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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Married life between a man and woman can follow many twists and turns. So why do gay marriages have to be so straight?
Jul 17, 2004 | We were having dinner at the house of some friends, a nice couple, around our age, good parents to three girls. The kids were tearing around in the yard and the adults were well into our third bottle of wine when the conversation turned to sex. We knew the wife was relatively young and sexually inexperienced when she married -- she had confided that in us the first time we'd been over to dinner, almost a year before. She had always felt as if she'd missed out, she told us. She never really had any sexual adventures; she had never done anything she regretted or looked back on and thought, "Wow! Was that me?"
We were the only gay couple she knew, my boyfriend and I, and she had been initiating slightly awkward conversations about sex with us ever since we met. She seemed hung up on our gayness, but not in a bad way. What she seemed was jealous. She assumed that, because we were gay, we had both had wild sexual experiences, the kind of adventures she had missed out on, and after two or three glasses of wine she would start demanding the details. Tonight she wanted to talk about infidelity.
"Have you ever cheated on Terry?" she asked me.
I looked at Terry and made my "am I allowed to answer this question truthfully?" face. He nodded his head to one side, making his "if you must" face.
"Sure, I've cheated on Terry," I said, after checking to make sure the kids were all out of earshot. "But only in front of him."
She laughed and looked at me, then Terry, then me again. Were we joking? I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn't a joke. I had "cheated" on Terry -- but only in front of him, only with his permission, only with someone we both liked and trusted, only when we were in one city and our son was in another. So, yes, we've had a three-way -- actually we've had a couple, and while three-ways barely register on the kink-o-meter anymore, they're considered the absolute height of kink for people like us -- for parents, I mean, not for gay people. As parents we're not really supposed to be having sex with each other, much less have sex with someone else.
She demanded the details, but I would only give her a basic outline. One was a nice French guy who looked like Tom Cruise. The other was with an ex-boyfriend of mine, a Microsoft millionaire who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building a "playroom" in his basement -- a kind of sex toy wonderland. Terry wanted to see this playroom for himself and so we went over for dinner... and one thing led to another...
We emphasized that we regarded three-ways the same way Bill Clinton regarded abortion: They're best when they're safe, legal and rare. Really rare. Two in 10 years? We get to vote for president more often than we have three-ways.
