Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

So this week in my integrated interpersonal communications theory / women’s studies / sex education program we spent a lot of time on sexual orientation, relationship patterns in groups with different orientations (surprisingly similar overall, by the way), and marriage and weddings. This is one of those areas where I’ve long known a lot of abstract and public-policy-level stuff. (I was surprised this morning how heated I felt hearing about the disappointingly common measures states and the Feds have taken to “protect” the institution of marriage from people who want to get married!)

Anyway, one of the snippets one of the professors mentioned the other day was that 1972 was a big watershed year in the American Psychiatric Association because that’s the year an association member gave an anonymous presentation declaring that he was both a homosexual and a psychiatrist and that he, and at least 100 other gay psychiatrists who were known to each other but closeted to the world, believed it was time for the APA to drop homosexuality from their list of mental disorders. He read his paper wearing a halloween mask and a voice-distorting microphone because APA rules forbade a person diagnosed with a mental illness from practicing psychiatry or psychology. The good news is that the paper was read to a packed audience and homosexuality was, in fact, dropped from the list soon after.

That’s the cool part. What shocked me, though, is that my professor added that many years later the doctor finally outed himself and it turned out that, as a lot of others closeted therapists evidently also did, he’d been living in a heterosexual marriage.

So that was yesterday. Today, in a completely different context, my professor mentioned that roughly 20% of gay men are in heterosexual relationships. Oh, part of the different context was that social scientists didn’t really bother to study gay family relationships until the mid-1980s when gay and lesbian couples started agitating to adopt children. And, she said, for whatever reason most of the studies have focused on gay men. The point being that when I asked if she knew the figures for gay women in heterosexual marriages she said she didn’t know.

And this is where it gets personal. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my college sweetheart came out and, after separating from me, entered a 20-year relationship with another woman. I happen to think that if our sexual relationship was dysfunctional it was due far more to me than to her, but in general I’m still pretty sensitive to the fate of the spouses of more seriously closeted individuals because for the most part their sex lives have got to be kind of crap.

Now people being who we are, I’m positive that in many instances the spouse in question is well aware of his or her partner’s orientation, that he or she is supportive, and maybe even delighted with the freedom to leave sex (together) on the back burner. I’m equally confident, though, that many more live their lives out wondering what’s wrong with them.

Also, people being who we are, it’s really important to remember that not all closeted people act in bad faith when they choose to marry either. A lot of them, like quite a few of my friends including my former fiancee, took a while to figure it out. And a lot of them, when they do figure it out, do their best to clean things up with their partners.

But if you look at all the ways a closeted individual has of making his or her partner wrong for wanting to have sex for something other than, oh, say, reproduction. I am not, not, not saying that, say, religious admonitions against non-reproductive sex inside marriage (let alone outside of it) are the product of closeted individuals. But I certainly wonder how many closeted people have hid behind those admonitions, kept them polished and shiny, held them up high, and said the equivalent of “Yes dear, I know we could have sex any time if you [went on the pill / got a vasectomy / whatever] but that would be against church! We’ll just have to soldier on as we have… with the lights out, and our pajamas on, in the missionary position, once a year, if we’re willing to risk another pregnancy.”

And just to be clear, here, my point isn’t really that closeted homosexuality or lesbianism is wrong (duh!) but that this is just yet another reason why homophobia warps heterosexual marriage, and heterosexuality in general, far far more than open, honest same-sex marriage ever would.

By driving non-heterosexual men and women underground, by failing to provide visible role models and social scripts for individuals who aren’t sure, by creating a culture wherein even more partners feel obliged to submit to their partner’s sexual advances — under a regime that (again according to my professors) even in progressive states like mine still provide only limited protection of spouses from coercion verbal and/or physical, we’re just sweeping all kinds of stuff under the rug of heteronormative expectation and then turning around and buying all manner of self-help advice because the floors don’t work because they’re too lumpy.

Anyway, point being if people tell you they think gay marriage should stay illegal ask them how’s that’s been going for them anyway.