I gay love you. Will you gay marry me?

Saw a link on towleroad to this article in the Australian Daily Telegraph.

The headline is "David Wants Gay Wedding". David is one of the contestants on Big Brother, a popular reality TV show here (there's a U.S. version too, I think, but it's not as popular) where contestants live in a house and have to do weird tasks, and each week Australian viewers get to vote one or more of them out of the house.

A few things about the article got my attention.

First, of course, it's another article about marriage, so yeah.

Second, check out this paragraph:

Next to the gay love he received from [his partner] Sherif, the former model said he was also overwhelmed by his father's uncharacteristic displays of affection.

The "gay love"? What is with certain editors/journalists just tacking "gay" on as an adjective to all manner of inappropriate things? It isn't really a huge deal, it just gets on my gay nerves. I guess if I were feeling especially intellectural today, I could hypothesize that this penchant for gay-as-adjective reflects an essentialist idea of sexuality, that gay men are inherently different, and extend the taint of our difference to everything we do and touch.

But I'm not feeling that intellectural, so let's move on to the "whoa" bit of the article:

While David's mother and three sisters were aware of his homosexuality, his conservative father - also a Queensland farmer - discovered his son's secret by watching the reality series.

So how did you come out to your father?
On national TV! While I was locked in a house where he couldn't contact me for several months!

It's wrong, but kinda hot. Oh wait no, it's just wrong. David is pretty hot, though. But I'm just saying that because he's a gay farmer.

Also, I have to admit I got a little misty at the mention of "uncharacteristic displays of affection", especially in light of this:

"In one evening being with him as a gay man I got more love than 26 years of being a straight son,'' David said.

Who doesn't love a good story about emotionally distant men eventually cracking and revealing their feelings? Hell, that description just about covers the major theme of several genres of film.

More stuff on marriage

As noted in the quote from the NYT in my previous post, several leading political thinkers, activists, writers and organizers have gotten together to sign a statement, Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, that calls for a push for legal protections for a broader range of human relationships, and an extension of protections for/reduction of restrictions on individual freedoms. This has prompted this post by Joe over at Joe.My.God. As Joe says, the manifesto could have come from the "Department of About Fucking Time". There's some interesting discussion in comments about when marriage became this defining issue, and who is responsible (Ok, yes, I left a comment there too - so go read it and stop rolling your eyes already).

Brian at Faggoty-Ass Faggot (so that's who took that domain name!) also crticizes the drive for same-sex marriage, though not prompted by the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement.

Of course, marriage has had its queer doubters from the beginning, but the old critiques were more on ideological grounds (since it wasn't being pushed for at the time). The new manifesto explicitly declares itself "strategic", perhaps to distance itself from the old debate (ah, our love of the new). However, it may be less strategic and more ethical and visionary than the title lets on:

...many of us long for communities in which there is systemic affirmation, valuing, and nurturing of difference, and in which conformity to a narrow and restricting vision is never demanded as the price of admission to caring civil society. Our vision is the creation of communities in which we are encouraged to explore the widest range of non-exploitive, non-abusive possibilities in love, gender, desire and sex – and in the creation of new forms of constructed families without fear that this searching will potentially forfeit for us our right to be honored and valued within our communities and in the wider world. Many of us, too, across all identities, yearn for an end to repressive attempts to control our personal lives. For LGBT and queer communities, this longing has special significance.

We who have signed this statement believe it is essential to work for the creation of public arenas and spaces in which we are free to embrace all of who we are, repudiate the right-wing demonizing of LGBT sexuality and assaults upon queer culture, openly engage issues of desire and longing, and affirm, in the context of caring community, the complexities and richness of gender and sexual diversity. However we choose to live, there must be a legitimate place for us.

I'm quite glad that this manifesto got written and signed by who signed it. At the very least, it'll be harder to (further) marginalize voices in the queer movement criticizing the drive for same-sex marriage.

If anyone finds other blogs discussing the manifesto, do let me know. I'm interested. As of today, no comment yet from Andrew Sullivan, Queerty, Towleroad or Keith Boykin.

8/1/2006 EDIT: Queerty now has a post on this topic, linking to the NYT Style article, but not to the statement or the gay.com article (both of which I found more informative).

As far as editorials go, Chris Crain of the Washington Blade wrote an editorial critical of the statement. I'm not aware of any others.

Gay.com has an article about the statement and responses to it by a few LGBT orgs. Basically the orgs (Lambda Legal and HRC) are saying "we've never made marriage The Big Gay Issue, so we don't know what all the fuss is about". While I'm willing to believe this about Lambda (or at least, that it has this self-perception), I'm a little more skeptical about the HRC's diversity-washing of its past behavior. Luckily the article does quote Joseph DeFilippis, a co-author of the statement, who politely calls bullshit by its proper name (I'm quoting the article quoting DeFilippis):

I'm glad to hear national organizations saying they agree with us, but speaking for myself, I think some have driven the marriage issue and spent resources that dwarfs what's spent on other important issues such as domestic partnership and universal health care, and it would be disingenuous to say otherwise.

New York Times reports on the problem with marriage

Urseberry pointed me to this piece in the July 30th New York Times Style section by Anemona Hartocollis (who, by the way has written several other pieces for the Times on LGBT issues).

An excerpt:

To these activists, the fight for gay marriage is the mirror image of the right-wing conservative Christian lobby for family values and feeds into the same drive for a homogeneous, orthodox American culture. The Stonewall confrontation and early gay rights movement, after all, was about the right to live an unconventional life, and to Mr. Dobbs and others like him, marriage is the epitome of convention.

While I am always wary of any coverage in non-queer media about conflicts within the LGBT community or any marginalized group (too often it becomes a way for the privileged and those uninvested in struggles of that group to delight in the infighting), the Times article seems... not horrible. There's even mention of this rather interesting development, a sign that a broader non-binary idea of family and love is making its way into "respectable" politics (although the word "strategic" is a little troubling to me):

...some 250 academics, celebrities, writers and others, including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun magazine, Armistead Maupin, Terrence McNally, Holly Near and Cornel West, signed a manifesto called “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families and Relationships.” It calls for the legal rights and privileges of marriage to be extended to arrangements like extended families living under one roof, and close friends in long-term caregiving relationships.

It's not all ponies and sunshine, however. I do think that the article should have gone further to establish that there is still plenty of common ground uniting the advocates and opponents of same-sex marriage within the LGBT community. Also, the ending is a bit of a random non sequitur, signalling to me that the journalist didn't quite get the nuances of the issue, but wanted to end the piece with a bit of local flavor - after all, this is the Style section:

Then there are those gay men who find themselves embracing marriage in spite of their iconoclastic temperament. Florent Morellet, the French-born owner of Restaurant Florent in the once-raunchy meatpacking district of Manhattan, had a commitment ceremony in 1988 with his partner, Daniel Platten. Mr. Platten died in 1994 and Mr. Morellet says he is at a stage in his life when he is looking for a monogamous relationship.

Yet, influenced by French attitudes toward erotic life, he does not subscribe to the American ideal of marriage as a narrowing of sexual opportunity. “In France, which is nominally a Catholic country, adultery is actually an equal opportunity,” he says. “Women have almost as much adultery relationships as men.”

Quoi?

No Comment

My awesome cousin Justin pointed me to The End Of The World* tonight, with the exhortation "YOU HAVE TO BLOG THIS". And he was right.

*not to be confused with http://www.endofworld.net (sans "the"), which hosts that flash movie many of us geeks are fond of quoting. You know. "I am le tired!"

The End of The World hosts a single long scrolling webpage, white text on a black background, with some graphics/icons, and plenty of information about the author's views on the end of the world.

The site's author informs us of why he thinks there will be Apocalypse Soon:

Here are six major reasons why I think
the End of the world may be near:
1. Nuclear Weapons -- There Are Many
2. Israel is a Nation -- Israel Back As A Nation Is Biblically Significant!!! From a Bible Prophecy Standpoint!!! And From All Standpoints For That Matter!!! A "Super Sign" Quoting someone from TV.
3. Abortion* -- In The USA alone, over a period of 33 years, There have been 45 million or more Abortions performed. We could stop right there, and have one of the strongest cases of judgment against this country, for just that reason.
4. Homosexuality* -- God says it sin. Many people are becoming reprobate, in not knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong. - God has said a man with a man, and a woman with a woman, is not right.
5. Hurricanes -- I live in Florida, went through Charlie, Jeanne and Frances, or I should say Charlie went through here.
6. Earthquakes -- Earthquakes are everywhere and seemingly big earthquakes.

There are some additional reasons:

* Famines -- Commentary by Mike Mickey at www.rapturealert.com
* 4 billion people on Earth live on 2 dollars a day or less -- Habitat for Humanity magazine (2000-2002ish)
* It's been 2,000 years since Jesus was here
* The Avian Flu
* Extreme weather, Solar Flares
* Godlessness of Hollywood
* Divorce in this country -- epidemic
* Pornography -- epidemic
* The Godlessness of the Music
* God given the exit sign in Public Schools
* Evolution -- In Genesis in the Bible it says God Created The World!

Gay Hate Speech

Ervan commented in my Vocabulary post about this, but I thought I'd reply in a separate post because it's really a different topic, and interesting enough (to me anyway) to deserve its own post.

He said:

Speaking of language: have you heard the latest "backlash" against LGBT folks?
Apparently, some are accusing them of "hate-speech" for using terms like "breeder" in reference to those damn hetero peeps.

I had not heard it, but I did my homework and found some interesting stuff on the net about "gay hate speech."

Provincetown

Richard Newell at Outright Libertarians discusses community reactions against "hate speech" in Provincetown. And also links to this article from the Boston Globe.

Trees and things has a story with some background on the history of hate crimes/hate speech in Provincetown, as well as the knowthyneighbor group.

A quick note: one of the instances of hate speech given in the Boston Globe article involved a Jamaican woman reporting that many (presumably non-Jamaican) gay residents harrassed her because they assumed that all Jamaicans were homophobic:

Winsome Karr, 45, originally from Jamaica, has worked in town since 2002. Lately, she said, the off-color comments stem from gay visitors who mistakenly believe that all Jamaicans share the views of an island religious sect that disagrees with homosexuality.

If this is true, I think it actually is unacceptable behavior. Being hostile towards immigrants of a certain group because of an overgeneralisation about their culture sounds like xenophobia to me. Just because you're gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans doesn't give you a free pass to be racist and xenophobic. Hell it doesn't even give you a free pass to be homophobic.

On the other hand, calling someone a bigot (another incident reported in the Globe article) because you see them signing a petition against same-sex marriage is much more of a gray area. I don't think it's hate speech, personally, but just calling somebody out on their bigoted action. There's no overgeneralization here - you just saw someone perform an act of bigotry. I only say it's a gray area because there might be a minor problem of misinterpretation of her actions. Maybe they signed the petition not understanding what it was calling for, or in a mistaken nod to "radical" queer notions (note, although I am opposed to many of the methods being used to campaign for same-sex marriage, and am ambivalent about the goal as well, I think that it is absolutely wrong to sign anti-same-sex-marriage petitions or support religious opponents of same-sex marriage, because in context they are inevitably also anti-gay)

GALHA Magazine in the UK

This article in the Guardian says that the Gay and Lesbian Humanists Association published in its magazine an article "that described immigrants as criminals of the worst kind and Islam as a barmy doctrine" (internal quotations reformatted). It also said that Islam was growing in the UK through "unrestrained and irresponsible breeding".

Other gay rights groups (not sure which ones) condemned the article.

GALHA actually seems to be a generally level-headed not-in-favor-of-bigotry organization, and anyway the ExCom did take action against the magazine's editor:

Galha's executive committee said the magazine's editor and deputy editor had been forced to resign over the comments, published in the autumn issue, and the magazine had been relaunched under a new editorial team. "We've done everything we can to rectify the situation," said the secretary of Galha, George Broadhead.

Most of GALHA's website content and events seem to be directed not at Muslim homophobia, but at Christian and Catholic homophobia, which makes sense, since there are far more Christians in Britain than Muslims.

I haven't found the full text of the GALHA piece, so I can't make a fully informed comment on it (although it does sounds pretty misconceived). Just a note: other than the "unrestrained breeding" comment, nothing else in the Guardian article indicates that this magazine piece was specifically anti-heterosexual, rather, it was anti-Islam. As I said above, nothing about being gay makes you immune to charges of racism and xenophobia.

"Burning Black Triangle" campaigns against "straight haters"

Ex-Gay Watch has a 2004 piece about PFOX's webmaster "Burning Black Triangle"'s personal website. Part of the mission statement of that site:

Many Homosexuals would like nothing better then to become an elite class among the Heterosexual population. We will not be pushed around by these heterophobes!

Look, this "elite class" of homosexuals isn't going to manifest, unless they somehow manage to get organized enough to start manipulating politics and blindsiding the media, numbing the nation with fear while accumulating more wealth and power for their rich friends. In other words, if they became the Republican party.

The Ex-Gay Watch piece is pretty long and has a lot of quotes from the BBT website. I couldn't read them all, as I would have to bang my head against the desk too hard, and it might startle the other office folk. Here's just one more, in reference to the Broward County v. Boy Scouts case (in which the judge ordered a school to allow the Boy Scouts to access its facilities, despite its disagreement with the Boy Scout's anti-gay policies):

The Boy Scouts of America... are caught up in the resurging wave of a Socialist movement in America. The Nazi's in Germany had a similar paramilitary group. The pedrastic leanings of the Nazi's tried to subvert Germany's youth this way too. Keep our Children safe from Homosexuality... Support your local scouts! OPPOSE QUEER AMERICA!

Homosexuals are closet Nazis? The sheer historical amnesia of this little tirade is astounding.

As a bitchy aside, Scouting worldwide was founded by Robert Baden-Powell, whose sexuality is the subject of some speculation. What is NOT the subject of speculation is that he commanded a regiment for the British in their colonial war against the Boer (who wanted self-governance).

Vocabulary Word of the Week

So you know how when you're a straight guy and you're engaged in oral sex with another straight guy?

Turns out there's a word for that now.

EDIT: By the way, I've heard "bro" pronounced "bruh" (like the first syllable of "brother", of which "bro" is an abbreviation) and "br-oh" (to rhyme with glow). I think this new use pretty much settles it for me which pronunciation should be preferred.

Virtually Over It

Reading this review of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal over at OGMN, I was reminded of the first time I read that book. I read it in 1996, as a 15 year old closeted gay boy in Singapore. Its neatly argued call for gay marriage seemed revolutionary to me. Gay Marriage! Like all revolutionary ideas, of course, I saw it as completely unattainable, yet completely reasonable (yes, my political miseducation was well underway).

wtf, mate?*

*Sorry. I couldn't find a good creative commons licensed photo of Andrew Sullivan or his book, but in my search I did find a picture of a redheaded cutie reading Virtually Normal. It's still not creative commons, so I won't steal it, but you can see the photo here. Instead, I found a cute chipmunk really giving it to that rock. Courtesy of ReneS. EDIT: So it turns out that photo of the redhead is under a creative commons license. But the chipmunk is too cute to delete. Here is the redhead too, though. Courtesy of alaspoorwho.

Alaspoorwho says: Protect yourself from the sun with the power of virtual normalcy!

So, First, some words on the emotive power of marriage to the 15 year old Minger:

!!Embarrassing Revelation Alert!! At 15, I was very into marriage ceremony fantasies. I wanted it all - first, an elaborate Singapore/Malaysia-Chinese-style wedding: the tea ceremony, the ten course dinner followed by long exhortations to "Yaaaaaaaaaam Seng!", the bowing to parents, and then driving through the streets in a gaudily decorated white or silver Mercedes Benz.

One exactly like this! Yes, that is a Singaporean license plate, as well.
Photo taken by St@ce. Another one under the creative commons license. I heart creative commons.

I also wanted the whole white-dress and tuxedo Western church wedding - somewhat odd in retrospect, because in addition to being a flaming queenlet, I was also a raging atheist - with the hushed awe as I walked down the aisle (I wanted to be in the dress), the solemnity and explicitness of the vows, and the awesome drama queen moment where the priest asks if anyone has any reasons that these two should not be wed, and everybody looks down while priest and couple glare accusingly at the crowd. It all sent shivers down my spine. I wanted a honeymoon too.

Not my ideal wedding. Although being presided over by a pumpkin would be great. Photo by Eric van der Neut. Again, creative commons license.

But that's not all. I didn't stop at the marriage ceremony fantasies. My schoolgirlishness was quite advanced. I'd also constructed an exquisitely detailed picture of domestic bliss. Everything in the house that could be covered with white or natural undyed linen would be (having actually done my own laundry now, I shudder at this particular aspect of the fantasy), the sun would always be rising or setting, and we would always be spending long mornings in bed or long evenings on the balcony with breakfast/cold drinks. ... Actually that's all the details I'm willing to divulge right now. Take a 2 minute sigh-of-relief break and keep reading.

WHEW!

So, back to Sullivan's book


Photo of gay shame anti-wedding cake is from dannyman.

Oh how I have changed. I suspect that if I were to read the book today I would be:
1) annoyed/amused by Sullivan's naivete;
2) still delighted by his crisp "Yes chaps, I was educated in England" prose;
3) furious at his caricatures of what he now calls the "Gay Far Left" (I think at the time he had another term for this, I forget what; and
4) bitchily remembering the bareback sex scandal in 2001. (others also still remember) BTW: Bronski's piece behind the first link is quite good. You should go read it AFTER you finish reading my post.

In any case, I certainly wouldn't be the overawed little boy from (what was in in gay terms) a cultural isolation cell.

So what is Sullivan's appeal? And who is he appealing to besides 15 year old gay boys? (Ok that sounded wrong)

I think Sullivan's work finds an eager audience in the embarrassed conservative base* that doesn't really like/care about gay people all that much, despite their protestations of "fiscal conservative, social liberal". This group, however, is a little alarmed at the sheer vitriol/hatred being spouted by the Religious Right that passes for idealism in the Republican party (and disguises the fact that it is a vehicle for the rich to use state power against the poor).

*I'm sure some gay and lesbian people and some liberals who genuinely care about gay and lesbian rights read and agree with Sullivan too. Now, how should I overgeneralize about and belittle them? Deluded? Self-hating? Insert Third Bit Of Invective Here? This is left as an exercise for the reader.

After all, one may not want that homosexual hanging around one's children (which is why one sent them to private school, where it's alright to discriminate more or less openly against gays, and probably always will be), but one does want him around to do one's hair. Surely it's only cricket to let him have a crumb or two of civil rights. Oh yes, marriage, that's a perfectly respectable one. After all, one doesn't have sex in a marriage, does one, unless one intends to have children. And homosexuals don't do that. Do they? Now Canada's gone and sanctioned gay marriage. One can't have all the homosexuals fleeing across the border - whoever would decorate one's house? The U.S. simply must keep up with its neighbors. Just so long as they don't try anything funny, like advocating for economic, social and political justice, those homosexuals are okay.

Photo of "Separate the Church and Hate" sign from sushiesque. ----->

In fact, I think Sullivan is at his best when he is taking on the Religious Right on their own terms. He (euphemistically? kindly? strategically?) refers to them as "social conservatives". There's no denying the man is a master of rhetorical moves.

But seriously. I understand the appeal. No, really. I feel your pain. I was once like you, entertaining fantasies of assimilation and obsessed with sexual privacy and the sanctity of the marital home. And it's not just me and you. Even Supreme Court justices have these fantasies. Yes, underneath those solemn black robes beat nine romantic hearts secretly dying to pass a covert love note across the bench ("Clarence, what do you think about this Lawrence guy from Texas? Totally gross or what? - Tony. P.S.: Do you like Ruth? Yes/No"). In fact, we have that Court's (well, a previous Court's) fantasies of the marital home to thank for legal contraception in the U.S. Thank you, marital home!

Let me just ramble on about marriage a bit more

I get the impression that, in a libertarian-flavored way, Sullivan generally opposes cultural change coming from government legislation. But then why campaign for government to sanction certain relationships and not others? Why not remove the hand of government altogether from marriage, and let whoever wants to call themselves "married" do so with no formal change in their relationship to the government? The answer must be that somehow, there is an overriding interest: certain relationships need government protection.*

*I think that Sullivan also argues (sort of) is that marriage encourages social stability. Now, I say "sort of" because, if I recall correctly, he really makes this point not as something he personally endorses, but in the context of pointing out the inconsistency in social conservatives' idealization of (straight) marriage even as they oppose gay marriage.

The fact is that "marriage equality" is not merely the removal of a bias, it is the extension of a regulatory scheme. Not just any scheme, but one that is rank with normative implications for sexual behavior.

Marriage is a set of conditional benefits. Those benefits are given not based on need (unlike redistributive schemes). A person would be entitled (let's say) to their spouse's healthcare if that spouse were an employee of the government, whether they* really needed it or not, which leaves us with the inescapable implication - that these benefits are given to those who deserve it.

*Yes, I use the singular "they" where I feel like it. I will also, but more rarely, use "ze" and "hir".

The normative nature of marriage is inescapable. "You get these rights because you deserve them" it says to married couples. By implication, unmarried people do not deserve these rights. So what happens? Gay people start reinterpreting our community narratives to fit into marriage's narrow picture of "deserving" couples. Just take a look at Freedom to Marry's current publicity materials. Most of these couples have been together for a long time, and many have kids and apparently steady jobs. Through implication by omission (anyone who has been "semi-in-the-closet" you know what I mean), they are monogamous. Certainly none of the publicity materials say "on weekends, Kris and Eddie like to go to sex parties, where they enjoy having group sex with friends and strangers" or "Lisa and Tyra are active community organizers and advocate the decriminalization of prostitution and marijuana".

I'm not saying that Freedom to Marry's campaign is ineffective. I'm certainly not devaluing the couples' lives together, or impugning their love for each other. I'm also not saying that going to sex clubs is preferable to not going to sex clubs, or that monogamy is never the right decision. (Actually, you know what, fuck that, you all are intelligent enough to figure out what I am not saying)

So what ARE you saying?


Thanks to irina slutsky and emarquetti for these two images, that I modified to make the above graphic. (creative commons licenses r00l!).

What I'm saying is that the couples picked to represent the LGBT community are de-fanged, sanitized, and otherwise made "safe" (however they are in real life, this is how they are portrayed). They've got one issue, and they're sticking to it. We're going from predatory sex fiends in the shadows to Model Minority 2.0. It seems that in order to get marriage, many in the community are trading in one set of cultural stereotypes for another, and abandoning those with whom we used to have solidarity in the process.

This is a pet topic of mine, and I could harp on it all day. It's not just Sullivan's focus on marriage as a gay rights panacea that bothers me, however. And anyway, it's not just Sullivan, but apparently the whole mainstream liberal camp that is adopting the attitude of marriage-as-crowning-achievement to a materialistic, individualistic version of the gay and lesbian movement (Sing it! We've got Castro, we've got WeHo, we've got marriage, who could ask for anything more?).

Oh dear oh dear, this has turned into a post on marriage. I wanted to talk more about Sullivan's core beliefs and how mine have changed from a set something like his (libertarian-esque) to something subtly different. But I've been working on this damn post for 3 days now, and it's time to let it go.

Thoughts for future posts or further reading:

So we'll become the new model minority - is that so bad? Asian American community organizers and theorists have done plenty of thinking and writing on why the model minority myth is harmful to Asian Americans and other oppressed racial groups.

Should government play a role (and what role should it play) in cultural/social change? I mentioned that Sullivan, like many libertarians, is averse to government meddling in "private" social relationships. My own view is that it is far more complex than this (obviously, Sullivan's view is more complex as well). I don't think there is a sharp public/private divide, nor do I think that government should be singled out and fetishized as the Big Disrupter of social relationships (there are other forces that interfere with personal autonomy as much as or more than government).

Heterophilosexuality

I am quite a fan of homespun sociology/psychology (as well as criticism of homespun sociology/psychology). So as my inaugural post, here's a little theory you may enjoy. It's a regularity that I noticed in an very informal survey of my friends and acquaintances. See if you can spot it applying in your own life!

Definitions: three types of people

First, I will define 3 types of people. Gynophiles, androphiles, and bi-philes (sorry about the ugliness of that last word). Notice that I color coded them because, well it's damned fun.

Gynophiles are people, male or female, whose circle of friends mainly consists of women.

Androphiles, conversely, are people whose circle of friends mainly consists of men.

Bi-philes, as you might expect, have more or less equal numbers of men and women in their circle of friends.

Note that these definitions depend, unlike some definitions of hetero- and homo- sexuality, not on the genders of the friends a person would prefer to have, but rather on the friends that a person does have.


"When we grow up we're going to be androphiles!"
(photo used under Creative Commons license from Tiggywinkle)

Get to the theory!

My theory is this - a great majority of same-sex binary relationships (with two partners of the same gender) consist of one androphile and one gynophile. I'll call such couples heterophilosexual.

This is different from butch and femme, and also different from masculinity and femininity. I know femme androphiles in relationships with femme gynophiles, masculine gynophiles with feminine androphiles and so on. The one thing (so far as I know) that has remained constant - one partner has mainly male friends, the other mainly female friends.

Just to clarify, individuals are not heterophilosexual, couples are. I don't think of heterophilosexuality as a preference or even a status that can be accorded to individuals (what would that even mean as an individual status?). It refers only to couples that have one androphilic and one gynophilic partner.

Problems/Gaps in knowledge:

Does this work for different-sex couples? Well, I don't have as much opportunity/inclination to inspect their relationships. It seems to me that often, regardless of their previous status, these couples often start to hang out exclusively or predominantly with other different-sex couples, hence making both partners default to bi-philes. In contrast, partners in same-sex couples tend to maintain more separate circles of friends (either ones they had before entering the relationship, or ones they cultivate on their own while in the relationship). It's a question of community norms.

What about bi-philes in same-sex couples? Well, like most nascent theories of this kind, mine does not fully escape the trap of dualism, so... you're out of luck, queer bi-philes. I'd welcome more anecdotal accounts of bi-philes in relationships, though. I'm more than happy to mess with mister in-between. I just need more data.

What's the point of all this anyway? Mostly an idle exercise for intellectual interest. I suppose if it is true that most same-sex couples are heterophilosexual, it raises some interesting questions about the mechanisms by which androphiles and gynophiles seek each other out or end up getting along. Because I've framed the categories as behavioral rather than identity or desire-based, I think the theory lends itself to behavioral explanations of how gyno and androphiles meet.