Fastlad wrote:

In every “ex-gay” thread I’ve read to date the men who become “ex-gays” first live lives of utterly extreme sexual addiction; not to say drug addled erotomania; until eventually they repent of their spectacularly dysfunctional ways and embrace Christ.

Well, if those are your two choices, no wonder, really.

But even then their gay orientation doesn’t appear to change, just their sexual addiction; so they’re not actually “ex-gays” at all, since it would be far more accurate to call them ex-drug and ex-sex addicts.

Why do we never hear of a well adjusted, monogamous gay man in the tenth year of his blissful homosexual partnership becoming an “ex-gay?” Can you guess? (Possibly because the dissolution rate for gay civil unions in Vermont is currently hovering at a mere 1%).

Back in April, I co-facilitated a workshop in London on this notion of sex “addiction” in gay men. (I’ll be doing another one in June.) If anyone is talking about erotomania or sex addiction, I always wonder if there’s erotophobia around. (Oh dear god, so many phobias. So little time.)

I believe that once we buy into the discourse of sex addiction, we have already succumbed to a worldview that is fundamentally conservative, one in which sex is reserved solely for the marital bed. If we suggest that ex-gays are “only” former drug- and sex-addicts, it implies a new normalcy, a de-queering and de-sexing of men, (sex is for fags, indeed, fastlad) that defines functionality and emotional wellbeing solely in relational terms: the paragon of the “well-adjusted” blissful, monogamous same-sex partnership, that lasts at least ten years, and only rarely ends in dissolution. That model serves to marginalise the sexual male, and bolster a worldview that is remarkably domesticated, a societal structure that is almost harking back to the fifties. I don’t know anyone who has had ten years of “blissful” relationship – it is hard-going to make relationships work, no matter who you are. And more and more of us are living lives as single people.

Being queer means different things for different people. More and more, I believe it’s to do with gender, not orientation. I have more in common with other sexually active men, of whatever orientation, than I do with Mr and Mr Happily-Partnered for Ten Years in Vermont. (Women have been saying this about being lesbian for decades, now, that they are women first, and have more in common with them than with other queers.)

If you call us dysfunctional long enough then perhaps we will believe it, feel ashamed of ourselves, and seek redemption through 12-step groups or fundamentalist Christianity or other belief systems. But the problem does not lie, I believe, in the “dysfunction” of having sex, but in the notion of sex as dysfunction. On a personal level, most men I know don’t see sex outside monogamous-relationship as a dysfunction, but I know a lot of women who do; indeed families break up on this very issue. On a political level, fundamentalists will always see the sexual anarchist as the threat to the notion of family, because all fundamentalism requires an enemy in order to exist. A toxic religious system is punitive in nature. Here is a description of “religious addiction“, a summary of the contents of a book called Toxic Faith. (Thanks to LCFP.)

Edmund White‘s autobiography, My Lives, is a fascinating read. He is a man who has a lot of sex, and it doesn’t sound as if monogamy has ever been on his agenda (I’m only half way through it at the moment, so he may surprise me on that, but I doubt it, I’ve just read the bit where he speaks of having just paid an Aeroflot steward for sex the day before.) Is he dysfunctional? A sex addict? Is he a “normal” gay man, or is he “queer”? Or, as he says of himself, just a “horny old bastard”, like his grandpa? Whatever he is, he’s forging his own path as best he can, the way we all try to do, without recourse to addictive notions of religiosity, or believing in the redemptive power of normalcy, or subscribing to notions of love- or sex-addiction, to ease the friction of living as a sexual man.