u/endergadget

Liked this piece, thought you all here would too.

tl;dr: the author married a woman while knowingly gay (or perhaps bi but heavily leaning towards men) but closeted and struggling with his identity. Years later he finally has sex with another man, with his wife’s knowledge and encouragement, and admits to himself who he is, leading to their divorce.

The real meat of the article is his assessment of the modern romanticization of lavender marriages (at least online) amidst growing cultural hetero pessimism, a larger trend towards the idea of “sexual fluidity”, and a hard shift back to Traditionalist Christian values in the West. There’s also some discussion about how technology/online dating has led to complacency, flakiness, and extreme fear of rejection. And how those roadblocks have given rise to relationship pessimism across all orientations.

some standout passages:

>“[a guy I had slept with]’s his leg was extended in front of us, touching mine all the way to our feet. It was a position I’d been in so many times with [my wife], the sort of contact I loved with the same body parts. Except his had some different quality, not a specific physical attribute—not hardness or body hair—but something closer to an aura or charge, something I can only call himness. I felt suddenly ashamed of everything I had never been able to feel for her, the love and sympathy and attachment I had been unable to give for the simple, irrational, categorical reason that she wasn’t a he.”

>“traditionalist Christians are thrilled about lavender marriages. Beaten back for a few years by high-profile scandals, the politics of marriage equality, and a wave of state-level conversion therapy bans, ‘ex-gay’ organizations have seized on the new popularity of sexual fluidity to reconstitute themselves as gentler, less politicized champions of mixed-orientation marriage. ‘trad’ Christians scarcely even need to claim sexual orientation can be changed since gay people can now choose who they’re attracted to, or if they can’t, can still express their queerness by marrying straight people.”

>“Stephen Adubato has more recently weaponized Foucault and a host of pre-Stonewall homosexual writers in a kind of postmodern guerilla warfare on modern gay identity. Adubato argues that sexual orientation robs gay men of ‘agency’ while also mystifying their spicy ‘ontological’ position ‘in conflict with nature’ and in ‘rebellion against the Creator.’”

>“no matter where we look, we find examples of how digital technologies have enabled the anxious gaming-out of desire, a neurotic prescription of experience in order to foreclose the possibility of confusion, discomfort or pain.”

>“People of all ages gorge on slop from self-appointed influencers, therapists and ‘relationship experts,’ and multiply arcane litanies of ‘icks,’ red flags, boundaries, dangerous diseases and predatory behaviors. They pathologize love itself. These logical formulas may seem to offer reassurance, … but it is only a situation of paralyzing fear of our own desires.”