Gay guys cheating
Of course it isn’t only gay men who cheat. Exposure of footballer John Terry’s recent marital lapse has prompted many of us to ponder our infidelities. Just being men, we may argue, we have an inbuilt tendency to roam and be predatory, or to get bored and distracted. As gay men we’re confronted by a lot of adorable blokes on the scene and a massive industry promoting the enticements of a gay lifestyle everywhere we look. Even gay couples who have been together twenty years or more are highly likely to have had sexual encounters with other men during that time - they just failed to break them up.
A friend was saying to me the other day (he’s a regular shag of mine), that he knows his boyfriend sleeps around and he doesn’t mind (naturally), but he can’t understand why his partner denies it and refuses to talk about it. I think it’s a consequence of the way we’ve come over many years , seeking the right to express gay love and imagining ourselves in some ideal relationship similar to the biblical one of David and Jonathan. This somehow fed into our liking for the muscle-bound heroes of the great screen epics over the decades, like Steve Reeves (Hercules Unchained), Stephen Boyd (Ben Hur), and Brad Pitt (Troy). It doesn’t take much to translate that into images of brave, young soldiers fighting the forces of Islamo-fascism today, and dying to preserve the free world we are an essential part of.
Having won the freedom and got the chance to show heterosexuals how it’s done, we find one man is not enough for us. Gay cheating, or infidelity, has become for gay men the betrayal that dare not speak its name. All that history, all that struggle and we can’t stay faithful to our man and prove ourselves better and worthier than the straight culture we so longed to escape.
There’s also a strand of the gay psyche that encourages us to revel in the status of being betrayed by our boyfriends, which is equally reflected in the heterosexual world. In the 1966 film The Oscar we find Stephen Boyd’s handsome actor character telling a female friend:
“You kinda get turned on by a guy who treats you nice, like the schlep you were out with tonight. But a guy who wipes his feet on you - that you dig!”
It’s probably one of the truest camp utterances on celluloid.
Clips from ‘The Oscar’
Should we regret the way we treat our men, and they treat us, and feel like failures? No, we should accept ourselves, anal warts and all. Sleeping around does not necessarily diminish the love we feel for the significant others we’ve bonded with temporarily in this life. I think of all those I have enjoyed gay sex with, even if only for one night, with affection. Then there are the special few I’ve forged the most enduring bonds with, who, despite our differences and sexual turnarounds will always occupy a secure place in my heart. And if I feel regret, it’s for some of the sexual offers I’ve had in the past and turned down, not the temptations I followed.
The legendary riots at the Stonewall Bar ushered in a new dawn of acceptance for LGBT people; in social terms it has been compared to an atomic blast, or a great experiment. It is a long experiment and any ideals we have of gay perfection may take centuries to mature. As gay men we crave a variety of carnal experiences and are unfaithful sexually as a cosequence. We’ll all feel better if, taking that wider perspective, we fully accept that’s how things are right now. Then let’s get on with being as kind and loving to everyone as we can, looking to the day when a John Addington Symonds put it, we
“shall make the world one fellowship, and plant New Paradise for nations yet to be.”
By John Hartley
(c) Copyright 2010. All rights reserved.
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