perhaps, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. But in New York, as in five states before it, gay marriage’s future is in the hands of gay couples themselves.

Over the decades ahead, their choices will gradually transform gay marriage from an idea into a culture: they’ll determine the social expectations associated with gay wedlock, the gay marriage and divorce rates, the differences and similarities between gay and lesbian unions, the way marriage interacts with gay parenting, and much more besides.

They’ll also help determine gay marriage’s impact on the broader culture of matrimony in America. ...

Still, there’s a third vision that’s worth pondering — neither conservative nor liberationist, but a little bit of both. This vision embraces the institution of marriage, rather than seeking to overthrow it. But it also hints that the example of same-sex unions might partially transform marriage from within, creating greater institutional flexibility — particularly sexual flexibility — for straight and gay spouses alike.

more (and more here; Mark Oppenheimer replies here)

Labels: adultery, culture, Dan Savage, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, Marriage, open relationships, Ross Douthat

posted by Eve at 1:22 AM VOTE

A FEW COMMENTS ON THAT NYT MAGAZINE COVER STORY: Eve

These are criticisms, not because I think everything in the piece was wrong but just because these are the only things I think I have to contribute to the discussion of Mark Oppenheimer's cover story.

1. There's gonna be a few things--maybe several things--you're gonna find really difficult to forgive. I was struck by the conflation of forgiving adultery and understanding nonmonogamy such that there is nothing to forgive in the first place. These actually seem to me like opposite moral positions, but both Savage and Oppenheimer (in his role as sympathetic conveyer of someone else's position) consistently conflate them.

2. Stay Together for Which Kids? On a related note, I'm struck by how the only players in this story are a) the adults (in the magazine story as printed it's really only the adults in the marriage, but even in Oppenheimer's comments here he only looks at e.g. the mistress, her boyfriend, or other adult parties who might be affected emotionally) and b) the children within the marriage. Have we really forgotten that sex still makes babies? There will be children of affairs, too, and so framing (heterosexual) adultery as a stay-together-for-the-kids plan strikes me as a great way to enhance the inherent inequality between children of the marriage and those outside it. Out-of-wedlock children, in this worldview, become unfortunate side effects of the sexual license designed to protect the marital children.

3. O reason not the need! But couldn't we all just be rational actors, contracepting demi-perfectly and backing it up with abortion? Then no worries!

But of course the whole weird premise of Savage's claim is that eros is so powerful and irrational, sexual fulfillment such an obvious non-negotiable, that... we should talk things out like rational adults before we get married and then stick to our rational rules and goals. Eros is simultaneously overwhelming--breaking down the strong norm of marital fidelity--and easily-tamed, contained within little well-contracepted well-communicated honest and generous mini-affairs.

Ultimately I think this piece, although it takes a really long time to hit its stride, offers a deeper analysis of Savage's ethic--both the good points and the bad.

Labels: adultery, children, culture, Dan Savage, divorce, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:20 AM VOTE

DAN SAVAGE ON THE VIRTUES OF INFIDELITY: Mark Oppenheimer

in the NYTMagazine:

...Although best known for his It Gets Better project, an archive of hopeful videos aimed at troubled gay youth, Savage has for 20 years been saying monogamy is harder than we admit and articulating a sexual ethic that he thinks honors the reality, rather than the romantic ideal, of marriage. In Savage Love, his weekly column, he inveighs against the American obsession with strict fidelity. In its place he proposes a sensibility that we might call American Gay Male, after that community’s tolerance for pornography, fetishes and a variety of partnered arrangements, from strict monogamy to wide openness.

Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.

“I acknowledge the advantages of monogamy,” Savage told me, “when it comes to sexual safety, infections, emotional safety, paternity assurances. But people in monogamous relationships have to be willing to meet me a quarter of the way and acknowledge the drawbacks of monogamy around boredom, despair, lack of variety, sexual death and being taken for granted.”

The view that we need a little less fidelity in marriages is dangerous for a gay-marriage advocate to hold. It feeds into the stereotype of gay men as compulsively promiscuous, and it gives ammunition to all the forces, religious and otherwise, who say that gay families will never be real families and that we had better stop them before they ruin what is left of marriage. But Savage says a more flexible attitude within marriage may be just what the straight community needs. Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves. ...

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

In their own marriage, Savage and Miller practice being what he calls “monogamish,” allowing occasional infidelities, which they are honest about. Miller was initially opposed to the idea. “You assume as a younger person that all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995, when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic about that kind of stuff.

“It was four or five years before it came up,” Miller said. “It’s not about having three-ways with somebody or having an open relationship. It is just sort of like, Dan has always said if you have different tastes, you have to be good, giving and game, and if you are not G.G.G. for those tastes, then you have to give your partner the out. It took me a while to get down with that.” When I asked Savage how many extramarital encounters there have been, he laughed shyly. “Double digits?” I asked. He said he wasn’t sure; later he and Miller counted, and he reported back that the number was nine. “And far from it being a destabilizing force in our relationship, it’s been a stabilizing force. It may be why we’re still together.”

While his marriage opened up gradually, Savage says that “there’s not a one-size-fits-all way” to approach nonmonogamy, especially if both partners committed to monogamy at the start. “Folks on the verge of making those monogamous commitments,” Savage told me in one of our many e-mail exchanges, “need to look at the wreckage around them — all those failed monogamous relationships out there (Schwarzenegger, Clinton, Vitter, whoever’s on the cover of US magazine this week) — and have a conversation about what it’ll mean if one or the other partner should cheat. And agree, at the very least, to getting through it, to place a higher value on the relationship itself than on one component of it, sexual exclusivity.”

Not that heeding our desires always simplifies matters. One recent writer to Savage Love thought he would enjoy seeing his wife fool around with another man, and initially did: “Almost every kinky kind was being had and enjoyed.” But when his wife had vaginal intercourse with the other man, something happened. “It was as if all the air in the room was sucked out through my soul,” he writes. Savage’s reply is pragmatic: “If there’s a sex act — say, vaginal intercourse — that holds huge symbolic importance for you or your partner, it might be best to take that act off the menu.” The answer, to Savage’s way of thinking, is smarter boundaries, not hard-line rules about monogamy.

For most people, sex cannot be so transactional; it is bound up with emotional need — to feel we excite our partner above all others, to believe that we have primacy in their lives. The question is whether it’s possible to act on our desires sensibly, as Savage would have it, while maintaining the special equilibrium we trust our marriages, or long-term partnerships, to preserve. Do we know our relationships well enough to go outside them?

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Labels: adultery, children, culture, Dan Savage, divorce, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, men, monogamy, open relationships, parenting, women

posted by Eve at 7:46 PM VOTE

WHAT STRAIGHT COUPLES CAN LEARN FROM SAME-SEX COUPLES: Seth Michael Donsky

in the NY Press:

Andrea Reese and Alice Ro have been engaged for just over a year. The Brooklyn residents, both in their forties, had hoped to get married in a civil ceremony in Manhattan City Hall this September and to celebrate with a ceremony in Park Slope. But that possibility remains doubtful as of press time.

Undaunted, the couple will now simply perform the civil ceremony elsewhere; Provincetown and Montreal are high on their list. But they will still celebrate with a secular ceremony in Park Slope. One of the ceremony's guests will be Andrea's ex-husband, John. He is, by Andrea's own admission, a "great guy," to whom she was married for four years (they had lived together for five years prior). They ultimately parted because they had lost the feeling of being a romantic couple and had become much more like buddies. "We have maintained a close friendship," says Andrea. "He's a big fan of Alice, and Alice and I are glad to have him at our ceremony."

Maintaining close ties to one's exes is a relationship dynamic fairly common in the LGBTQ community (as a matter of fact, my own boyfriend's two closest friends are long-term exes of his—and I like them fine). But maintaining close ties with former lovers after beginning new, committed romantic relationships, especially marriage, is only one of many unconventional relationship constructs— unconventional for opposite-sex marriages, at any rate—that same-sex couples are likely to import into the institution of marriage. And that's not necessarily such a bad thing. ...

The issues of gender roles can become compounded in relationships with children. Here, however, same-sex couples can also offer a beneficial model for married, opposite-sex parents.

Although Sarah and Sonia considered their relationship to be fairly free of conventional gender roles, they were surprised at how that changed after the birth of their first daughter. It turns out that both Sarah and Sonia wanted very badly to be "Mom," not one of two mothers, rather, "The Mom." They didn't know how to share that role, and it wasn't something they had even thought about discussing prior to their daughter's birth.

"In all the marriages around us," Sarah says, "never were the gender roles so clearly defined as when children entered the picture." They found themselves fighting over who would bathe their daughter, or racing each other to get to her crib in the morning. It was definitely not what their peers were experiencing with their husbands.

They had no examples to turn to, so they had to figure it out for themselves. "Once the sleep deprivation subsided and the enormous adjustments that all parents go through had worked their way out," Sarah explains, "we realized that it was possible to both be The Mom."

The fact that Sarah nursed their daughter fulfilled the part of her that wanted to be special. Sonia loved taking their daughter out for walks, which she considered her special bond, fulfilling that need in her. By the time their second daughter was born two years later, they were more secure in themselves and each other as parents. ...

Varied approaches to sexuality is probably the most taboo of the constructs that same-sex couples may import into marriage, and one that Coontz, of the Council on Contemporary Families, approaches very delicately. "I want to be very careful about how this is phrased, but there is a prevalence among some same-sex relationships, particularly gay male relationships, to establish long-term commitments while allowing for nonmonogamy," she says. "While this is not for every opposite-sex couple, just as it is not right for every same-sex couple, it is one of the ways that some people may handle the pressures of a world where people want partnerships but live long lives and have frequent opportunities."

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Labels: beyond marriage, children, culture, divorce, gay marriage, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships, parenting

posted by Eve at 1:32 AM VOTE

THE REAL REASON GAY MEN DON'T GET FAT: Brian Moylan

writes (hey, if I can post about "dadchelor parties" and What They Mean for Our World, I can post this too I figure):

New York gay about town and Barneys creative director Simon Doonan just sold a manuscript for a diet book called Gay Men Don't Get Fat. While this is true, the real reason why gay men don't get fat might not be the most marketable message. ...

Gay men, unlike their straight counterparts, don't have the luxury to stay in "fighting shape" just long enough to find a partner before letting their bodies fall to [junk] afterwords. No, gay men have to get buff, get married, and stay buff. Why? Because of three-ways, obviously. I'm going to let you in on a little secret: There are countless committed gay couples out there who like to either play on the side or invite guest stars into their beds. And you're not going to get any A-list guest stars if you're giving D-list torso with a four-star gut. Yes, gay men go to the gym to stay competitive, but since the man-eating marathon doesn't end after marriage, they just keep on competing and competing until death do they part.

The funny thing about the gay competition is that, because men (especially of the gay variety) are so visually stimulated, the only piece on the chess board that matters is having that traditional lean body. If straight men are lacking in some area, they usually make up for it by becoming rich or powerful, things that some women (see: Real Housewives of Orange County) find just as attractive as a washboard stomach dusted with natural body hair. But for gay men, only body will do.

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, homosexuality, men, open relationships

posted by Eve at 5:29 PM VOTE

A PROVOCATIVE NEW BOOK ON THE EVOLVING INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE: Ruth Franklin

in the New Republic:

There was something hollow about the hubbub last month over the revelation of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s split. As one of the weirder new clichés lately to invade the language puts it, we were shocked but not surprised. Nothing is less earthshaking these days than infidelity: According to current statistics, up to 50 percent of men and 40 percent to 45 percent of women cheat. No, the real scandal was not that Schwarzenegger had been unfaithful; his misbehavior had long been public knowledge. It was that, in fathering a child with his mistress, he had been spectacularly, stupidly unfaithful in a way that even a wife apparently accustomed to overlooking infidelity—a wife who had perhaps decided that a 25-year marriage, with four children, could withstand a few dalliances—could not ignore.

With infidelity now seeming less like a deadly plague and more like a relatively mild form of cancer—we all know someone who has suffered from it, even if we haven’t experienced it ourselves—does it still make sense for monogamy to constitute the basis for marriage? Or should couples figure out creative ways to expand the boundaries of their relationships, acknowledging that they might want to continue to be life partners even if one or both needs the occasional night off? This is the argument of Pamela Haag’s new book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules, in which “affair-tolerant” couples aren’t a regressive throwback—they’re the benchmark of a new kind of modernity. Its abundance of gimmicky catchphrases aside, this book asks serious questions about whether we have come to expect too much from contemporary marriage: a partner who is simultaneously an emotional and intellectual “soul mate,” a monogamous provider of sexual thrills, and a best friend to see us through our creaky final decades. If marriage has a hard time living up to these burdens—and a divorce rate holding steady at 50 percent suggests just how hard it is—maybe we ought to be thinking about ways to transform it.

Following Stephanie Coontz, who covered much of this ground more soberly in her book Marriage: A History, Haag notes that marriage has undergone a dramatic transformation from the “traditional” partnerships of the nineteenth century, when marriage was “a social institution and an obligation,” to the “romantic” marriages of the twentieth century, when the practice of choosing a partner for reasons of love rather than practicality first became widespread. Now, she argues, we are moving into a “post-romantic age.” People have become far more likely to marry in mid-life, when they already have established careers and friendships; and they are having children much later than their counterparts did 50 years ago. But they continue to organize their marriages around the same assumptions—assumptions that, possibly, no longer work.

more

Labels: adultery, culture, divorce, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 12:51 PM VOTE

Being a Prude in a Family of Libertines: Molly Jong-Fast

in Salon:

My mother fought for free love and the right to sexual expression. I fight the traffic as I squire my kids up and down Madison Avenue. Both sets of my grandparents had open marriages. I have a closed marriage (that’s where you only sleep with the person you are married to). My mother’s mother tells stories of sleeping with my grandfather in the woods and smoking "grass." There are not a lot of woods where I live in Manhattan. If it is every generation’s job to swing the pendulum back, then I have done mine.

My father’s father (Howard Fast) was famous for his communism, Spartacus and his various exploits with members of the opposite sex around Hollywood. One of my aunts is known at her prep school for being straight then gay and then straight again. A deceased grandaunt of mine was notorious for being one of the most sexually active octogenarians at The Hebrew Home for the Aged. ...

Later we unzipped our backpacks and placed the condoms in the center of the large wooden table. The teacher congratulated us for our courage and ability to remove money from our wallets. We then proceeded to open the condoms and put them on bananas. Even at the tender age of twelve we understood how profoundly misguided our teachers were. We weren’t stupid idiots. We knew how to go into a store and buy things. Most of us smoked at least a few cigarettes a day by twelve years old. We weren’t short bus riders. Kids have unsafe sex because they think they are invincible not because they are too stupid to buy condoms. It did not create a class of safe-sex zealots, as I think our teachers might have hoped. It did, however, make sex seem somehow unsexy.

more

Labels: contraception, culture, girls, Marriage, open relationships, pornography, sex, sex education, women

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:46 AM VOTE

THE PROBLEM WITH GAY MEN TODAY: Larry Kramer

interviewed in Salon:

...Salon spoke to Larry Kramer in his New York apartment about the importance of "The Normal Heart," iPhone's Grindr app and the problem with young gay men.

[KRAMER:] There are these issues now. It's just that you don't think of them as galvanizing, mainly because they're not so life and death. I cite marriage, although I'm sort of fed up with how long it's taken and I think we've gone about it the wrong way. I'm 76, and my partner is 64. I'll obviously die before he does, and the way the laws are written it's very hard to leave him anything of substance compared to what I have to leave. It all goes to taxes because we're not legally federally married and that's not fair, that's just not fair. You don't care about it at your age, but I care about it at mine, and there are a lot of older gays who should care about it as well. That should be a galvanizing issue. Anything that keeps us from being unequal should be galvanizing. I want what they have. I do. And everybody should. But again, people don't think that way. ...

The play suggests that one of the reasons there was so much meaningless sex in the gay community in the 1980s was because there was no gay marriage. Now that state marriages exist, do you think there's been a cultural shift away from that meaningless sexual culture?

I think there's still an awful lot of meaningless sex going on and the infection figures are still much too high and going up, so obviously there's still too much careless sex going on. ...

Are you familiar with Grindr, the iPhone gay sex app?

What?

It's an iPhone application that shows you how far away other gay men are, so you can have sex with them.

No. I'd be happy to use it now if I thought it would do anything. I get horny just like anybody else, and David [Webster, Kramer's partner] and I have been together a long time, so our relationship is now something else. I joined Daddyhunt or Manhunt and all those things, and posted my pictures, and filled out my questionnaire. And I got absolutely no response from anyone and it led me to wonder: What do older men do? It's very sad that suddenly there's no way to partake in all of this.

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Labels: AIDS, culture, gay couples, gay marriage, homosexuality, open relationships, sex, STDs

posted by Eve at 10:32 PM VOTE

WILL GAY MARRIAGE UNDERMINE MONOGAMY?: John Corvino

at 365Gay.com:

...But two things jumped out at me in Douthat’s discussion.

One was his quick statement that this correlation ["between sexual restraint and emotional well-being"] “is much stronger for women than for men.” (More on this in a moment.)

The other was the absence of any mention of same-sex marriage. As I’ve discussed before, Douthat has argued against marriage equality on the grounds that extending marriage to gays and lesbians would render the institution less able to address heterosexual challenges.

Douthat’s rationale for this assertion is vague, but it’s not difficult to put two and two together and form an argument....

There’s more than one place to attack this argument, but the weakest point, in my view, is at [5]: letting gays marry would undermine the norm of monogamy for everyone.

It should go without saying, but letting gays marry will not change the fact that straight sex makes babies or that straight relationships contain women.

It also won’t change the fact that at least half of same-sex couples ARE women.

Finally, it won’t change straight people’s ability to think for themselves, notwithstanding social conservatives’ apparent pessimism on this point.

While monogamy may be hard, it’s not so hard that a monogamous couple (straight or gay) can’t look at a non-monogamous couple (straight or gay) and conclude, “Nope, that’s not right for us.” After all, people read the Bible without deciding to acquire concubines.

More generally (and realistically), people encounter neighbors with different cultural mores while still preferring—and sometimes having good reason to prefer—their own.

As our opponents are fond of reminding us, gays and lesbians make up a relatively small minority of the population. Coupled gays and lesbians make up a smaller minority, coupled gay males an even smaller minority, and coupled gay males in open relationships a smaller minority still. As Jonathan Rauch has written in his excellent book Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, “We might as well regard nudists as the trendsetters for fashion.”

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, heterosexual couples, John Corvino, men, monogamy, open relationships, Ross Douthat, women

posted by Eve at 3:27 PM VOTE

THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE--AT LEAST MINE: Kate Dailey

in Newsweek:

...Why get married? Why not just see how it goes, or enter into some kind of legal partnership? Because I believe that my relationship with Brett is important, and I want to publicly recognize that. Because I want to go through life as part of a partnership, and I want to kick off that partnership in a meaningful way. Being a couple is hard, even when you’re in love, and having the institutional support, as well as the support of my friends and family who recognize what it means to be married, matters to me. There’s a reason that weddings transcend most cultures, and that so many people are now fighting with whole hearts to earn the right to marry: those reasons go far beyond property rights and health-insurance issues.

(That being said: although any government perks Brett and I will receive never factored into our decision, they’re a hell of a lot better than what’s provided by the patchwork system of civil unions and domestic partnerships currently in place. These are half measures to provide rights and benefits to people denied them by the government, and what rights and benefits they afford are more expensive and less comprehensive than what we’d get from marriage. Domestic partnerships are a consolation prize, one not intended to give heterosexual couples the protections of marriage without the totally unhip matrimonial association. That’s why most companies—including NEWSWEEK—don’t extend domestic benefits to heterosexual couples.) ...

Statistics about marriage are helpful only to a point, because marriage is such a personal and personalized thing: it reflects, not creates, the culture, ideals, and attitudes of the people involved. Getting married doesn’t suddenly increase one’s chances of wanting kids, or breaking up, or getting heart disease (I’ve found that any romantic partnership leads to increased fatty-food consumption and time spent lounging on the couch). For many couples, it doesn’t even mean lifelong monogamy. Marriage is how you define it—it doesn’t define you.

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Labels: beyond marriage, cohabitation, culture, gay marriage, gender, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 2:04 PM VOTE

Not Like Everyone Else: Chuck Colson

at Breakpoint:

Same-sex couples just want the right to be married like everyone else, or so the argument goes. They call it a civil right. You could hardly find a more innocuous argument, perfectly designed to appeal to all of us who believe in equal rights and fair play.

The only problem is that it’s not true. A significant percentage of same-sex couples do not want to get married “like everyone else.” Many of them want to create a whole new paradigm for marriage that has serious implications for the institution and for the rest of society.

Now, if you think I’m being bigoted about this, then perhaps you haven’t checked out the latest scientific research on the subject. A recent three-year study of homosexual couples in San Francisco--where many gay “marriages” have been performed--shows that half of them are in open relationships.

more (and more)

Labels: beyond marriage, culture, divorce, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, open relationships

posted by Imapp Staff at 2:03 PM VOTE

SAME SEX, DIFFERENT MARRIAGE: Mollie Ziegler Hemingway

in Christianity Today:

Same-sex marriage advocates frequently ask, "How would gay marriage affect your marriage?" The question is posed rhetorically, as if marriage is a private institution with no social consequences.

But The New York Times, of all papers, argues that gay unions could significantly alter marriage norms. A new study of gay couples in San Francisco shows that half are "open," meaning that partners consent to each other having sex with other people. The Times says that the prevalence of such relationships could "rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony" by showing straight couples that monogamy need not be a "central feature" of marriage and that sexually open relationships might "point the way for the survival of the institution."

In the gay community, open relationships are neither news nor controversial. Many of my partnered, gay male friends are in open relationships, some of which have lasted for decades. But the Times reporter, Scott James, who is himself gay, notes that nobody in an open relationship agreed to give their full name for the story, worrying that "discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage."

Indeed, some gay activists were upset with the Times. Gay political commentator Andrew Sullivan derided the piece and pointed to several critiques of the study. However, Sullivan himself has made the same argument, saying that gay male unions could "help strengthen and inform" traditional marriages. ...

To be sure, some advocates of same-sex marriage hope that heterosexual marital norms of monogamy and fidelity would be transferred to same-sex unions. But since these norms are based on the ideal that marriage is the union of a man and woman making a permanent and exclusive commitment for the purpose of bearing and rearing children, it would be irrational to expect same-sex partners—whose sexual relations bear no risk of procreation—to share the same norms.

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, Judith Stacey, Marriage, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 2:52 PM VOTE

STUDY EXAMINES GAY MALE NON-MONOGAMOUS RELATIONSHIPS: Bay Area Reporter

reports:

Addressing a topic that's often taboo when talking about same-sex marriage, an Oakland couple recently presented a study of the complexities of open gay male relationships.

Lanz Lowen and Blake Spears, who have been together for 35 years – and who have always had a non-monogamous relationship – were in Palm Springs the weekend of April 9 for a Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality conference to talk about "Beyond Monogamy: Lessons from Long-Term Male Couples in Non-Monogamous Relationships."

"The study came out of our experiences of being non-monogamous, but not having a roadmap," Spears said in an interview. "Generally, it worked out well. Sometimes it didn't, but there was very little that we could find in the available literature for couples that chose to be non-monogamous. We felt this would be a way of creating information for other couples who found themselves in the same situation that we're in."

Finding couples willing to talk about their open relationships was challenging, but the couple eventually interviewed 86 couples over four years. ...

"We recognize that by posting this study and maintaining this site we run the very real risk that the 'Religious Right' can use this information to further their efforts to fuel fear and deny [LGBTs] the right to marry," the men note on the website, http://www.thecouplesstudy.com.

However, in the study, they say that when California briefly legalized same-sex marriage in 2008, they began hearing "more and more of our study participants mention their marriages. ... [A] majority of the study couples from that point forward spoke of being married."

As a gay community, "if we don't want to replicate the heterosexual divorce rate, we might begin looking for ways to talk more openly about how our relationships really work," the couple says in the study.

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Labels: gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, heterosexual couples, men, monogamy, open relationships

posted by Eve at 5:24 PM VOTE

The Future of Marriage and Nontraditional Relationships: KPBS

discussion:

MAUREEN CAVANAUGH (Host): I'm Maureen Cavanaugh, and you're listening to These Days on KPBS. The big news about marriage recently is how many more people want to give it a try. Many gay and lesbian couples are working hard to achieve the right to marry in California, a right same sex couples have already achieved in five states and the District of Columbia. In addition to being part of a struggle for equal rights, the move toward same sex marriage might also be seen as a validation of monogamous relationships. But not everyone agrees. At the same time that some are working for marriage, the polyamory movement is gaining strength in some urban areas and on the internet. Polyamorists believe in ethical non-monogomy by openly engaging in intimate relationships with more than one person at a time. And if that sounds like old fashioned hippie free love to you, you may not be so far off the mark. Joining me to discuss what place polyamory may have in the future of relationships are my guests. ...

CAVANAUGH: And I wonder, what legal status, if any, would people have in a multi-partner relationship?

BOWERMASTER: It depends on whether there’s a marriage involved, okay? But with regard to just children, the biological ties will be defining for the most part. On occasion, in California and some other states, they’ve recognized what they call de facto parents but we’re not going to do that at the expense of the primary biological connections. And, you know, there’s only so much time in a child’s day and if you, you know, have more than one or two parent figures, the court, if it breaks up, doesn’t have the opportunity to arrange for all of those people to keep their connections.

CAVANAUGH: You know, Janet, even in a monogamous relationship, in a marriage relationship, divorce can be very messy and very complicated. I wonder what the legal hazards are in this kind of an open relationship that we’ve been talking about?

BOWERMASTER: Well, if we’re talking about a married couple that’s in the constellation, they may agree at the time but even polyamorous relationships go south, I’m sure, just like every other characterization of a relationship, and then there are some legal possibilities that come up that can be dangerous. For example, we may have agreed at the time but now I’m really angry and it seems to me that I didn’t really agree and, therefore, you were committing adultery and I am going to file for a fault-based divorce—in most states it’s available—and then I get certain benefits for property, for usually not custody anymore but for property and for alimony. Or we can talk about child custody, and we don’t usually take fault into account but we look at what’s best for the children and to the extent that there are those in society who think, you know, that this polyamory effort is immoral, they would then have a bias against putting the child in the care of a person who remained in the relationship and tend to favor the one who had left.

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Labels: culture, divorce, open relationships, parenting, polyamory, polygamy, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 9:25 PM VOTE

LONG-TERM NON-MONOGAMOUS MALE COUPLES: Tom Moon

in the San Francisco Bay Times:

Blake Spears and Lanz Lowen have been together for over 34 years. They told me that they still have great sex, contradicting the common belief that sexual interest inevitably wanes in a long-term relationship. How do they do it? “One reason,” Lanz said, “is that we’ve been in an open relationship from the very beginning. If we hadn’t been open, we wouldn’t have been able to grow individually or as a couple.” But, they write, this was a journey they took “without a roadmap… Information about how couples navigate this terrain is surprisingly lacking. We were curious about the experience of others and assumed many long-term couples might offer valuable perspectives and hard-earned lessons.”

So, a few years back, they decided to use their combined training and experience in research and psychology to do an independent, in-depth study of other long-term open gay male relationships. ....

The study includes a summary of previous research on non-monogamy, in which the authors report that “Most research shows that approximately two-thirds of long-term male couples who have been together for five years or more are honestly non-monogamous,” and that “Multiple studies have found no differences in relationship quality or satisfaction between samples of sexually exclusive and non-exclusive male couples.”

Despite those findings, they had a hard time recruiting participants. They had no trouble finding non-monogamous couples, but relatively few who wanted to talk about it. One man who chose to participate said “Having an open relationship feels like a funny way of being in the closet again. Family and friends expect that we’re monogamous, and we don’t tell them we’re not. It’s like a secret….In our community and society, it feels like something huge isn’t being talked about or studied or understood.”

more (the study itself can be downloaded here as PDF)

Labels: culture, gay couples, men, open relationships

posted by Eve at 6:59 PM VOTE