The gay male elephant in the living room

Apropos of which, consider this well-documented article. Factual challenges to the information presented in it are welcome; attempts to silence it or ignore it are neither welcome nor helpful.

For anybody.

A sample:

...Male homosexuals are very seldom monogamous; they overwhelmingly reject the type of relationship most heterosexuals think of when they think of marriage: a long-term relationship where sexual activity is strictly limited to one's marriage partner. One homosexual writer admits that “trying to locate monogamy among gay men is like trying to hunt for truffles.”

Male sexuality, whether oriented toward females or other males, craves variety. But whereas almost all heterosexual men, perhaps after “sowing wild oats,” settle down with one woman, homosexual men do not settle down. Ever. A classic, large-scale study by Bell and Weinberg conducted during the 1970s and published by the Kinsey Institute found that forty-three percent (43%) of white male homosexuals had had sex with 500 or more partners, and twenty-eight percent (28%) had had sex with 1,000 or more partners. Seventy-nine percent (79%) said that more than half of their sexual partners had been strangers. In 1985, Pollack found that gay men averaged “several dozen partners a year” and “some hundreds in a lifetime” with “tremendous promiscuity.” In their 1997 study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals published in the Journal of Sex Research, Paul Van de Ven, et al., found that “the modal range for number of sexual partners was 101-500.” In addition, 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent had between 501 and 1,000 partners. A further 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent reported having had more than one thousand lifetime sexual partners.

These numbers are extraordinary, to put it mildly. Outside of a few privileged categories—such as rock stars, movie stars, elite professional athletes, and royalty—heterosexual men do not have sex with hundreds or thousands of women. Straight men may want to behave, and sometimes fantasize about behaving, in this way, but very few actually do. A 2011 survey conducted by Britain's National Health Service found that the average number of lifetime sex partners for heterosexual men was 9.3; only 25% of men had been with more than 10 women in their entire lives. A 2007 survey in the U.S. found that the median number of lifetime sexual partners for men was seven.

...But even within relationships, the terms “committed” and “monogamous” mean something very different from what they mean in heterosexual marriage. A Canadian study of homosexual men in “committed relationships” lasting longer than one year found that only 25 percent of those interviewed reported being monogamous. In The Male Couple, authors David P. McWhirter and Andrew M. Mattison (themselves a gay couple, one an M.D. psychiatrist, the other a Ph.D. psychologist) reported that, in a study of 156 males in homosexual relationships lasting from one to thirty-seven years, only seven couples had a totally exclusive sexual relationship, and these men had been together less than five years. Stated another way, only nine percent (9%) of the male couples were actually monogamous, but none of the couples with a relationship lasting more than five years were sexually exclusive. McWhirter and Mattison consider monogamy to be a homophobic stage that gay couples pass through and out of; in other words, McWhirter and Mattison consider promiscuity to be definitional to male homosexuality.

...One study of faithfulness in marriage reported that 75% of men and 85% of women self-reported as being faithful to their spouse, but in a similar study of homosexual men, only 4.5% self-reported as being faithful to their partner. German sexologist Martin Dannecker, who is himself homosexual, says fidelity between homosexual men living in a “committed relationship” is a myth. Dannecker interviewed 900 male respondents living in a “steady” relationship in Bonn, Germany, and 83 percent of them (747 men) said that they had had frequent homosexual contacts outside their “steady” relationship within the past 12 months.

...Study after study has found that even in so-called “committed relationships,” male homosexuals are not sexually exclusive.

So what is this discussion about, again? Same-sex what?

Could it really be that a large part of the issue here is whether or not monogamy is a definitional part of marriage?