As equal rights have slowly, slowly spread across the globe, chances are you’ve run into at least a few people worried that gay marriage would end up taking the edge off of gay men. In a way, I can see where they’re coming from: We’re sexual progressives, and not everyone is going to be up on the idea of getting married.
But as Alexander Abad-Santos from The Atlantic Wire reminds us, gay men don’t necessarily have to shelf their libido for the sake of conformity, nor will the rise of gay marriage kill off gay hook-up culture.
The idea that gay men are somehow shocking their heterosexual counterparts with sordid sex tales is perhaps giving them too much credit and not taking into account what straight people have long been told. After all, anti-gay apostles have been conflating homosexuality with bestiality, polygamy, pedophilia, natural disasters and the dissolution of heterosexual monogamy for years. And most Americans have seen an episode of Sex and The City (which is, in all honesty, a story about gay men) or Oz or read one of the several trend pieces on gay men’s hookup habits over the past couple of years. Despite that, a growing majority of Americans supports same-sex marriage. Don’t look now, gay men, but what you did last night probably isn’t shocking anyone enough to ruin your future marriage.
Now Canada’s had same-sex marriage for a little over eight years, so we can say with some authority: Relax, you can have gay marriage AND ball-slappy sex. It’s totally cool.
The internet may at times be a bottomless pit of screaming, impotent rage and stupid, but at its best, it facilitates the open exchange of ideas and knowledge. One of the upsides of this is that over the years, people have become increasingly sex-positive, and that means less judgement and shame when it comes to fucking. More and more people can now openly enjoy their sex lives without having to deal what other people think about it. Sex is a human need; the quantity needed just varies from person to person.
Gay men are always going to fuck just as there will always be people who get all weird about it. Just ignore them and do whatever feels comfortable to you.
[Image via Feast Of Fun]
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