John Corvino

Tag: sex

  • Crush

    First published at 365gay.com on June 18, 2010

    “I think I’m in love,” my friend announces.

    “You knew him for five minutes,” I retort.

    We’re both exaggerating. My friend—let’s call him Bob—met a guy while traveling, and they hit it off. Literally they spent hours together, though much of that was in, um, “non-verbal” communication. Bob has been thinking about the guy ever since.

    Far be it from me to deny anyone his long walks on the beach, even if both the beach and the walk are imaginary. Though happily married, I have as active a fantasy life as the next guy, and I know from joyous and painful experience the power of a hard crush.

    Bob’s crush has the feature—I’m not sure if it’s an advantage—of having been briefly realized. We’ve all been there. You meet someone cute on vacation. You start flirting, wondering whether he’s going to like you back. You lean in closer, he responds; you touch his hand; he squeezes back; you kiss—yes!

    And then you come home…and daydream.

    You think and talk constantly about the guy, and your friends who are not similarly twitterpated try hard not to look at you like you’re crazy. “You knew him for two days,” they remind you. They don’t understand, right?

    Actually, they do understand. You will too, eventually. Fantasy is not reality.

    Meanwhile, you might as well enjoy it—both the bliss and the angst. Consider this advice a version of “‘tis better to have loved and have lost…” Call it, “‘tis better to have obsessed from distance and have stalked someone’s Facebook page than never to have crushed at all.” Romantic longing is the stuff of which great art is made.

    But don’t overdo it.

    The thing about fantasy relationships is that they place no demands on you. There’s no accountability. For a brief spell, that’s fine, but it’s unhealthy in the long run—especially if it stands in the way of real flesh-and-blood relationships, which it sometimes can.

    You think you are daydreaming about a real flesh-and-blood person, but that’s not quite right. You are daydreaming about a fantasy version of a real flesh-and-blood person. In real life, he retains his human status, with all its strengths and weaknesses, but in your mind, he’s perfect. He never interrupts, never says anything stupid, never gets cranky, never has bad breath.

    The real flesh-and-blood people you meet have all of these flaws, so they don’t measure up. Worse yet, YOU have all of these flaws, which means that the fantasy can affect your own self-esteem.

    Compare this to another kind of fantasy, one that (like Bob’s) also often happens post-vacation: fantasizing about places. How many times have you heard someone say,

    “Oh my God, wasn’t New York/San Francisco/Paris/Puerto Vallarta the best place ever!? I wish I could live there!”

    Yes, New York/San Francisco/Paris/Puerto Vallarta was indeed wonderful, for a whole host of reasons. But one of the reasons was that you were there ON VACATION. Those who actually reside there have their own daily grind to deal with, along with congestion/earthquakes/pollution/sunburn. When their plumbing backs up, they can’t just call the concierge.

    If you always compare the vacation version of these places with the daily-grind version of home, home will pale by contrast. Similarly, if you always compare the fantasy version of your crush object—which, as long as he remains a crush object, is about all you have—with the human version of new acquaintances, old friends, or perhaps even your own partner, the human versions will pale, too.

    This is not to say that crushes never turn into something more enduring. Many full-blooded relationships—including both romances and friendships—started as crushes from a distance. Sometimes people just “click.” Such relationships are often worth exploring.

    So if Bob were asking my advice, I’d tell him to go ahead and pursue his crush. But I’d also tell him to keep his feet on the ground and to remember that fantasy grass is always greener.

  • What about Asexuality?

    First published at 365gay.com on May 28, 2010

    I hesitate to write another column about Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Stevens, and someone whose putative sexuality has been discussed ad nauseam by people (like me) who aren’t in a position to know the first thing about it.

    It’s true that when people enter public life, they must forgo some realm of privacy. But c’mon. It’s not as if Kagan is picking up chicks at the Dinah Shore Golf Weekend. For that matter, it doesn’t appear that she’s doing much romantically with men, either—at least not in any public way. Despite relentless media efforts to make it so, Kagan’s sexuality is just not a particularly visible feature of her life.

    So let’s not have another column about Kagan—at least not directly. Let’s instead bring up Kagan only as a springboard to something else.

    In the discussions surrounding Kagan, various parties aimed to produce evidence that she was either gay, straight, or bi. She plays softball, smokes cigars, and doesn’t have a man in her life (which apparently suggests that she’s gay); she dated Eliot Spitzer’s male friends in college (which apparently suggests that she’s straight); she never dated Spitzer (which suggests that she has taste).

    What no one seems to have considered is a fourth option: perhaps Kagan is neither gay, straight, nor bi. Perhaps she is asexual.

    Asexuality is an unusual phenomenon where people do not experience any sexual attraction. (Or perhaps it is better understood on a continuum model, where they experience vanishingly low levels of sexual attraction.)

    Asexuality does not get discussed much, mainly because it challenges our tendency to put everyone into the neat boxes we’re used to. It has taken decades to accustom people to the “gay/lesbian” box, making them understand that gay people are not just perverted heterosexuals. Many people still have a hard time with the “bisexual” box. (“They’re just confused; they haven’t decided yet; there’s no such thing.”)

    And some people (a minority) argue that we shouldn’t have “boxes” at all, although they can be a useful way of organizing information and building community identity.

    I’ll be candid: I don’t know much about asexuality. I have at least one friend that I think it probably describes. He’s never dated either males or females and doesn’t have much interest in doing so, and as far as I know, this disinterest is not the result of some emotional or physical dysfunction. He appears to view sex the way I view having children or running marathons—I can see why other people might enjoy these things, but they’re just not for me. And I don’t need to try either one to know this.

    One thing that LGBT people ought to understand is that the boxes society wants to impose don’t always fit. That’s one reason why I aim to give people the benefit of the doubt when they’re sharing their experience: generally speaking, every person gets to be the expert on his or her own feelings. And some people report feeling no sexual desire.

    According to Asexuality.org, an online community of over 19,000 people:

    “An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently. Asexuality is just beginning to be the subject of scientific research.”

    The website goes on to explain that asexuals have the same emotional needs as everyone else and that some date and form long-term partnerships. Those who do are just as likely to date sexual people as to date each other (indeed, probably more so, since there are many more sexual people in the world).

    Thus, while many asexuals are celibate, some aren’t: despite lacking sexual desire, some have sex as a way to care for non-asexual partners. (Kind of like I might go running with a partner even though I have no direct interest in running. But don’t get any ideas, Mark.) By contrast, most celibates are NOT asexual: they are people with sexual desire who choose to forgo sex for some other reason.

    Some other interesting points from the website:

    “Many asexual people experience attraction, but we feel no need to act out that attraction sexually….Asexual people who experience attraction will often be attracted to a particular gender, and will identify as lesbian, gay, bi, or straight.”

    The website also explains that some asexual people experience sexual arousal whereas as others do not; some masturbate; others don’t. What they all have in common is a lack of desire for partnered sexual expression. Thoughtfully, the site includes this caveat:

    “Note: People do not need sexual arousal to be healthy, but in a minority of cases a lack of arousal can be the symptom of a more serious medical condition. If you do not experience sexual arousal or if you suddenly lose interest in sex you should probably check with a doctor just to be safe.”

    At the risk of adding more letters to the coalition of LGBTQQISS and so on, I think it’s time we take the “asexual” box seriously. Check out Asexuality.org if you want to learn more.

  • Rekers’ Rentboy

    First published at 365gay.com on May 7, 2010

    So, we have a new line to add to the file labeled “Seriously?!?”—alongside Reverend Ted Haggard’s “I bought the meth but didn’t use it,” ex-gay leader John Paulk’s “I had to use the bathroom and had no idea it was a gay bar,” Rep. Eric Massa’s “I’m just a salty old sailor,” and Senator Larry Craig’s “I have a wide stance.”

    Now add Reverend George Rekers’ “I hired him to lift my luggage.”

    As a co-founder (with James Dobson) of the conservative Family Research Council, a board member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), and an author of numerous anti-gay works, Dr. Rekers is a major right-wing figure.

    And so he did what any straight, family-oriented Baptist minister would do when looking for someone to carry his luggage on a ten-day European excursion. He went to rentboy.com and hired a prostitute.

    I can’t make this stuff up.

    The Miami New Times broke the story [http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2010-05-06/news/christian-right-leader-george-rekers-takes-vacation-with-rent-boy/1] this week, complete with details from 20-year-old blond Puerto Rican rentboy “Lucien’s” profile: his “smooth, sweet, tight ass,” his “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” and the fact that he’ll “do anything you say as long as you ask.” These are important attributes for travel assistants, no doubt.

    A blogger at Unzipped.net [http://blog.unzipped.net/2010/05/meet-homophobe-george-rekers-rentboy-fuck-slut-lucien.html] quickly uncovered the rentboy’s profile, which identifies him as Boynextdoor/Geo and was purged of some of the earlier sexual content; the profile has since been removed from the site to protect the young man’s privacy.

    (Incidentally, we SHOULD protect the young man’s privacy. 20-year-olds don’t typically go into prostitution because it’s the best among many excellent job opportunities.)

    Lucien/Geo is the same age as a son that Rekers adopted four years ago, which might not be relevant were it not for Rekers’ vigorous opposition to adoption by gays. Rekers testified in favor of nasty homosexual adoption bans in both Arkansas and Florida. Indeed, on the blog page [http://professorgeorge.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/misleading-internet-reports-about-professor-george-rekers/] where he repeats his lame luggage excuse, there’s a link labeled “Should homosexuals be allowed to adopt children?” This leads to a page full of outright falsehoods, including:

    “Large research studies consistently report that a majority of homosexually-behaving adults have a life-time incidence of one or more psychiatric disorders, while a majority of heterosexually-behaving adults do not suffer a psychiatric disorder…. So my professional conclusion that homosexually-behaving adults should not be allowed to adopt children is based on research and logic.”

    And perhaps personal experience.

    This is not funny. It is not even sad. It’s disgusting. And I’m tired of feeling sorry for these people.

    As the Gay Moralist, I like to give all people the benefit of the doubt. It’s not a strategy so much as a matter of empathy. I was once a closeted homosexual conservative myself, and I came close to entering the Catholic priesthood. I often wonder whether, had my life gone slightly differently—different influences, different opportunities, different choices—I’d be missing truths that seem obvious to me now.

    I even wonder whether I might have acted out sexually in inappropriate ways—hiring male prostitutes privately while railing against homosexuality publicly, or hitting on college seminary students (not children) in my priestly care. While I’m no longer a believer, the phrase “There but for the grace of God” still resonates with me.

    I am not denying that we’re responsible for our choices and actions. I’m simply saying that there are often mitigating factors beyond observers’ ken. I don’t know Rekers personally, and I can only make an educated guess at what demons he wrestles with.

    But I know from hard experience that the best way to tame demons is to start being honest with yourself and others. That, instead of using self-respecting gays as a proxy for whatever internal foes you’re fighting.

    Unsurprisingly, not even Rekers’ religious-right buddies are buying his “lift my luggage” line, or his more recent claim (in a message to blogger Joe.My.God) that he spent time with the youth in order to share the Gospel: “Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I have a loving Christian ministry to homosexuals and prostitutes in which I share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them.” [http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/05/dr-george-rekers-patron-of-male.html]

    Lift his luggage? Share the Good News? These lines make great double-entendres for late-night comedians (“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”) but they don’t get Rekers a whit closer to addressing his real baggage.

  • No Asians?

    First published at 365gay.com on January 22, 2010

    Not long ago a friend approached me for relationship advice. He’s a white guy who was contemplating dating a black guy, and, as he put it, “I thought you could give me some insight since you’re in an interracial relationship.”

    His query took me by surprise. To be honest, I had forgotten that I’m in an interracial relationship (though I’ve been in one for eight years and counting).

    It’s not because I “don’t see color” or anything like that. Of course I see color. People who don’t see color in this society are blind to an important feature of others’ experience.

    Maybe it’s because I frequently don’t see Mark’s color. That’s partially a function—for better or worse—of our intimacy. But I suspect it’s equally a function of the fact that Mark is Asian.

    Like many Americans, I tend to think of color in terms of a black/white paradigm. Living in Detroit, as Mark and I do, tends to reinforce that paradigm. “Interracial” means “black and white.” I’m well aware that it’s a false paradigm, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t common and powerful.

    It doesn’t follow that people don’t notice Asians, don’t stereotype Asians, or don’t discriminate against Asians. All of the negative stuff still applies (in varying degrees). The difference, I think, is that when we white people make efforts to be more sensitive to race issues, we sometimes forget that there are more than two races. It’s not so much that Asians are invisible; it’s that discrimination against them is overlooked.

    The gay Filipino-American comedian Alec Mapa is currently touring with a show entitled “No Fats, Femmes, or Asians”—highlighting a phrase he sees commonly in personals ads.

    Mapa retorts that he objects to the idea—I’m quoting from memory here—“that belonging to a certain class of people makes you inherently unfuckable.”

    I missed the next ten minutes of Mapa’s routine as I pondered the moral implications of his analysis.

    Put Fats and Fem(me)s aside for the moment, and let’s focus on the “No Asians.”

    Having been with Mark for nearly a decade, I recognize that the sentiment is common. Growing up, Mark was painfully aware of the fact that there were (virtually) no Asians in the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog or other standard markers of our notions of beauty.

    Before we started dating, lots of guys told him, “You’re cute, but I don’t date Asians.” For that matter, people have told *me* that “I’m not into Asians, but Mark’s cute—you’re lucky you found each other.” (Yes we are, thank you.)

    On the one hand, I think personal tastes are just that. For example, I’m not into beefy, muscular guys. Give me a cute scrawny nerdy type over a football player any day. Other people have the opposite preference. To each his own.

    What’s more, there are some guys who are really into Asian guys (the slang term is “rice queens”). More power to ‘em, I say.

    I would add that people get enough grief about their sexual tastes—especially LGBT people—that the last thing I want to do is give them more. Sexuality is a gift to be enjoyed, not an occasion for affirmative-action programs. As I’ve sometimes explained, “I’m not into women sexually, but that doesn’t make me sexist.”

    On the other hand, our notions of beauty don’t arise in a vacuum, and some of our preferences are premised on false—and morally troubling—stereotypes. They’re hurtful. And the social structures that lead to them are an appropriate subject for moral scrutiny.

    So my advice to people contemplating—or consciously avoiding—an interracial relationship? Keep an open mind. Listen and learn. And wherever you find love, celebrate and enjoy it.

  • Fighting Gay Dehumanization

    First published at 365gay.com on January 8, 2010

    The column that follows is about anal sex.

    Some friends have urged me against writing it, not because readers find frank discussions of anal sex “icky,” but because the offending comments’ source—Peter LaBarbera—is unworthy of serious attention.

    In one sense these friends are quite right. But for reasons I hope to make clear, LaBarbera’s most recent ugliness needs answering.

    LaBarbera is the president of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), one of the nastier anti-gay groups. In a recent letter at his website, he discusses how Matt Barber at Liberty Counsel (a right-wing legal group) is threatening to boycott the Conservative Political Action Conference unless CPAC drops the gay conservative group GOProud as a co-sponsor.

    LaBarbera writes,

    “It boils down to this: there is nothing ‘conservative’ about — as Barber inimitably puts it — ‘one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it love’.”

    Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

    LaBarbera’s post led Liberty Counsel to deny that Barber had ever said such a nasty thing, prompting a sharp rebuttal from LaBarbera, followed by Barber’s admission that he had indeed made the comment privately years ago (and had given LaBarbera permission to quote it). This back-and-forth was interspersed with some barbs between LaBarbera and Randy Thomas, executive VP of the ex-gay group Exodus International, at Thomas’s Exodus blog. (Thanks to Pam’s House Blend for exposing the imbroglio.)

    I’ll focus here on LaBarbera, since he was the one who saw fit recently to post Barber’s words and to defend them repeatedly, calling them “a brutally honest and necessarily accurate description of homosexual sodomy.” He also challenged Thomas to “cite chapter and verse in the Bible” explaining why their use of these words is wrong.

    Chapter and verse? Let me try.

    Exodus 20:16: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (Hint: it’s one of the Ten Commandments, and it boils down simply to “Don’t lie.”)

    Look, Peter—and I know you’re reading this—NOBODY calls it love when a man “violently cram[s] his penis into another man’s lower intestine.” Nobody.

    We sane people call that rape.

    Indeed, the “violent cramming” of a penis into any bodily orifice, male or female, is rape. Not love. The description is not merely uncharitable (about which we could both cite many verses), it’s a blatant falsehood.

    Frankly, I’m not surprised you missed this simple, obvious point, because when it comes to homosexuality, you wouldn’t know truth if it violently crammed itself into your—oh, never mind.

    Now one might argue that we shouldn’t bother with LaBarbera. Indeed, a Christian friend of mine told me just that, stating that LaBarbera’s comments are “no more worth writing about than the graffiti on men’s room walls.”

    And I wish I could ignore them. I really, really do. If only the sentiments underlying them weren’t so pervasive and harmful.

    I’ve been defending gays and lesbians against heterosexist distortions for two decades. And one of the things that has saddened and angered me most is our opponents’ continued tendency to reduce our lives, our commitments, and our intimacy to bare mechanical descriptions—and false ones at that.

    Why do they do this? Perhaps it’s because of a fundamental lack of empathy (a trait that forms the core of The Golden Rule, another biblical principle).

    Or perhaps it’s because they know that dehumanizing us in this way is an extremely effective tactic. As LaBarbera himself writes at the Exodus blog, his and Barber’s “colorful and dismissive” language are precisely geared to “re-stigmatize shameful homosexual behavior.”

    Stigmatize, it surely does.

    By spreading their lies about “violent cramming” and such, LaBarbera, Barber and their ilk have visited needless suffering upon countless LGBT people, particularly LGBT youth.

    Among the unspoken casualties of such stigmatization is that it makes it harder for us to have frank conversations about the relative risks of various sexual practices, for fear of feeding such nastiness. The upshot is more silence, and shame, and—paradoxically—risk.

    All of which LaBarbera and Barber can answer to their Maker for, when and if Judgment Day should come. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:40).

  • A Story of Comfort and Joy

    First published at 365gay.com on December 18, 2009

    Allow me to share a favorite holiday story.

    It was late-November 1989, a year after I first came out. I had been dating a guy named Michael for over a month, which made him (in my mind, at least) my first “real” boyfriend. I was twenty and he was turning twenty-two, and we decided to drive into the city to celebrate his birthday.

    “The city” was Manhattan. I was living with my parents on Long Island while going to college; Michael lived nearby. Together with his cousin and his cousin’s boyfriend, we piled into my 1985 Camry and made the trek west along the Long Island Expressway, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge into the Big Apple.

    Dinner, then drinks, then dancing—or more accurately, sitting in the corner flirting while other people danced. It was the kind of young love (lust?) that makes one largely oblivious to one’s surroundings.

    So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised, upon exiting the club, to discover that it had been snowing for several hours—hard. No one had predicted a blizzard that night, and it wasn’t as if we could check the weather on our iPhones. (Remember, it was 1989.)

    We rushed back to the car and headed slowly home. About a third of the way across the Williamsburg Bridge, traffic stopped.

    We waited a minute, then five, then ten—and still no movement. The snow around us was blinding. Meanwhile, the cousin and his boyfriend were soundly asleep in the back seat.

    So Michael and I did what any two young lovebirds would do in such a situation: we started making out in the car.

    We kissed; we caressed; we cuddled. It felt like we were there for an hour, though again, we were largely oblivious to time and space. It was joyous.

    Eventually the traffic flow resumed and we made it home okay.

    Michael dumped me a few weeks later (Merry Christmas, indeed) and what remained of our relationship was more disastrous than that night’s weather. But two decades and numerous boyfriends later, I still count that bridge experience as one of the magical moments of my life.

    It wasn’t just because it was new and exciting, or because of the Frank Capra setting (Snow on a bridge? Seriously?).

    It was because, at a time in my life when I still struggled to make sense of being “different,” the experience sent a powerful, visceral message: Gay is good.

    The message didn’t arrive by means of a philosophical argument or someone else’s testimony. It came through direct experience. Those once-scary feelings were suddenly a font of great beauty, and intimacy, and comfort. I had previously figured it out in my head. Finally, I knew it in my heart.

    In this column I have often extolled the virtues of long-term relationships. I believe in those virtues—and am ever grateful for my eight-year partnership with Mark, the love of my life.

    But I don’t believe that homosexuality has moral value ONLY in the context of long-term relationships—any more than heterosexuality does. That quick flirtatious glance across a crowded room; that awkward kiss with the cute stranger at the party—such moments make life joyful, and there is great moral value in joy.

    And so, this holiday, I wish my readers joy.

    It has been an incredible, fast-paced year on the gay-rights front. We gained marriage equality in several states only to lose it again in Maine; we had ballot victories in Washington State and Kalamazoo, MI; we elected a lesbian mayor in Houston and a gay City-Council President in Detroit.

    There are reasons to be hopeful, and there is much work left to be done. We will keep fighting the good fight.

    Yet let us also step back and enjoy the simple yet profound joy that is part and parcel of why we’re fighting. Kiss someone under the mistletoe, and remember that life is good.

    Wishing you all the best in 2010.

  • Robert George’s Reality

    First published at 365gay.com on August 7, 2009

    Robert George’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Gay Marriage, Democracy, and the Courts,” [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970204619004574322084279548434.html] contains both sense and nonsense—but more of the latter.

    George, a Princeton professor of jurisprudence and founder of the American Principles Project, is a preeminent conservative scholar. In the op-ed, he considers the federal lawsuit challenging California’s Proposition 8 and claims that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality would be “disastrous,” constituting a “judicial usurpation” of popular authority and inflaming the culture wars beyond repair.

    First, the good points: George is quite right to insist that the Court’s role is to interpret the Constitution, not to make policy. He’s also right to argue that marriage law has been, and should be, tied closely to the needs of children. And he exhibits a refreshing “don’t panic” attitude, asserting that “democracy is working”—although by democracy, he seems to mean only voter referenda, and not our more complex representative system, with its various checks and balances. On the latter, broader understanding, I’d agree that “democracy is working:” in the last year, five additional states have embraced marriage equality.

    But the misunderstandings in George’s piece are legion.

    (1) George provides a lengthy analogy with the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which recognized abortion rights. But while this analogy may be relevant to the culture-war angle, it says absolutely nothing about the legal merits—since rather different issues were at stake in Roe.

    What’s more, it’s not even clear how relevant it is to the culture-war angle. Most abortion opponents believe that abortion involves large-scale killing of innocent babies. Compare that to Adam and Steve setting up house in the suburbs. Whatever your view of homosexuality, there’s no comparison in terms of moral urgency.

    (2) George also considers—and summarily rejects—an analogy with the 1967 Loving v. Virginia. He writes,

    “The definition of marriage was not at stake in Loving. Everyone agreed that interracial marriages were marriages. Racists just wanted to ban them as part of the evil regime of white supremacy that the equal protection clause was designed to destroy.”

    Seriously? Perhaps “everyone agreed” that they were marriages in some sense—as one could say equally about same-sex marriages—but they certainly didn’t agree that they were valid marriages. When the Loving trial court judge declared, “The fact that [God] separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix,” he expressed the widespread view that interracial marriage violated a divinely ordained natural order.

    George’s reference to the “evil regime of white supremacy” is also telling. In order to undermine any analogy between racial prejudice and homophobia, right-wingers often paint all those who opposed interracial-marriage as angry KKK types. But most opponents of miscegenation sincerely believed that the Bible condemns it, that it’s unnatural, and that it’s bad for children. In other words, they cited the same “respectable” reasons as modern-day marriage-equality opponents.

    That these two groups cite the same reasons doesn’t show that their arguments are equally bad or their motives equally flawed. It does show, however, that religious conviction doesn’t secure a free pass for discrimination, and that friendly, well-intentioned folks can nevertheless be guilty of bigotry.

    (3) George, a noted natural-law theorist, asserts that marriage “takes its distinctive character” from bodily unions of the procreative kind. By “procreative kind,” George doesn’t mean that procreation must be intended, or even possible—oddly, sterile heterosexuals can have sex “of the procreative kind” on George’s view. He means penis-in-vagina. According to George,

    “This explains why our law has historically permitted annulment of marriage for non-consummation, but not for infertility; and why acts of sodomy, even between legally wed spouses, have never been recognized as consummating marriages.”

    “Historically” is the key word here—as in “not any more.” There’s a reason consummation laws have been almost universally discarded (and were seldom invoked when present). Such laws reflected, not the law’s majestic correspondence with Catholic natural-law doctrine, but an outdated mixture of concerns about male lineage and female purity.

    (4) Finally, George asserts the standard false dilemma: Either accept the traditional natural-law understanding of marriage, or else have no principled basis for any marriage regulation:

    “If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.”

    No principled basis? How about the fact that polygamy—which historically is far more common than monogamy—is highly correlated with a variety of social ills? Or that the stability provided by long-term romantic pair-bonding is good for individuals and society—far more profoundly than typical “friendships”? Or that the state legally regulates important contracts of all sorts, and the commitment to “for better or worse, ‘til death do us part” is a pretty important contract? Here as elsewhere, George seems incapable of recognizing any principles beyond those prescribed by a narrow natural-law theory.

    Ultimately, the trouble with George is that his theory—which is supposed to be rooted in “nature”—is in fact divorced from reality. The reality is that gay people exist, fall in love, pair off, settle down, and build lives together—sometimes with children, often without. When we do, we seek the same legal protection for our relationships that other Americans take for granted. If the denial of such protections is not an appropriate subject for judicial scrutiny, I’m not sure what is.

  • Dangerous Campsite?

    First published at 365gay.com on July 3, 2009

    “What do you think about my having sex with an 18-year-old?” a thirtysomething friend asked.

    What do I think? Tread carefully.

    Notice I said “Tread carefully,” not “Run in the other direction,” which was my initial gut reaction. So let me fill in some background.

    The legal age of consent where these two live (Michigan) is 16. The 18-year-old is a recent high-school graduate. The thirtysomething guy has no interest in running for mayor of Portland.

    The 18-year-old quite clearly initiated the flirtation between the two, and wants it to go further. This I observed personally, as I was present when they met.

    Like most 18-year-old guys, he’s horny. He has not been impressed, thus far, with other guys he has met (usually on the internet).

    The thirtysomething guy is good-looking, thoughtful, kind, and healthy. I’d rather see the 18-year-old hook up with him than with many of the guys he’s likely to encounter.

    Aside from the age difference, and the accompanying educational and economic differences, there are no other obvious power imbalances (which is not to diminish the significance of those just mentioned). The 18-year old is not the thirtysomething’s student, or intern, or employee, for example.

    Neither of them plans for this to be an ongoing thing—or so they now say. Recalling my own youthful tendency to fall hard for anyone who showed me romantic attention, one concern I had (and voiced) is that the 18-year-old might quickly want more than this relationship is likely to offer.

    On the other hand, that risk—along with many of the others that come to mind—could arise in a peer relationship as well, the difference being that I trust my thirtysomething friend’s ability to handle the situation better than I trust most youths’.

    All relationships carry risks, as the thirtysomething guy knows and the 18-year-old will learn in his own time. That includes risks for the older partner. The dynamics of power can shift when one falls in love or lust.

    Regarding relationships with younger partners, the ever-insightful Dan Savage proposes his “campsite rule”: “leave ’em in better shape than you found ’em.”

    Specifically, he says, “Don’t get ‘em pregnant, don’t give ‘em diseases, and don’t lead ‘em to believe that a long-term relationship is even a remote possibility.” Also, work to ensure that they emerge from the relationship with “improved sexual skills.”

    Needless to say, the general campsite rule is a good rule for all sexual relationships. Non-sexual ones, too. But it becomes especially important with the young, who are vulnerable sexually.

    The flip side of that vulnerability is receptiveness to positive input. Just as a bad sexual relationship during your formative years can permanently scar you, a good one can be a great blessing, instilling salutary habits. (Such as: Use a condom every time. Tell your partner what feels good—and what doesn’t. Watch your teeth. And so on.)

    All else being equal, an experienced partner can teach such things better than a novice.

    Some will balk at this endorsement of “casual” sex. Yes, sex can be a deep, meaningful thing in the context of a committed relationship. But it can also be a safe and highly pleasurable experience between relative strangers, and I don’t think the casual kind now undermines the committed kind later. On the contrary, it can help train one—physically and emotionally—for the committed kind.

    Many people harbor the peculiar idea that sex requires no training. We’re supposed to be able to do it instinctively, the way birds pushed from the nest fly. No wonder the world has so many lousy lovers.

    I’m not suggesting that the solution is for older folks to start cruising high school parking lots. Let’s face it: there are plenty of unscrupulous characters who are all too eager to manipulate the young.

    My friend is not in that category.

    However, one might argue that the fact that so many ARE in that category is a good reason for endorsing a bright-line rule against sex with younger partners.

    I agree that bright-line rules are sometimes necessary. For example, while some 13-year-olds would make better drivers than many adults, we don’t issue them licenses.

    Legally, Michigan law sets that bright line at 16 for sex. (Other states vary.) I’m not convinced that the moral bright line in this case should be different, and I certainly don’t think that it should be over 18.

    As one friend put it, crudely but accurately, “There are worse things you can do to an eager 18-year-old than give him a good blow job.”

    I would add that, if you keep the campsite rule in mind, are honest and kind, and strive to be a good mentor, you might in fact do him a considerable service.

  • Sex and Distortion

    First published at 365gay.com on March 13, 2009

    Sometimes we gay writers do such a good job cutting down one another that we scarcely need our enemies.

    Consider a recent column [http://www.baywindows.com/index.php?ch=columnists&sc=realitycheck&sc2=&sc3=&id=88032] in Bay Windows, a New England GLBT newspaper, where Jeff Epperly identifies me as a “gay conservative” who’s a “a bit touched in the head when it comes to sexual issues.”

    Epperly’s column analyzes “the tendency among right-wingers, gay or straight, that the louder they complain about that which offends their sexual sensibilities, the greater the chance that they are getting freaky with those same sexual acts in their personal life.”

    Apparently I’m one of those freaky right-wingers.

    I don’t know Epperly personally, although Bay Windows was one of the first papers to run my work, and Epperly was editor at the time. (I have great respect for the publication.) On what basis does he diagnose my supposed sexual neurosis?

    Oddly, he bases it on a column [http://www.365gay.com/opinion/corvino-opponents-on-our-butts/] in which I, too, discuss conservatives’ obsession with sex.

    In that column, I point out our opponents’ tendency to reduce our sexual intimacy to its bare mechanics. Since they find those mechanics weird, they label our sex—and by extension, us—as disgusting, unnatural, perverse.

    My response was to point out that when we reduce it to bare mechanics, it’s not just gay sex that’s weird, but ALL sex. (There’s a reason people call it “doing the nasty.”) But it’s silly to think about sex merely in terms of mechanics.

    I illustrated by way of an e-mail exchange with a closeted gay British 15-year-old, whose parents went off on a tirade about how disgusting it was for a man to stick his penis up another man’s bum. (With stunning insensitivity, Epperly describes the youth as “equally obsessed with the alleged grossness of homosexual sex.”)

    Epperly quotes from my response to the young man:

    “In the abstract, of course it’s weird (and from some perspectives, gross) to think of a man sticking his penis up another man’s bum. But isn’t all sex weird in the abstract? Sticking a penis in a vagina, which bleeds once a month? Sucking on a penis, something both straight women and gay men do? Pressing your mouth—which you use for eating—against another person’s mouth, and touching tongues, and exchanging saliva (i.e. kissing)? Weird! Gross! (In the abstract, anyway.)”

    Perhaps if I had stopped there, Epperly might have been justified in his conclusion: “I know this is simply a gay conservative’s variation on the ‘we’re just like you’ argument to heterosexuals, but somehow I think that ‘our sex is as gross as yours’ is not the most effective argument in the world. But it says a lot about the person delivering it.”

    But of course, I didn’t stop there. Immediately thereafter—in a section that Epperly, tellingly, doesn’t quote—I wrote:

    “Sex makes no sense in the abstract. But then you have urges, and you eventually act on them, and what once seemed weird and gross becomes…wow.

    “Our opponents recognize this in their own lives, but they can’t envision it elsewhere. It’s a profound failure of moral imagination—which is essential for empathy, which is at the foundation of the Golden Rule.”

    The Golden Rule is something Epperly might brush up on. Or the Principle of Charity.

    The point of that column was that our opponents are using a double standard. For their sex, they see the deeper emotional picture. For our sex, they see only the mechanics. No wonder they find it weird.

    Epperly seems so keen to peg me a “gay conservative” that he completely misses—or deliberately distorts—that point.

    (Though perhaps I shouldn’t write “keen to peg me,” since that wording might just fuel his hypothesis about my sex obsession.)

    I always find it funny when people label me a gay conservative. It’s true that I write for the moderate-to-conservative Independent Gay Forum. And in some ways, given my work as “The Gay Moralist,” the label is apt. But in many of the standard ways it’s not.

    I haven’t voted Republican in two decades, except in a primary where the Democrat ran uncontested. I’m an avowed atheist. While I support marriage equality, I don’t believe that marriage is for everyone, and in my column I’ve defended sexual pleasure for its own sake. I’ve also publicly supported affirmative action.

    Of course, even if I were a hardcore gay conservative, I’d deserve a fair reading—just like anyone else.

    As a columnist, I’m used to the occasional reader setting me up as a straw-man and then psychoanalyzing me on the basis of that straw-man. It comes with the territory.

    But from a fellow writer—particularly one who shares my disdain for sexual small-mindedness and the distortions it engenders—I hope for better.

  • Strange Bedfellows

    First published at Between The Lines News on March 12, 2009

    Recently I wrote about a proposed compromise by David Blankenhorn, who opposes gay marriage, and Jonathan Rauch, who supports it.

    On the Blankenhorn/Rauch proposal, the federal government would recognize individual states’ same-sex marriages or civil unions (under the name “civil unions”) and grant them benefits, but only in states that provided religious-conscience exemptions, allowing religious organizations to deny married-student housing to gay spouses at a religious college, for example, or to refuse to rent out church property for gay-related family events.

    The Blankenhorn/Rauch proposal has prompted much discussion, including a counter-proposal from Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis at the conservative website thepublicdiscourse.com.

    Anderson and Girgis—who unlike Rauch and Blankenhorn, come from the same side of the debate—reject the original proposal as granting “too much to revisionists and too little to traditionalists.” As they see it, traditionalists don’t merely seek to secure their own personal religious liberty, but to promote what they see as “a healthy culture of marriage understood as a public good.”

    They believe that the Blankenhorn/Rauch proposal undermines that public good, because

    “it treats same-sex unions (in fact, if not in name) as if they were marriages by making their legal recognition depend on the presumption that these relationships are or may be sexual. It thus enshrines a substantive, controversial principle that traditionalists could not endorse: namely, that there is no moral difference between the sexual communion of husband and wife and homosexual activity—or, therefore, between the relationships built on them.”

    Anderson and Girgis instead propose the following: “revisionists would agree to oppose the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus ensuring that federal law retains the traditional definition of marriage as the union of husband and wife …In return, traditionalists would agree to support federal civil unions offering most or all marital benefits.” But these unions “would be available to any two adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities, whether or not their relationship is sexual,” provided that they are “otherwise ineligible to marry each other.”

    In other words, there would be federal civil unions for gays—but also for other domestic pairs: elderly widowed sisters, for example, or bachelor roommates.

    At first glance, their claim that Rauch and Blankenhorn base their proposal on “the presumption that these relationships are or may be sexual” seems strange. After all, Rauch and Blankenhorn never mention sex, and the state neither knows nor cares (nor checks) whether people are having sex once they’re married or “civilly united.”

    On the other hand, people generally assume (with good reason) that marriages and civil unions are sexual, or more broadly romantic. Romantic pair-bonding seems to be a fundamental human desire—for straights and gays—and part of what marriage does is to acknowledge pair-bonds. It does so not because the government is sentimental about such things, but because it recognizes the important role such bonds have in the lives of individuals and the community.

    Anderson and Girgis are correct that there are other important bonds in society, and we may well want to extend more legal recognition to them. There is no reason that two cohabitating spinsters shouldn’t be granted mutual hospital visitation rights if they want them.

    But the question remains whether we want to extend “most or all” federal marital benefits to any cohabitating couple otherwise ineligible to marry, as Anderson and Girgis propose.

    And this question prompts additional ones: why limit such recognition to couples? Mutually interdependent relationships don’t only come in twos. Oddly, Anderson and Girgis seem to have more in common with radicals who seek to move “beyond marriage” than they do with anyone in the mainstream marriage debate.

    Also, why limit such recognition to couples “otherwise ineligible to marry”? Can’t an unrelated man and woman have an interdependent relationship that’s not sexual/romantic?

    Anderson and Girgis write that, “Our proposal would still meet the needs of same-sex partners—based not on sex (which is irrelevant to their relationship’s social value), but on shared domestic responsibilities, which really can ground mutual obligations.”

    And there’s the crux: Anderson and Girgis assume that sex has social value only when open to procreation. But that’s just false, and most Americans know it. We acknowledge sexual/romantic relationships not merely because they might result in children, but also because of their special depth. Sex doesn’t merely make babies; it creates intimacy—for gays and straights alike.

    The problem is that Anderson and Girgis divide couplings into two crude categories: (1) married (or marriageable) heterosexuals, and (2) everyone else: committed gay couples, elderly sisters, cohabiting fly-fishing buddies, what have you. They then implausibly suggest that those in column two are all of equal social value.

    As David Link writes at the Independent Gay Forum, “The authors of this proposal are quite honest that they find it impossible to view same-sex couples in the category of marriage. But if these are the two categories offered: aging sisters or married couples, I’m betting more Americans who don’t already have an opinion, would view same-sex couples as more like the married couples than the sisters. With apologies to the traditionalists, the days when a majority of Americans simply closed their eyes to the loving—and sexual—relationships of same-sex couples are coming to an end.”

    As they should.