My Name is Eleanor B., and I Am Monogamous
Few things are as distasteful as the sight of a homosexual crowing from the rooftops that she or he is monogamous.
It is, in short, a betrayal of the gay and lesbian community to brag about monogamy. Even if you are monogamous.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with monogamy, it's a perfectly acceptable lifestyle choice. So as long as everybody involved agrees and approves, goodie for you. Whatever makes you happy.
But there's something about loudly and proudly declaring it out to the world that smacks of arrogant backstabbing.
You see, there is a difference between being gay or lesbian, and being, well, merely homosexual.
Let's define homosexual (or, gawd help us, an MSM, a man who has sex with men -- what, no WSWs?) as someone who has sex with others of the same gender.
To be gay or lesbian is to be a part of a culture and a cultural movement. And the culture of gay liberation is about more than just having sex with someone of the same gender -- it's about the idea of freedom.
It's an entire ideology that allows us, even forces us, to question and make our own decisions about how we want to live our lives.
It's about building a queer culture based on refusing the mainstream hetero values of marriage and monogamy that exist only because some miasmous zeitgeist said so.
Gay liberation is about having anonymous sex in parks, not because you're married and afraid to have gay sex anywhere else, but because it's fun and you happened to meet some cutie in the park.
Gay liberation is about glory holes. About fucking in the toilet of a lesbian bar.
I'm not saying everyone must do these things. Sex in bathrooms turns me off, personally. But gay liberation questions social conditioning, pushes the straights (and I use this word intending its many meanings) into thinking about their own hang-ups and helping to create a very different world.
About turning conventional morality on its head. About forcing people to refuse to judge based on sexual morality.
So all of you folks who e-mail me paens to your monogamous relationships: Good for you for knowing what you want. I'm not judging your personal decisions.
Declare your love for one each other wherever and whenever you can. That's what being out is about. That's the only way to force the bigots to deal with us -- by shoveling it into their faces.
But really, stop bragging about being monogamous. You're knifing the very gay liberation movement that helped us all come out.
You're saying hey, I'm not like those yucky bathhouse gays. I'm a Proper Gay.
I'm a button-down lesbian who's a Nice Girl. I behave.
Monogamy braggarts are setting up a two-tier system that allows heterosexuals to accept the homosexual but reject the icky promiscuous faggot.
Of course, many monogamy braggarts say they're specifically fighting the nasty stereotype of gay promiscuity.
They're missing the point. How many people you sleep with should have no bearing on your worth as a human being.
Proclaiming your monogamy makes all of the right-wing moralists out there feel comfy and liberal in their acceptance of proper gays, and allows them the freedom to continue to despise the bad gays.
I write all of this because, recently interviewed about my opposition to gay marriage, I was asked about monogamy and, faced with a rolling camera and the desire to be seen as open and sympathetic, I blurted out that my partner and I are monogamous.
I regret saying it.