Abstract
Banned from openly expressing their affective relations for most decades of the twentieth century, gay men invented other ways of relating, created couple relationships of varying duration and configurations to suit the circumstances forced on them or to circumvent prohibitions against them. These have been variously characterised as experimental, difficult to sustain, or similar to heterosexual marriage.1
‘He has provided huge stability and gives me huge freedoms.’ Lionel, 59.
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Notes
D. Altman The Homosexualization of America, the Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. xi–xii;
K. Plummer ‘Going gay: identities lifecycles and lifestyles in the male gay world’ in J. Hart and D. Richardson (eds) The Theory and Practice of Homosexuality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 105;
R. W. Connell, M. H. Davis and G. W. Dowsett ‘A bastard of a life: homosexual desire and practice among men in working-class milieux’ in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 29, 1 (1993) 122.
C. Chamberlain and P. Robinson The Needs of Older Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Persons, a report prepared for the ALSO Foundation (Melbourne: Centre for Applied Social Research, RMIT University, 2002).
G. W. Dowsett Practicing Desire: homosexual sex in the era of AIDS (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 135.
M. Foucault ‘Friendship as a way of life’ in Ethics: essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley and others, ed. P. Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 137.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1955, it was banned in Australia until 1961. When it did become available in Australia its annual sales were between 1,500 and 2,000 throughout the 1960s. See G. Wotherspoon City of the Plain: history of a gay sub-culture (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991), p. 126.
D.J. West Homosexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1968), p. 56.
J. Weeks Sexuality and its Discontents: meanings, myths & modern sexualities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 221.
G. Hekma ‘Same-sex relations among men in Europe, 1700–1990’ in F. X. Elder, L. A. Hall and G. Hekma (eds) Sexual Cultures in Europe: themes in sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 99–100. Henning Bech writes that the Danish law on ‘registered partnerships’ has been in effect since it was passed in 1989. Bech argues that these developments will lead to the disappearance of the homosexual as a type.
See H. Bech When Men Meet: homosexuality and modernity, trans. T. Mequit and T. Davies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), ch. VI.
See reports in the Age, Melbourne, 23 December 2005 and 30 June 2005. J. Boswell The Marriage of Likeness: same sex unions in pre-modern Europe (London: HarperCollins, 1995).
These findings closely correspond to those of a large-scale Australian inquiry. Private Lives: a report on the health and wellbeing of GLBTI Australians was based on surveys conducted on-line in 2005 of 5,476 people aged 16 to 92. More than 60 per cent of respondents were male, of whom more than 80 per cent identified as gay. The report states that a very small percentage of respondents had formalised their relationships by marriage or a commitment ceremony (5–10% of men and women), ‘while most others had no wish to do so’. See M. Pitts, A. Smith, A. Mitchell and S. Patel Private Lives: a report on the health and wellbeing of GLBTI Australians (Melbourne: Gay and Lesbian Health Victoria and The Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, 2006), p. 9.
M. Poliak ‘Male homosexuality — or happiness in the ghetto’ in P. Ariès and A. Béjin (eds) Western Sexuality: practice and precept in past and present times, trans. A. Forster (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 51.
J. D’Emilio and E. B. Freedman Intimate Matters: a history of sexuality in America, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 265–6.
For history of companionate marriage in English society, see L. Stone The Tamily, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld St Nicolson, 1977), ch. 8.
Connell, Davis and Dowsett ‘A bastard of a life’, p. 122; P. Bourdieu Masculine Domination, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 119.
See G. Herdt Same sex, different cultures: exploring gay and lesbian lives (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p. 157;
S. O. Murray Homosexualities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), ch. 9; Plummer ‘Going Gay’, p. 105;
J. Weeks, B. Heaphy and C. Donovan ‘Partners by choice: equality, power and commitment in non-heterosexual relationships’ in G. Allan (ed.) The sociology of the family: a reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1999), pp. 111–28.
For a useful survey of scholarly debates concerning gay men’s masculinity, see T. Edwards ‘Queering the pitch? Gay masculinities’ in M. S. Kimmel, J. Hearn and R.W. Connell (eds) Handbook of studies on men and masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc., 2005), pp. 51–68.
D’Emilio and Freedman Intimate Matters, p. 359. A. Giddens Modernity and Self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 6.
See also A. McLaren Twentieth Century Sexuality: a history (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999), p. 218
J. Weeks Making Sexual History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 220–1.
It was during the sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s that many heterosexual members of the ‘baby boomer’ generation experimented with similar radical, alternative sexual arrangements. Couples that engaged in ‘open’ sexual relations were known as ‘swinging’ couples or ‘swingers’; married couples were said to have ‘open marriages’. Herpes and then HIV-AIDS curtailed such experimentation for most of the 1980s and 1990s. See D. Allyn Make love not war: the sexual revolution, an unfettered history (New York: Routledge, 2001), chs 4 & 17 and passim.
J. Boswell Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: gay people in Western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 26–7.
For useful examination and discussion of the variety of medical metaphors used in association with HIV-AIDS, see D. Lupton Medicine as culture: illness, disease and the body in Western societies, 2nd edn (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2003), ch. 3.
D. Altman ‘AIDS and the discourses of sexuality’ in R. W. Connell and G. W. Dowsett (eds) Rethinking Sex: social theory and sexuality research (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), pp. 40–1.
E. White States of Desire: travels in gay America (London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986), p. 51.
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© 2008 Peter Robinson
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Robinson, P. (2008). Couple Relationships. In: The Changing World of Gay Men. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584310_7
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