Some gay lessons on marriage

Earlier this year, America’s leading love and sex columnist Dan Savage suggested — in light of a year of extramarital indiscretions, which included names like Ashton Kutcher, Tiger Woods, Dominic Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger — that heterosexuals should learn something from the gays — to stop defining sexual exclusivity as the “be-all and end-all of commitment”. The moral outrage his comments generated was instant and overwhelming. “I couldn’t believe how worked up people got,” Savage said later in an interview. “It was like they were a bunch of children and I’d told them Santa didn’t exist.”

Savage should have expected the outrage. Sexual fidelity remains a basic defining point of committed relationships for most of us. Manek Jain, an LGBT activist who is himself straight, admitted that he, though a longtime fan of Savage, was uncomfortable with his remarks. “I get where Savage is coming from, but that argument — that gays are ‘promiscuous’, ‘depraved’, etc — is a homophobic line used by many to explain why ‘the gays’ are such a threat to our society.”  Adversely, the ‘they’re just like us’ argument is used by gay rights activists to dispel misunderstanding and make an argument for gay rights. So which one is it: are gay people really approaching monogamy differently? Or are they ‘just like us’?

‘No set pattern for gay relationships’
Anshul Bose, 32, who works in advertising, is proudly gay and has been ‘out’ since he was 18. He has also been dating the same man — Nikhil, a college friend — for the last eight years. “Once we left college, we realised how much we missed each other, and things just grew from there,” says Bose.

When I ask Bose about monogamy, he adopts a professorial tone, as if lecturing all heterosexuals. “I have never been promiscuous. I wasn’t open to dating because of being in the closet. Once I met Nikhil, I realised what I had been missing out on. We broke up briefly and for a while it became an ‘open’ relationship. That’s when the sexual confidence I had gained from the relationship came in handy.” Bose says that their brief phase of sexual experimentation was never a bone of contention between him and Nikhil. “At the end of the day, Nikhil remains what he is to me. Our connection isn’t diminished because we had sex with other people.”

Does he view sex as being separate from an emotional bond? Bose laughs loudly at my question. “Well, yes! There is ‘loving’ sex, but there is also sex-sex. I think heterosexual relationships would be a lot happier if they learnt the difference.”

Bose believes that because gay relationships are so counter-culture, there is no “set pattern” defining their dos and don’ts. “If a straight person is dating, they already know what the future looks like: they’ll wait a decent amount of time before they have sex, they’ll meet the families, get married and have children. Gay relationships are haphazard, unstructured, and impulsive: in one word, freer. Gay people have less baggage and expectations when it comes to sex. After sex, a straight girl will wonder: does he still want to marry me? A gay guy wonders: do I want to do it again?” he laughs.

Neither biology nor history is on the side of monogamy. Research at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has suggested that men possess a ‘divorce gene’ — the more of it they have in their genetic makeup, the likelier they are to stray. Additionally, romantic love as we know it — with its expectations of red roses and fidelity — is a fairly recent innovation. Before the 18th century, it would have been sacrilegious, but now, the expectation of monogamy is a given. “Prior to this, men had access to concubines, mistresses, prostitutes and all the rest of it,” Savage points out.

Parekh Malik, 21, has dated several men in the two years that he’s been out, and is clearly uncomfortable with my questions. “I don’t know what to say about that. Being gay, we run the risk of being labelled ‘promiscuous’ rather than open-minded if we sexually experiment.”

Unexpectedly, in a later email exchange, Malik points to the “Indian environment for the gay community” as a reason for his casual approach to physical relationships. Prodded on this point, he explains further. “India is a sexually frustrating place to be gay. It’s hard to find someone who can accept themselves for who they are. It is tough to find someone whom you gel with, either romantically or sexually. So when I find like-minded people, I don’t ask a thousand questions, or expect a thousand things. As gay men, we are adrift in a country like India, and we need all the support — emotional, sexual, whatever — we can get.”

The couple as ‘siblings’
Andrew Marshall, author of How Can I Ever Trust You Again? said in an interview that in his experience, gay couples usually have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy when it comes to sexual dalliances; but if not felled by jealousy, the couple ends up having sex with everyone except each other — resulting in a kind of ‘sibling’ relationship. Swicheta Das, a counselor at an LGBT NGO in Delhi, finds that sexual infidelity can often be the “manifestation of what is going wrong in the relationship, whether heterosexual or homosexual. How you deal with it is what matters. I find that gay relationships are far more forgiving of such lapses — maybe they know by experience that moral judgement isn’t always the right judgement.”

So far, the only difference between heterosexual and homosexual affairs that emerges is the degree of acceptance and openness that is exhibited. The relationship between Kunal Sud, 24, and Ronak Panikar is another case in point. After two years together, Sud wasn’t sure where the relationship was going. “Our relationship was stagnating. We had been perfectly loyal, and when Ronak went out of town for a month, I met someone new,” he says. Kunal entered into a physical relationship with a common friend, Aftab, with the intention of breaking up with Ronak when he returned. But two weeks later, when the ‘newness’ of Aftab wore off, Kunal realised that he missed Ronak — what he had with Aftab had just been “chemistry”.

Guiltily, he confessed to Ronak when the latter returned. That’s when Ronak told him that he had made out with a couple of gay men abroad, and had been feeling guilty about it ever since. “We called it even and moved on,” says Kunal. A few months later, the two have worked through their issues and are still together, happier than ever. “I expect full monogamy from my partner,” says Kunal. “I just know that we’re not perfect people, we’re just perfect for each other.”