They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad.

That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation. ...

Although the number of participants remains small, gender-neutral housing has gained attention as the final step in the integration of student housing.

In the 1970s, many U.S. colleges moved from having only single-sex dormitories to providing coed residence halls, with male and female students typically housed on alternating floors or wings. Then came coed hallways and bathrooms, further shocking traditionalists. Now, some colleges allow undergraduates of opposite sexes to share a room.

Pitzer, which began its program in the fall of 2008, is among about 50 U.S. schools with the housing choice, according to Jeffrey Chang, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign in 2006 to encourage gender-mixed rooms. Participating schools include UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, Haverford, Wesleyan and the University of Michigan.

College officials say the movement began mainly as a way to accommodate gay, bisexual and transgender students who may feel more comfortable living with a member of the opposite sex. Most schools say they discourage couples from participating, citing emotional and logistical problems of breakups. Officials say most heterosexuals in the programs are platonic friends. ...

Parents cannot veto such a decision at Harvey Mudd, but Gerbick asks students to discuss it with their families ahead of time. He also asks applicants whether they are romantically involved; all of this year's participants said no. But if they were, the school could not forbid them from rooming together.

"If we are going into a post-gender world, then the regulation of private behavior is just not practical," he said.

Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, universities

posted by Eve at 4:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

On the first day same-sex weddings were held in the District, Dustin Rhodes could barely stomach the outpouring of matrimonial enthusiasm: the joyful couples exchanging vows in front of family, friends and colleagues, with all the flowers, cake and flash photography that come with the show.

"It's so personally revolting to me," said Rhodes, 36, who has been in a committed relationship with a man for 13 years.

"I'd rather see marriage abolished than see me married," he said as he ate lunch in a Columbia Heights cafe with his partner, Bray Creech. "The materialism of it, what I perceive as kind of a narcissism. Like all the money and decoration. . . . I have no interest in having a performance, which to me is what weddings are."

Creech, 33, got a faraway look on his face. "I would do it," he said, with a little smile of resignation that comes with years of losing the same argument. "You get all those gifts; that would be so nice. I have no problem with the performance part of it."

Many same-sex couples who rushed to make history this week by marrying in the District cited reasons such as spousal benefits, inheritance and hospital visitation rights, and greater societal legitimacy. But for some couples, the option to legally marry has raised a thorny issue -- to wed or not -- that had long remained safely in the realm of the hypothetical. For those who can't agree on whether to tie the knot, the new horizons have stirred up old conflicts. ...

As with heterosexual couples, the reasons for one same-sex partner balking are myriad. Some simply aren't ready to commit; others refuse to consider marrying until the right is extended nationwide and includes federal benefits. Some say that although they committed to their partners long ago in their hearts, they oppose the idea of marriage as an institution -- especially because it is one that so often collapses. ...

"There's a whole segment of the [gay] community for whom the marriage equality bit seems way too heteronormative," mimicking conventional heterosexual practices, said Suzanne Scott, director of women and gender studies at George Mason University. "Some would even argue that marriage is an outdated norm based on archaic rules."

Like immigrants who once sought to become Americanized and now embrace their ethnic roots, Scott said, many gays and lesbians embrace their differentness but also feel torn because they value the benefits that come with marriage. ...

"Marriage for me presents an opportunity for approval, social approval," said the Frederick woman, who has never married but whose 54-year-old partner lost faith in the institution after a heterosexual marriage. "And I shouldn't care after all I've been through, but I do, I do care. I'm tired of being marginalized."

Labels: culture, DC, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, heteronormativity, Marriage

posted by Eve at 2:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.

Traditional society choked this down—some more progressive parts of it did, anyway—by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity that must be rigid and ineluctable. It hypothesized three millennia of men and women who must have been closeted, before they had such wonderfully enlightened friends and neighbors as we are. Only in this restricted way could society understand homosexuality without gayness threatening to reveal more new choices.

The utopians among us held our peace. It seemed impossible to stay in view of the rest of traditional society, the reactionary and hostile parts, and make our argument to fellow progressives that gay reorganization might be better than the old heterosexuality, and not just a neutral object for tolerance—that liberation from the heterosexual family was something we all could wish for, and that it needn't stop where it has. Then, because such a large part of the gay community publicly seemed to prefer the necessitarian, "eternal" framework, finding it the best way to make sense of individuals' own experiences, and to justify them to family and friends, we utopian straights—bystanders, well-wishers, but dilettantes—had another good reason to keep quiet. ...

Social utopianism has long focused on the reorganization of households, but has rarely accomplished much. Straight utopians argued for free love, free divorce, unorthodox childrearing and communal parenthood, and got divorce, followed by more imprisoning marriages, followed by more divorce. Because the home has seemed to be at the origin of economics (the word comes from the Greek oikos, household, and household management, oikonomia), a revision of the home, say one based on non-reproductivity and made by equals of the same sex, could ground a wider egalitarianism. Because the family, as the crucible of personality for children, seems to be the origin of violence, hierarchy, and tyranny—in the old descending triad of dominance: man-woman-child—a revision of the family, such that children could look forward to forming their own future households on different models, could gain new principles of power for society.

Labels: abortion, beyond marriage, culture, fam, feminism, gay marriage, gay/straight differences

posted by Eve at 10:35 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...How does marriage benefit children? The answer is not that marriage confers general respectability or practical benefits. If that were true, then children in remarried families would do better than children with unmarried parents. And they don't, on average.

Marriage benefits children to the extent that it keeps the child's own mother and father in a permanent, not-too-high-conflict union. ...

I do not think same-sex marriage will serve child well-being in any appreciable way, and I don't think there is much sign that that is the goal. The gay community is by and large supporting same-sex marriage as a right, not as a norm at all. Relatively few same-sex couples enter same-sex marriages [PDF] and the dissolution rates (at least in Sweden, where we have hard data) are extraordinarily high (roughly 50 percent higher for gay men, 100 percent higher for lesbian couples [PDF]).

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:11 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

When Rio and Ray married in 2008, the Bay Area women omitted two words from their wedding vows: fidelity and monogamy.

“I take it as a gift that someone will be that open and honest and sharing with me,” said Rio, using the word “open” to describe their marriage.

Love brought the middle-age couple together — they wed during California’s brief legal window for same-sex marriage. But they knew from the beginning that their bond would be forged on their own terms, including what they call “play” with other women.

As the trial phase of the constitutional battle to overturn the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage concludes in federal court, gay nuptials are portrayed by opponents as an effort to rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony. Quietly, outside of the news media and courtroom spotlight, many gay couples are doing just that, according to groundbreaking new research.

A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.

New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

The study also found open gay couples just as happy in their relationships as pairs in sexually exclusive unions, Dr. Hoff said. A different study, published in 1985, concluded that open gay relationships actually lasted longer.

None of this is news in the gay community, but few will speak publicly about it. Of the dozen people in open relationships contacted for this column, no one would agree to use his or her full name, citing privacy concerns. They also worried that discussing the subject could undermine the legal fight for same-sex marriage.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, open relationships

posted by Eve at 12:38 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...It is striking, then, how comparatively rarely children are mentioned as an argument in favor of gay marriage. The issue is framed as a debate over equality and justice, of personal freedom and the relation of church and state, not about what is good for kids.

That’s partly because, until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

This growth, coupled with the passage of time, means there is a large cohort of children who are now old enough to yield solid data. And the portrait emerging tells us something about the effects of gay parenting. It also contains lessons for all parents. ...

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families. ...

Heterosexual couples might want to pay attention to these results. While the gay-marriage debate is playing out on the public stage, a more private debate is taking place in kitchens and bedrooms over who does what in a heterosexual marriage (takes out the trash, spends more time with the kids, feels free to head out with their friends for a beer). The philosophical underpinnings of both conversations — gay marriage and equality in parenting — are similar, in that both focus on equality for adults (in the case of heterosexuals, mostly wives). But even if parents who seek parity do so for their own sanity and in pursuit of their own ideals, might it not also be better for their children?

Labels: culture, gay parenting, gay/straight differences, gender, gender differences, heterosexual couples, parenting

posted by Eve at 12:15 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A new analysis of Census data shows that same-sex couples who identify as married are similar to opposite-sex couples in age, income and even parental status, regardless of whether they are legally wed. ...

It also found that Utah, Wyoming and other states that don't offer any legal recognition of gay relationships had some of the highest percentages of same-sex couples who describe themselves as husbands or wives.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, Marriage

posted by Eve at 4:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...When straight people have a relationship involving more than the customary two partners, they call it “polyamory.” We don’t use that term much as gay men, but we are at least as adventurous in trying out all the possible combinations and permutations of relationships. If two is good, then is three better?

Men choose relationships with multiple partners for many reasons. The novelty of having a third person around certainly can make things interesting. Three people can feel more like a family than being a couple feels for some men. Chores and responsibilities can get divided up with less work (sometimes) and there is usually more disposable income.

Relationships are complicated and plenty of work even when there are only two people in them. What’s it like when a third enters the calculations?

It’s unusual for three people to meet one another simultaneously and decide to form a potentially complex relationship. More often, two of the partners have been together a while when the third person enters the relationship.

Labels: gay/straight differences, polyamory

posted by Eve at 1:47 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A couple's sexual orientation determines whether or not they prefer to adopt a boy or a girl. Gay men are more likely to have a gender preference for their adopted child whereas heterosexual men are the least likely. What's more, couples in heterosexual relationships are more likely to prefer girls than people in same-gender relationships, according to Dr. Abbie Goldberg from Clark University in the US. ...

Among those who expressed a preference, gay men were the most likely to have a preference and heterosexual men were the least likely. Couples in heterosexual relationships were less likely to prefer boys than couples in same-gender relationships.

The study participants provided a range of reasons for their preferences for girls. The most common reason among heterosexual women was their inexplicable desire for a daughter, whereas heterosexual men most frequently listed a combination of their inexplicable desire to have a girl, their ideas about father-daughter relationships and their perceived characteristics of girls. Men felt girls would be easier to bring up, and more interesting and complex than boys, and less physically challenging than boys. Lesbians tended to focus on their perceived inability to socialize a child of the opposite gender, and gay men most frequently cited concerns about boys being more likely to encounter harassment than girls.

The most common reason for preferring boys among heterosexual women was an inexplicable desire for a son, whereas heterosexual men's preference for a son reflected patriarchal norms, including keeping the family name going and gender identity considerations i.e. their own masculine interests. When explaining their preference for a boy, lesbians most frequently mentioned their own atypical gender identities, including the fact that their own interests tended to be more masculine and tomboyish, whereas gay men most often highlighted that they felt more confident about their ability to raise and socialize boys.

Labels: adoption, gay/straight differences, gender

posted by Eve at 4:31 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Sorry eHarmony: Just because you launched a same-sex match site doesn't mean you're out of legal trouble. Settling an anti-discrimination charge from New Jersey's attorney general, Neil Clark Warren's eHarmony yesterday unveiled Compatible Partners for gay men and women. But a class action suit making its way through California, where eHarmony is based, says the matchmaker hasn't gone far enough — and their current two-site approach amounts to "separate but equal." And violates law.

From a press release issued by Schneider Wallace Cottrell Brayton Konecky LLP:

“Having been sued for discrimination, eHarmony’s response is not to stop discriminating but to instead create another business. Nothing in the law or logic allows companies to operate a business that discriminates so long as they open up another one that does not, nor does California equal rights law indulge the practice of separate but equal," says Joshua Konecky of Schneider Wallace Cottrell Brayton Konecky, LLP, who is representing plaintiffs in a class action suit against eHarmony.com. ...

Meanwhile, the California class action lawsuit argues eHarmony must provide both opposite- and same-sex dating on its flagship site. It's a reasonable demand — in theory.

Until you think about Gay.com: Should that site be ordered by a court to offer opposite-sex dating right on Gay.com?

Should Manhunt.net and adam4adam be told by a judge they must appeal to straight couples too?

Labels: gay/straight differences

posted by Eve at 2:21 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Anderson and Girgis instead propose the following: “revisionists would agree to oppose the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus ensuring that federal law retains the traditional definition of marriage as the union of husband and wife …In return, traditionalists would agree to support federal civil unions offering most or all marital benefits.” But these unions “would be available to any two adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities, whether or not their relationship is sexual,” provided that they are “otherwise ineligible to marry each other.”

In other words, there would be federal civil unions for gays--but also for other domestic pairs: elderly widowed sisters, for example, or bachelor roommates.

At first glance, their claim that Rauch and Blankenhorn base their proposal on “the presumption that these relationships are or may be sexual” seems strange. After all, Rauch and Blankenhorn never mention sex, and the state neither knows nor cares (nor checks) whether people are having sex once they’re married or “civilly united.”

On the other hand, people generally assume (with good reason) that marriages and civil unions are sexual, or more broadly romantic. Romantic pair-bonding seems to be a fundamental human desire--for straights and gays--and part of what marriage does is to acknowledge pair-bonds. It does so not because the government is sentimental about such things, but because it recognizes the important role such bonds have in the lives of individuals and the community.

Anderson and Girgis are correct that there are other important bonds in society, and we may well want to extend more legal recognition to them. There is no reason that two cohabitating spinsters shouldn’t be granted mutual hospital visitation rights if they want them.

But the question remains whether we want to extend “most or all” federal marital benefits to any cohabitating couple otherwise ineligible to marry, as Anderson and Girgis propose.

And this question prompts additional ones: why limit such recognition to couples? Mutually interdependent relationships don’t only come in twos. Oddly, Anderson and Girgis seem to have more in common with radicals who seek to move “beyond marriage” than they do with anyone in the mainstream marriage debate.

Labels: beyond marriage, civil unions, David Blankenhorn, gay/straight differences, Jonathan Rauch, Ryan T. Anderson, Sherif Girgis

posted by Eve at 12:26 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...But I digress. This is about gay sex in particular. And the fact that gay men, like it or not, are being asked - implicitly or explicitly - to shut up about sex while the GMM forges on. Even as gay sexual life, such as it is, continues on its way. I hear from a friend that several single gay men found themselves being hit on by gay couples looking for threesomes - at a gay marriage convention. I know, from the constant swinging of the doors of my neighbourhood bathhouse, and from my conversations with friends, that there's plenty of gay sex going on all around me.

I'm sad about how much of gay sexual culture is being made to go away while the adults play at respectability in order to win the marriage game. I wonder: After gay marriage is won, will we talk more openly about what married gay men actually do with and to each other? Or will we have completely forgotten how to have those conversations?

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, gender differences, open relationships, sex

posted by Eve at 1:40 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Here in the great evergreen-and-gray metropolis of Portland, Ore., we like to think of our city as a thriving wonderland of forward thinking. We prefer our urban planning carefully considered, our light-rail and bicycle routes plentiful, our indie musicians erudite and inscrutable, and our movie theaters stocked with beer—progressive policies, all. So when we kicked off 2009 by swearing in Sam Adams, as the first openly gay mayor of a major American city, the occasion left a lot of us pretty pleased with our nonchalant open-mindedness: "Oh, did we just make civil rights history? Funny, we weren't even paying attention." But the back-patting didn't last long. Within weeks of taking office, Portland's new mayor found himself embroiled in a scandal so lurid and combustible that it resembles a plotline from The Young and the Restless. Which now leaves Portland as an innovator of something quite different. The Adams imbroglio may be the first true 21st-century political sex scandal: one that only a gay politician could survive. ...

To demonstrate the first way it's different, let's ask the obvious question: How would the Portland public react if Adams were straight and Breedlove were a teenage girl? The answer is, we'd see this as a garden variety, morally black-and-white sex scandal, and Adams would be jobless faster than you can say "McGreevey." After all, there's a massive double standard in how we think about the age of consent. When an older man courts a teenage girl, it's predatory and sleazy; but when it's a teenage boy receiving advances, gay or straight, we have trouble believing he's being wronged. (Indeed, Breedlove was aggressively chasing Adams; he even has a dog named Lolita.) Critics see the movie The Reader, wherein a 36-year-old Kate Winslet beds a 15-year-old boy, and they speak of a "tender sexual awakening," as every straight man in the theater (including me) thinks, "I would have sold my siblings into bonded labor to sleep with Kate Winslet when I was 15, you little bastard." Portray a 36-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl, though, and you're in … well, Lolita territory—no mercy there. Some have argued that if Breedlove were female, straight men would be high-fiving Adams, but this is preposterous. We'd understand the attraction—and when you peruse Breedlove's unbelievably porny Myspace pics, you can certainly see what was on Adams' mind—but we wouldn't excuse the behavior. "Yes, she's hot," we'd say, "but they call it jailbait for a reason. You don't touch underage girls, period." The male-male relationship brings a moral gray area that helps Adams.

And let's add another factor to this ethical calculus: For better or worse, the under-40, hyper-liberal Portlanders who make up Adams' support base automatically err toward nonjudgment when it comes to gay culture. Essentially, the years of school lessons on tolerance are coming to the fore; we were taught not to judge the lifestyles of those who aren't like us, and we're not inclined to start now.

Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, gender differences

posted by Eve at 11:44 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT