Monogamy and me

A certain kind of op-ed has started to crop up in local gay magazines. The author is usually a hunky 22-year-old who breathlessly asserts that allowing your boyfriend to sleep with other guys is the ultimate form of trust. His not-so-veiled implication is that this gay marriage business is the stuff of dour and heavyset gay people who aren't hot enough to be as free as every dance-floor tilt instructs us to be.

Open relationships--the ultimate form of trust? Tiffs is where I get lost. I have always believed that when I allow someone close to me to engage in genetically predisposed behavior, I am engaging in pacifism, or at best, a policy of nonintervention. Both can be admirable qualities in certain situations, but they don't qualify as an act of trust.

Let me say this up front. I have numerous friends in open relationships. That said, only a few of them have managed to turn this type of arrangement into something that strikes me as loving and functional. Meaning, they have stayed together for longer than a few weeks and haven't ended the relationship by hurling beer bottles at one another outside of a West Hollywood nightclub because one of them slept with a mutual friend who was deemed off-limits.

I do understand why gay men in open relationships may feel like they are under attack. Those of us who have thrown our hearts behind the pursuit of legal recognition for same-sex couples have lost all patience with talk of unconventional arrangements. But the reasons gay men who have chosen monogamy often harbor such harsh judgments for those in open relationships goes beyond politics. Tim fact is, the true open relationship--with its highly progressive blend of menage a trois and solo expeditions under strict, mutually enforced ground rules--has so many dysfunctional imitators. For instance, if your new beau is superhot and haft your age and you have reluctantly agreed to let him sleep around because you want to keep showing him off at pool parties, think hard before you call this an open relationship. Turning a blind eye is not the same as linking hands and kicking open the barn doors to let in all the other livestock.

As someone who has been in a monogamous relationship for three years, allow me to clear up a popular misconception about those of us who appear more buttoned-down: I have not had my inner sexual outlaw brainwashed out of me by an increasingly conservative gay mainstream. Please stop implying this. It suggests that no gay man is truly willing or able to change his sexual behavior over time, and that any partner who asks him to do so is taking greedy possession of a new toy, as opposed to demonstrating love for a human being to whom he is sexually attracted. These are dehumanizing generalizations of all gay men based on speculative evidence--or what we commonly call homophobia.

In an attempt to find some middle ground on this issue, I contacted an even-tempered friend in an open relationship and put the issue to him. Long-term relationships evolve, he said, and monogamy is not always the benchmark of commitment. His implication was startling: A relationship may start out open, then close its doors down the road, or vice versa.

Should this process diminish the worth of the relationship? After all, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single heterosexual marriage I admire in which at least one partner wasn't unfaithful over the years. The true measure of the marriage was in how both partners chose to respond to the infidelity.

Many of us are asking for legal recognition of our decision to grow and evolve with a partner of the same gender. If we start insisting that our relationships conform to unchanging categories of fidelity, we are denying ourselves the very opportunity we ask for.

Meanwhile I'll stick with monogamy. Maybe this will change over time. But for now, I can't enjoy the ocean with a single partner if I keep heading back to the pond for a dip with the guy I met five minutes ago.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Liberation Publications, Inc.
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