‘I’d much rather have sexual intimacy as opposed to sex’: Young Australian gay men,sex,relationships and monogamy

Introduction

There is a significant literature describing the myriad ways in which gay men have constructed alternative relationship models to those institutionalised in heterosexual life (Adam, 2006; Giddens, 1992; Green, 2006; Stacey, 2011; Weeks et al., 2003). Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2003) provide a compelling portrait of the ways in which, in the absence of traditional marriage, non-heterosexuals have produced creative ‘experiments in living’ in response to the ‘fundamental question of “how shall we live?”’ (2003: 3). Similarly, Adam (2006) argues that gay sexual cultures provide unique opportunities for sexual self-expression that in turn have produced innovative emotional connections between gay men.

However, very few studies have explored the characteristics of young gay men's relational lives, particularly in regard to the social norms and expectations they may have grown up with and those they encounter as they come out, meet other gay men, and venture onto the commercial gay scene. In this article, we explore the ways in which young Australian gay men (aged 18–30) conduct their sexual and relationship lives, and how they make sense of the choices available to them in the absence of marriage and family conventions that define sexual and relational life for young heterosexual men. Drawing on data from a qualitative study exploring gay men's experiences and definitions of monogamy and relationships, we seek to provide an understanding of the tensions, ambivalences and contradictions that underpin sex and relationships for younger gay men.

Young gay men, sex, relationships and homonormativity

Most research on the relationship lives of young gay men is framed in terms of risk factors or vulnerability to HIV (Bauermeister, Leslie-Santana et al., 2011; Bauermeister, Ventuneac et al., 2012; Eisenberg, et al., 2011; Mustanski et al., 2011; Prestage et al., 2008). For instance, Trussler et al. (2000) explored the sexual and relationship patterns in young gay men's lives in Vancouver to better understand the personal, interpersonal and social factors that lead men to compromise their sexual safety. Participants described ‘coming out’ into an identity and a social and sexual scene that brought new challenges regarding sex, love and relationships, in parallel with the hostility of a homophobic culture and society. The authors noted a tension between a desire for lasting relationships with sexual opportunities and cultural practices in gay life: ‘the men in our study talk about a desire for both monogamous relationships and casual sex at the same time as if it is the central problem of their lives’ (Trussler et al., 2000). The young men in Ridge, Plummer and Peasley's (2006) study described the rituals related to dance, drug use, sex and embodiment that characterised their passage through the commercial gay scene as one in which new, potentially exciting opportunities for self-expression were offset with new forms of isolation, exclusion and loss of self. Anderson (2012) argues that young gay men come out onto a social scene in which monogamy is expected, but rarely maintained. Recent Australian survey research suggests younger men are more likely to report being in a monogamous than an open relationship (Prestage et al., 2008). Younger men also tend to have shorter relationships indicating the practice of ‘serial monogamy’ (Mustanski et al., 2011; Prestage et al., 2008).

However, it is no longer the case that gay men are excluded wholesale from the mainstream institutions of heterosexual relationship life, as evidenced by the contemporary same-sex marriage campaign and the focus it has assumed in gay politics. As in other domains, the figure of the same-sex couple is currently pre-eminent in Australian gay social and cultural life, while more radical sexual and relationship forms appear to have been strategically silenced in favour of an ‘equal rights’ discourse that makes little mention of sex (Klesse, 2007; Warner, 1999). Critics have taken aim at the normalising effects of such political strategies of accommodation within the social and cultural institutions of heterosexual society in a now well-rehearsed critique on ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan, 2002; Jackson and Scott, 2010; Klesse, 2007; Richardson, 2004). According to this critique, social tolerance and legal equality discourses foster the incorporation of some gay men and lesbians into the mainstream of neoliberal, heteronormative citizenship at the expense of others whose gender or sexual identities or practices cannot be so easily tolerated. Middle class and white gays and lesbians more easily access these forms of citizenship, while sexuality is privatised and domesticated with long-term, monogamous coupledom emblematic of ‘good’ gay citizenship and other forms constituted as morally weaker or personally less fulfilling.

Earlier research on gay men's relationships described static models of men's partnerships (i.e. monogamous or ‘open’), or described monogamy as a stage in the formation of new relationships (McWhirter and Mattison, 1984). Subsequent work (Adam, 2006; Green, 2006; Stacey, 2011; Weeks et al., 2003) has tended to explore monogamy as the structure against which gay men cultivate alternative arrangements, neglecting the meaning and practice of monogamy itself (Duncan et al., 2014). Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan (2003) identified the chosen nature of relationships and the implicit need for their negotiation to ensure equality and mutual satisfaction as more important than whether monogamy was the basis to the relationship among their participants.

However, Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott find the account offered by Weeks et al., and others too ‘optimistic’ (2010: 75), and lament ‘the demise of the critique of monogamy’ (2010: 99) as one casualty in the neo-liberal gay politics currently ascendant in many western settings:

Those still arguing for non-monogamy … remain a minority. The move away from questioning the privileging of couple relationships has blunted the critique of heterosexuality and is intimately connected with the pursuit of a rights agenda that seeks inclusion into pre-existing normative patterns of sexual and domestic life. (2010: 100).

To counter this limitation, a number of geographers have recently advanced a critical approach to thinking about the uneven and variable nature of the impact of homonormativity. As Podmore (2013: 263) argues: ‘while legislation against homophobia, the adoption of non-discrimination clauses, and the extension of marriage rights have produced official ‘equalities’ landscapes for sexual minorities in many core nations, these forms of sexual legitimation have been socially and spatially uneven’. Following more than a decade of engagement with the ‘forces of assimilation’ that produce ‘homonormativities’ (2013), Podmore suggests moving beyond the binary of inclusion/exclusion to explore how a ‘climate of equalities’ is reshaping the spacialities of LGBT lives.

Brown (2009, 2012) similarly contests the portrait of ‘homonormativity’ as ‘all-encompassing and unassailable’ (2012: 1067) and, drawing on the work of Oswin (2005), argues that if we reject the binary between radical and homonormative we may find more interdependence between so-called queer spaces and those fostered by the heteronormative impulses of contemporary gay political movements. Brown argues, vice-versa, that if there are many heterosexualities then it is a folly to position heterosexual spaces, and the practices and norms that appear to strengthen them, as always oppressive (that is, to ‘indicate a state of assimilation’ (Brown, 2009: 1500)), or to be wilfully blind to the unexpected social relations which might be given rise to (Brown, 2009).

In a recent example of work analysing the uneven effects of homonormativity, Nash (2013) explores the meaning and significance of gay community for a generation of young gay men in Canada who conceive of themselves as ‘post-gay’. She argues that:

certain segments of the LGBT population in Toronto are experiencing a ‘post-mo [post-modern] world’. A new generation of twentysomething men, arguably, white, middle class and technologically savvy, are experiencing themselves as sexual and gendered beings in historical and geographical circumstances that are completely different from the LGBT generations that went before. (2013: 250)

Thus, understanding the effects of homonormativity requires analysing the variable, contextual, and everyday experience of negotiating the changing meaning and practical significance of a gay identity. It is in this spirit that we explore the data that follow. In particular, we seek to analyse the ways in which young gay Australian men appear to negotiate a tension between competing ideologies furnishing their understandings of sex, intimacy and monogamy – the heteronormative discourse of ‘complementarity’ between the sexes which sustains monogamy as ‘natural’ and ‘good’, versus the rejection of orthodoxies associated with heterosexuality in gay liberation and homonormative critiques. We pay particularly close attention to the figure of ‘the scene’, simultaneously a material space formed by the social and commercial spaces constituting gay urban gay life, and a more ephemeral concept embodying ideals about sexuality, identity and belonging tied up with a now long and established history of ideas about sexual liberation. We also explore the ways in which monogamy as the ideal is found wanting, the ways young gay men experience and understand this loss of value, and the formulation of new meanings and values around alternatives to monogamy.

Importantly, we find that this embrace of alternatives to monogamy may have much more in common with the conditions of late modernity and neoliberal governmentality than those who advance non-monogamy as a political strategy against heteronormativity might expect. As such, we also ask whether monogamy might be a ‘red herring’ as far as debates about homonormativity are concerned. As Brown (2009: 1506) implies, non-monogamy is not necessarily incompatible with ‘the figure of the affluent gay consumer’. Provided non-monogamy is a private aspect of the publicly endorsed, equal gay couple, it is fully consistent with the ideals of the neo-liberal state and with the sexual and social opportunities of the commercial gay scene. Is it possible that monogamy may also be more complicated in practice than it is ideologically positioned within the homonormative critique?

Methodology

The data for this article are drawn from a larger project exploring the meanings and practice of intimacy, relationships and monogamy among Australian gay men. Following approval from La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee, 61 gay identified men were recruited from three Australian states on the Eastern seaboard (Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland) to participate in an individual face-to-face interview. The sample in each state was divided 3:1 between the capital city (Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane) and a regional centre (Central Victoria, Northern Rivers, and Cairns). In the capital cities, the sample was age stratified (18–25; 25–35; 35+), but this was not practically possible in the regional centres due to the smaller number of interviews conducted in these locations.

Men were recruited by advertisements in the print and online gay press, appeals to gay organisations, and targeted advertising on Facebook. Advertisements asked for men in monogamous or open relationships and single men to participate in an interview about their experiences, thoughts and preferences with regard to relationships, including whether they conceived of monogamy as an HIV prevention strategy. Participants were screened on the basis of the aforementioned age categories, but were diverse in regards to relationship length, HIV status, ethnic background, educational level, and relationship status.

Semi-structured interviews of between 50 and 120 minutes were conducted at local gay men's health organisations or participants' homes, recorded and subsequently transcribed. Participants reviewed an information sheet and signed a consent form in accordance with Ethics procedures. All participant details have been kept confidential and participants are referred to by pseudonym in the reporting of data that follows.

Interviews were transcribed and reviewed by each of the investigators, and several meetings were held to discuss initial impressions of the data. Analysis for the present article was guided by the following question: How do young gay Australian men construct meaning in relation to questions of intimacy, sex and relationships at the intersection of competing ideologies regarding the significance and value of monogamy? To answer this question, we drew on Foucauldian discourse analysis. From a Foucauldian perspective, discourses enable and constrain what can be thought, said and done (Burman and Parker, 1993). They privilege particular versions of social reality and legitimate existing social structures and power relations accordingly (Willig, 2008: 113). A Foucauldian discourse analysis enables questioning of the relationship between how individuals think and feel, the practices they engage in, and the social relations within which their experience is located (Willig, 2008). In particular, we were interested in the ways in which these young men understood their sexual and relationship lives as reflections of age-specific choices.

Each transcript was read and reread by the lead author before transcripts were imported into the data analysis software NVIVO9 for coding. An initial stage of open-coding involved the analysis of words and sentences for underlying discourses and patterns of meaning across the data set. Close attention was then paid to the various subject positions afforded participants by the discourses identified, the ways in which participants deployed particular discourses to position themselves or others, and the ways in which particular discourses facilitated certain forms of action and self-understanding, while closing down others.

As indicated, quantitative data suggest younger gay men adopt different kinds of relationships to those of their older counterparts. Thus, the current article is comprised of data from interviews with 26 men aged 18–30 years. Eight of these men were in a relationship: four were monogamous; two were dealing with an incidence of ‘cheating’ in a monogamous relationship; and two were in relationships with an open agreement. Among the 18 single men, 16 described their ideal relationship as monogamous. Importantly, in responding to the request for participants these men were likely to be particularly reflective and thoughtful about the questions we asked them, and as a qualitative sample, cannot be thought to constitute a representative sample of young Australian gay men.

There is considerable debate about what constitutes a ‘young person’ in the sexual health literature, and there are a number of terms and concepts employed to capture a diverse range of developmental experiences and social transitions specific to being a ‘young person’ (Hendry et al., 2013). Torkelson (2012) has argued that emerging adulthood is often defined in terms of heterosexual markers of maturity, including marriage and family, excluding those who are same-sex attracted or transgender. For the purposes of this article we have defined ‘young gay men’ to mean men aged 18–30, having identified shared patterns of relationship practice and meaning-making among this cohort of men. While aspects of the following themes were present among those men over 30, there was a strong sense among these men that age made a difference to how they experienced relationships.

Intimacy, maturity, ‘the scene’ and flexibility

In the following sections, we present three themes that each explore the ways in which participants spoke about sex, intimacy and relationships. In the first, we analyse a developmental narrative that underpinned how men thought about ‘the gay scene’ and the realisation of their ambitions for monogamy in a future relationship. In the second, we look at the ways in which some men positioned themselves as abnormal, or exemplary, in response to a perceived pressure to be more sexually free than they felt comfortable. Finally, we look at how some men described learning to experience sex and intimacy with greater flexibility, and increased care for the preservation of oneself and others, than they had previously thought possible.

Discussion: Between assimilation and transformation

Between the ‘optimism’ (Jackson and Scott, 2010) of concepts such as ‘life experiments’ (Weeks et al., 2003) to describe gay relationships, and the ideological weight of ‘strong theories of homonormativity’ (Brown, 2009), we found that serial relationships, dating, fuckbuddy relationships and casual hook-ups coexisted in tension with monogamy as the prevailing ‘gold standard’ for ‘mature’ and ‘satisfying’ relationships among this group of young men. Participants rarely expressed a political position on monogamy as a social practice imbued with greater privilege than its alternatives, but did describe tensions reconciling their desires for secure, committed relationships with the sexual life of ‘the scene’. They managed this tension with frequent appeals to a stage model of development in which young adulthood was understood to afford a period of sexual experimentation before one is expected to ‘get serious’ and ‘settle down’.

Paradoxically, many of these men condemned the superficiality of a casual sexual culture among gay men, and drew on familiar, sometimes gendered, ‘promiscuity discourses’ (Klesse, 2007: 60) accordingly. Future relationships were imagined in parallel with career ambitions and a vision of property ownership and social status balanced by a capacity to resist the opportunities that characterise ‘scene’ life (including sexual opportunity, drugs, alcohol, and clubbing). Within this narrative, participants positioned themselves as vulnerable, their own desires for secure, committed relationships at odds with their perceptions of the desires of other gay men. Monogamy was expressed as a current relationship ideal that was otherwise foiled by the immaturity of one's peers or the absence of successful (monogamous) gay male relationship models. Speculatively, we wonder if some of these men invoke the pressures of ‘the scene’ as a way to distance themselves from the incompatibility of their competing desires for sexual autonomy and a romantic relationship ideal (underpinned by monogamy and a forever-after script of happiness). For a number, ‘the scene’ appears to function psychologically as an external, corrupting force that bears upon their true, authentic (monogamous) selves.

Those men in monogamous relationships generally described withdrawing or avoiding the social life of the scene altogether. These men tended to conceive of monogamy as either the only, or the best way, to arrange their relationships, and few had contemplated non-monogamy as a valid alternative (Duncan et al., 2014).

Thus, these men were less likely to demonstrate the reflexivity gay men have been charged with in more optimistic accounts of relationship innovation. Rather, they were more likely to demonstrate struggle and conflict in negotiating competing values on sex and relationships. A few described finding strength to resist the pressures on sexual life they felt subject to by drawing on religious or ethnic identities – rather than straightforward exclusion or judgement from those communities as might be expected. Still, many perceived themselves to be traditional, old-fashioned, or abnormal in their outlook on sex and relationships.

It was rare for young men to cite liberationist ideas about sexual freedom which were not about an entitlement to sexual experimentation understood as temporally limited to their youth. Indeed, cast through the lens of the contemporary Australian campaign for same-sex marriage, the sexual and relationship lives of older single gay men were often looked upon as sad and disappointing, reflecting not social and political choices, but the limitations imposed by a homophobic culture and the sexual limitations of the scene itself. Significantly, increased acceptance of sexual diversity, embodied by the political project of same-sex marriage, was understood to offer up greater choice in personal life, not less.

Some men described expanding their definitions of intimacy, or loosening pre-established rules on sex and relationships. Unlike the notion of maturity which characterised the speech of many of the men's vision of a future relationship ideal, this was described as a process of self-discovery in which these men were managing the insecurities and uncertainties of relationships girded by a different set of ideals. Some spoke about the need to be self-protective, and how the process of learning to be less idealistic in regard to sex and relationships was driven by peer and social norms requiring a separation between sex and intimacy. Preserving the self, or one's sexual opportunities in the ‘dog-eat-dog world’ of gay dating, meant that these men emphasised flexibility and pragmatism as to the prospect of romance and intimacy. Whether this was balancing competing flirtations or experimenting with ‘fuckbuddy’ arrangements, they described the limitations of sexual fidelity in the sexual scene.

Thus, while it was endorsed, monogamy was also contested among these men – if not along the lines of its idealisation – at least in terms of its practical realisation. This is consistent with Giddens’ (1992) claims that ‘pure relationships’, characteristic of intimacy in late modernity, are marked less by the symbolism of classical Romance than by more pragmatic notions of love. Yet, Jackson and Scott (2010) are right to bemoan the demise of the critique of monogamy in the public sphere. As these men's experiences demonstrate, the absence of a political account of the ways in which intimate choices are compelled through the logic of institutionalised heterosexuality creates tensions and conflicts that result from the stigmatisation of sexual choices that are inconsistent with the ideal of a ‘good’ relationship or life. These experiences undermine claims regarding the presence of self-conscious ‘reflexivity’ among gay men in regard to relationships (Giddens, 1992).

However, the absence of a political critique of monogamy in these men's accounts of relationship life does not necessarily imply that non-monogamy will not emerge as a creative possibility in these men's future relationship lives. In accordance with discourses of autonomy and choice, non-monogamy offers a practical solution to the pressures of gay scene life, which these men attribute to promiscuity and masculine sex-drive discourses. While monogamy remains privileged insofar as it is idealised as the best and most secure way in which to live one's (future) relationship life, it is simultaneously weakened by a perceived need to be flexible, adaptable and emotionally restrained.

But, an emphasis on choice and individualised self-care as a function of essentialised ideas about masculinity or sexual freedom seems hardly a progressive step forward, particularly for young gay men struggling with the tensions raised by the sexual opportunities of gay life. This is perhaps a reason why some men fall back on pejorative understandings of promiscuity, refusing to submit to the idea of an essential male sexual drive that seems so at odds with the feelings sex and intimacy raise within them. It is worth thinking of the ways in which gay communities might develop the resources that support young gay men as they negotiate new sexual opportunities and choices, so that they might work out what feels most comfortable for them, while undermining the idea that casual sex and intimacy are opposite, as dominant promiscuity discourses maintain. A first step may be in making visible the diversity of gay men's relationships.

This observation takes us back to our earlier suggestion that the monogamy/non-monogamy binary may be a red herring in accounts of heteronormativity if we only think of it in terms of its ideological status, rather than as a daily practice that particular subjects may struggle with. The limitation of thinking about the monogamy/non-monogamy binary solely in terms of whether it reflects homonormativity or a radical outside to institutionalised heterosexuality is that we miss the opportunity to explore the ways in which it functions to order and make meaningful, or meaningless, the sexual opportunities and relationships available to sexual subjects. Looking beyond its complicity to the ways in which it functions means thinking beyond whether monogamy is done by gay men, and whether it is complicit or conservative, to what its effects might be. It also provokes a challenge as to how we might creatively deconstruct the monogamy/non-monogamy binary while recognising that its effects are not simply ideological, but also practically, emotionally and psychologically powerful.