But I could also relate to young gay men yearning for companionship and emotional security. Had gay marriage been an option when I was 23 and recently out of the closet, I might very well have proposed to my first gay love. Like many gay men my age and older, I grew up believing that gay men in a happy long-term relationship was an oxymoron. (I entered high school in 1989, before gay teenagers started taking their boyfriends to the prom.) If I was lucky enough to find love, I thought, I’d better hold onto it. And part of me tried, but a bigger part of me wanted to pitch a tent in my favorite gay bar. I wasn’t alone. Everywhere I looked, gay men in their 20s — or, if they hadn’t come out until later, their 30s, 40s and 50s — seemed to be eschewing commitment in favor of the excitement promised by unabashedly sexualized urban gay communities. There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence. While most of our heterosexual peers had experienced, in their teens, socialization around courtship, dating and sexuality, many of us had grown up closeted and fearful, “our most precious and tender feelings rarely validated or reflected back to us by our families and communities,” as Alan Downs, the author of “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World,” puts it. When we managed to express our sexuality, the experience often came booby-trapped with secrecy, manipulation or debilitating shame.I've really spent a lot of time wondering about what the statistics are on gay marriage. Gay relationships are notorious for being short-lived. I remember reading one comment from somebody that referred to a just-ended gay relationship of seven years as being "incredible" for its longevity.
Does institutionalizing marriage help them to last longer? Is fitting gay relationships into a framework of traditional heterosexual marriage really sensible? Are the two that interchangeable, or do we need to find a completely different language and framework for referring to these? (Already I know how problematic it is for me to talk about some of my close friends who are together. Are they boyfriends? Partners? Husbands? I don't even know the adjective to use.)
I've expressed to friends and written before about how the church doesn't provide any sort of moral framework for gays and lesbian Christians about how they should conduct their relationships in both sensible and holy ways. This is, of course, because they're still stuck on discussing whether these relationships should be blessed and supported, and if so, how. In the meantime, those of us who are trying to find our way through this are left a little in the lurch.
Of course, this is probably quite a bit of my fundamentalist upbringing talking . . . a religion of "requirements and rewards", to quote Marcus Borg. There were plenty of very specific rules for things - you mostly knew what they were and knew of the dire consequences of not following them (eternal punishment in the fires of hell).
While I've left that perspective behind, at least in my head, if not completely in my heart (long story and many psychotherapy sessions later), I'm still not quite sure what to do with myself.
Of course, I think the issues are the same for single adults who are at least into their mid-20s. Simple commandments encouraging chastity, pointing to dogma, smack of junior high or high school dating strictures that seem pretty irrelevant to us. Why should we listen? Give us something nuanced, thoughtful, and smart to chew on here.
Why? Because today's liberal American culture pretty much doesn't care, as long as nobody gets hurt in any obvious and immediately perceptible way. And that's just not an ethic that works.
But it seems like that's all we got until people start to figure out those of us - especially younger GenXers and Millennials - who seem to have moved beyond these tired debates.
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