Savage Love from A to Z by Dan Savage

Author:Dan Savage [Savage, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

We’re mostly monogamous, not swingers, not actively looking. Monogamish.

—JULY 20, 2011

I was raised to believe that good people were monogamous and monogamous people were good.

It took me a little while to realize that I’d been misled—misled by every movie I’d seen, every parent I’d had, and every faith I’d been raised in. But by the time I was twenty-five I’d met enough good people in nonmonogamous relationships to know it wasn’t as simple as “monogamous = good” and dated enough deeply shitty people who were nonmonogamous to know that “nonmonogamous ≠ good.”

Like I write in “P is for Price of Admission” (see this page), my husband, Terry, insisted on monogamy when we started dating. I was thirty years old when we met—we made out in the bathroom of a bar—and I was looking for an open relationship. But monogamy was the price of admission that I was willing to pay to be with Terry.

Four years later—four years, one child, and two books in which our monogamous commitment featured prominently later—we weren’t monogamous anymore. Since I’d written about us being monogamous, I felt like we needed to write about the fact that we no longer were. Terry would’ve preferred that I let people assume we were still monogamous—that was my mother’s preference as well—but I worried we would be outed as nonmonogamous and accused of lying in order to present ourselves as “good gays,” i.e., monogamous gays, to win respectability points.

So…I wrote a little about our newly open relationship without going into a lot of detail. It was the height of the marriage equality movement and it was politically risky for a prominent gay writer who had advocated for same-sex marriage—particularly one who had adopted a child with his boyfriend—to come out as nonmonogamous. Some people in the marriage equality movement were extremely annoyed and let me know it. But I was just as annoyed at the marriage equality advocates—some of them friends of mine—who argued that gay couples deserved the right to marry because we were just as capable of making and honoring monogamous commitments as straight couples were.

Straight couples didn’t and don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. And straight people could get married without being religious or having kids either, the other two “defining” characteristics of marriage, at least according to opponents of marriage equality—defining and disqualifying, according to anti-gay bigots, since gay people were less likely to have kids or be monogamous. But if the marriage equality movement was about securing equal rights and not embracing double standards, then nonmonogamous gay couples like me and my then-boyfriend were just as “deserving” of the right to marry as nonmonogamous straight couples like, oh, Warren Buffett and his wife. And other couples with kids. And other couples without kids.

Our new openness about, well, our new openness made some people uncomfortable, but our honesty didn’t derail the marriage equality movement. Terry’s my husband now. But a couple of assumptions were made about us after I wrote about our now-nonmonogamous relationship that made us both uncomfortable.

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