You log into
Facebook and find another friend has just given birth to a beautiful baby boy.
You pour yourself a glass of red to go with the gin in preparation for the
inevitable question over dinner: “so, any boyfriends on the horizon?” The thing
is you are seeing somebody, but a pickup at XXL and a couple of weeks’ casual
fucking doesn’t have the same ring to it (pun intended) as a couple who have
been together since they crawled out of the primordial soup. You have two
options. If they’re not friends, say “I’m waiting for true love, not just whoever
comes along” and then look at them both sympathetically.
If they’re
friends, then you can take the opportunity to launch into the forty-five
minute, gin-soaked (“another triple, please babes”) story of your disastrous
last boyfriend. How he was so perfect for you in every single way, apart from
things like… Oh, you know when he was supposed to turn up and meet all your
friends and instead he went to a chill out and turned his phone off. But hey,
that’s just what you’ve come to expect from gay men’s intimacy in 2016.
In fact, you
find that’s what many people expect from gay men’s intimacy. As the gin hits in
and you get into an actual deep conversation about where you are with your
romantic life, and how that ex-boyfriend actually truly hurt you, a close
friend says: “but loads of gay men are single, aren’t they?” And she’s right:
whereas almost all my straight friends have been in couples since their
mid-twenties, a large amount of the gay men I know are freewheeling lone
rangers.
Boyfriends
come and go obviously, but often seem to cause more pain than pleasure. The
caveat is of course that gay men enjoy more sexual freedom. A third option you
could have drunkenly declared @ the table would be: “I might not have a life
partner, but I’ve probably fucked more people than the lot of you put
together.” But that wouldn’t sit well, right?
Navigating
man-on-man romance in a world designed for straight love stories, is like sailing
by the stars under a cloud-filled sky. We grow up largely invisible, in both
our families and our schools. We do not have equal rights. The lack of same-sex
Sex and Relationship Education in schools is a disgrace. Not only does it mean
that gay men emerge from the education system institutionally ill-equipped to
protect themselves from HIV, but we are not even given the basic tools in how
to make a gay relationship work. And state-sanctioned invisibility encourages
homophobia: not one national bullying charity has specific policies to tackle
homophobic bullying.
Everything
about this society has been shaped to affirm your love: the songs on the radio,
the programmes on television, the movies in cinemas. You’ve never once had to
check where you were, or who was around, before you kissed a partner. Your
parents would have been delighted to meet your girlfriend. Your Dad will have
encouraged and back-slapped your awakening sexuality.
“You won’t
have had your first sexual experiences in a public toilet, or meeting strangers
online. You won’t have had to hide away your sex, and you won’t have been
terrified of being discovered throughout your most formative teenage years. You
won’t have associated intimacy of loved ones with masking who you are. You
won’t have found a boyfriend who’d experienced all this but worse and so was it
any fucking surprise that he offered you emotional hurt as love?
Hopping from cock to cock at a
chillout, and calling each other sluts in the same breath. And we as a gay
community have got some personal responsibility to take in how we celebrate
shade and treat each other as dirt. But there are reasons why, sometimes, it’s
difficult to find a boyfriend.”
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