HomoQuotable - Michelangelo Signorile

"Let's cut the ageist crap. The 'yuk' is a display of nothing but disgust for someone older. Yes, [Dustin Lance] Black is old enough to be [Tom] Daley's father. But he's not. If Black were just a couple of years older than Daley, he could be his brother too. But he's not. Shocking news for you: You're all going to be old. And your tastes are going to evolve over time. Some younger people are attracted to older people, and vice versa. There's even a gay website called Daddyhunt. The famed novelist Armistead Maupin's 27-years-younger husband, Christopher Turner, founded it. They met on another one of Turner's sites, HotOlderMale.com. If that's not your thing, it's totally cool, but in that case just shut your mouth." - Michelangelo Signorile, writing for the Huffington Post.

HomoQuotable - Frank Bruni

"For the four and a half years that we’ve been together, we’ve been apart, me in Manhattan, Tom in Brooklyn, at least most of the workweek, and during chunks of the weekend, too. We tell our friends that it’s a borough standoff, a game of Big Apple chicken, but that’s just a line and a lie, a deflection of the questions you field when you challenge the mythology of romance.

"Moving in with each other: that’s supposed to be the ultimate prize, the real consummation. You co-sign a lease, put both names on the mailbox, settle on a toothpaste and the angels weep.

"But why not seize the intimacy without forfeiting the privacy? Establish a different rhythm? One night with him, one night with a pint of Chubby Hubby and 'Monday Night Football' or a marathon of 'Scandal,' my wit on ice, my stomach muscles on hiatus, my body sprawling ever less becomingly across the couch. Isn’t that the definition of having it all?" - Frank Bruni, on being part of a "LAT" couple that is "living apart together."

Read the full New York Times essay.

Same-Sex Legal Kit For Dummies

Joining the popular Dummies line of how-to books next month will be a title aimed at same-sex couples looking to negotiate the often complicated legalities of protecting their relationship and property.  Via press release:

Rainbow Law is pleased to announce that their new book - the Same-Sex Legal Kit for Dummies - is now available for pre-order through Amazon.com and will be available in bookstores on December 4, 2012 -- just in time for the holidays! The Same-Sex Legal Kit for Dummies is the first Dummies reference guide to comprehensively address the legal issues facing the LGBT Community, including estate planning, marriage equality, adoption, surrogacy, artificial insemination, immigration, housing, taxes and more. The book was co-authored by Carrie Stone, JD, of Rainbow Law and John Culhane, JD, a law professor at Weidner College of Law. The comprehensive and easy-to-use legal kit includes sample documents to help gay men and lesbians create the legal protections they need -- especially in light of the ever-changing LGBT legal rights landscape. "This book was intended to be user-friendly," said Elisia Ross of Rainbow Law. "We hope that members of the LGBT community, our supporters and allies will use the Same-Sex Legal Kit for Dummies as they plan a family, navigate the dissolution of a relationship, or simply seek to protect their rights and those of their partners and children."

Amazon is taking pre-orders.

Headline Of The Day

From India's Hindustani Times:

Strange as it may sound, but it’s the gay guys who are scoring over straight men in some cases when it comes to marriage worthiness. Sick of lecherous, two-timing, aggressive men who tromp over their feeling, some women are opting for a ‘safer option’ — marrying gay men, who are believed to be more sensitive and caring. Sample this: When 26-year-old artist Tania Singh met photographer Aryan Khanna, everything seemed to click, except sexual chemistry. But that didn’t deter Tania from falling for the “ever-so-organised and ultra caring” Aryan. Soon she discovered he was gay. But instead of dumping him, Tania went ahead and married him. “It doesn’t matter that he is gay. He is the most loving guy I’ve ever met. He never thrusts his choices on me. When you love someone truly, physical needs lose their importance.” There are others sailing in the same boat.

Obamas Celebrate 20th Anniversary

The president and First Lady celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary today. It's a shame the debate had to be tonight.

Open Thread Thursday

How's your love life? Bitch, boast, or shrug.

Overheard On Second Avenue

Second Avenue, Wednesday, 9:45PM

Woman On Cell Phone: "You're still at the office? What's that music? I can hear music. Why is there music at your office? Where are you really? OK, fine. Send me a photo of your desk right now and I'll believe you. I'll wait. Hello? Don't you fucking hang up on me! Hello?"

Taiwan Animators On Cooper's BF

UK Tab "Busts" Anderson Cooper's BF

Britain's Daily Mail tabloid apparently stalked the boyfriend of Anderson Cooper to "bust" him with a long lens as he macked on some unidentified man in an unnamed NYC park. Cooper, as you may know, is rumored to be getting married very soon and the photos will surely be posted on anti-gay sites as "evidence" that gay people don't really want marriage for themselves, they just want to destroy the institution entirely. The Daily Mail writes:

There was no hint of upset from Cooper last night who looked typically sharp in a navy suit as he joined other A-listers in New York to watch Beyonce perform at the UN headquarters for World Humanitarian Day. It is believed that Cooper has been dating Maisani, who owns gay bar Eastern Bloc in Manhattan's East Village for around three years. The couple live together at Cooper's converted fire station townhouse and enjoy a low-key lifestyle, working out and going to dinner with friends including Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick. They were encouraged to marry last year by Anderson's mother, designer Gloria Vanderbilt. She reportedly helped the pair patch up their relationship after they struggled with conflicting work schedules.

The number of fucks we should give about this: ZERO.

Saturday Is "Trash Your Ex" Night

This Saturday Brooklyn's minor team baseball team will host "Trash Your Ex Night." Fans are encouraged to bring romantic memorabilia which will be compacted in a garbage truck at the stadium.

We will focus upon cutting ties with former relationships and ridding yourself of heartbreak resulting from an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend, or ex-husband or wife. “Trash Your Ex” is about moving on, and feeling good about it! Fans are encouraged to bring old memories of their ex to trash outside MCU Park into a DSNY garbage truck. Old gifts such as teddy bears or sweat shirts, love letters, picture frames, and much more are just some of the items we anticipate receiving that day.

The Brooklyn Cyclones are a farm team of the New York Mets.

RELATED: Gothamist notes that the Cyclones' plan echoes the now infamous Disco Demolition held in 1979 at Chicago's Comiskey Park, a racism and homophobia-tinged event in which fans near-rioted in joy after thousands of disco records were exploded in center field. Disco Demolition is often cited by music historians as marking the end of the disco era in popular culture.

On Husbands

About seven years ago I wrote this:

When gay marriage finally becomes widespread, how quickly (if at all) will we act to correct each other when we identify someone's significant other?

"There goes David and his husband."

"Oh, they aren't married, just living together."

Will we do that? Will we give those who choose not to marry a verbal downgrade to "just living together", to "just boyfriends"? Gay people have traditionally operated fast and loose with the rules of defining and naming our relationships.

Will there be a sense of relief then, as we convert to straight society's hierarchy of relationships and start identifying couples as: dating, living together, or married? I think that the implied legitimacy of a legal marriage will tempt many of our people to begin resorting relationships into those separate categories. And I don't know how I feel about that.

It took almost seven years, but this very thing happened to me last night as I was rather archly informed that the couple I'd referred to as "husbands" were not married. They've just lived together for 22 years.

Fuck that, they are husbands.

New Phone App: What Went Wrong

A new phone app sends a form to the person who dumped you. Didn't he just tell you to stop calling?

Beware The Dangers Of Emo-Porn

Focus On The Family warns women that the "emotional porn" of soap operas and romance novels only sets them up with unrealistic expectations of how men should behave in real life. Don't expect real men in the real world to be emotionally available! Really!

Just as wives rightly complain when compared to the artificially created women of Internet porn, men should complain when compared to the artificial men of daytime television. In the real world where real men burn through a lot of emotional battery life to make a real living, being expected to behave like men who don’t exist is more than wrong. It’s cruel. Emo-porn creates caricatures in the minds and hearts of wives. Most men just aren’t and cannot be that attentive, especially in marriage where responsibilities to provide weigh heavy upon them. Husbands are quietly deemed unresponsive and uncaring when compared to emotionally dexterous hunks of daytime lore, chat rooms, celebrity rags, and romance novels. Thus a secretive and snowballing form of marital discontent is born and nurtured.

G-Male

"Google has created the perfect boyfriend. Or is he?"

Dating Advice For The Newly Out

Facebook Knows When You'll Break Up

By tracking the changes in relationship statuses, Facebook can predict when you'll be more likely to break up. The peak times to find yourself suddenly single is during spring break (duh) and right before Christmas (no presents!).

The Map Of Non-Monogamy

Complicated! Unicorn polyamory? Bigger version here.

On Gay Sexual Jealousy

Over at Scientific American, Jesse Bering discusses a partner's infidelity and opines that sexual jealousy among gay couples is genetically hardwired, whether or not we intellectually dismiss monogamy as unnatural. Bering concludes:

[B]ecause fatal sexually transmitted infections for which gay men are unusually vulnerable, such as HIV, were not present in the ancestral past and could not have produced any special adaptive psychological defenses, sexual jealousy in gay men can only be explained by some sort of pseudo-heterosexuality mindset simulating straight men’s hypervigilance to being cuckolded by their female partners. All this is to say that I reacted the way I did because, at an unconscious level, I didn’t want my testiculared partner getting impregnated by another man. I don’t consciously think of him as a woman, mind you; in fact, if I did, I assure you I wouldn’t be with him. But tell that to my gonads and amygdalae. I would imagine the same is largely true for lesbian relationships; at an unconscious level, a lesbian’s bonding with another woman may trigger concerns in her partner about her “male” spouse’s disinvestment in real or prospective offspring.

Read Bering's entire essay.

Ex-Blocker

If it pains you to see all the wild, hilarious, romantic adventures now being enjoyed by your ex since he finally kicked you to the curb, a browser plug-in called Ex-Blocker will delete any mentions of said ex's name from your Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feeds. Even if your horrible evil friends post pictures or rave about your hot hot replacement, you won't see it. And for those with active dating lives, you can block up to five exes.

Gays And Monogamy: Here We Go Again

NOM is already happily tweeting the link to another story about gay men and open relationships. You may recall the brouhaha that erupted in January when the New York Times published a story about a study which reported that 50% of gay male couples are non-monogamous. While the truth of that study seemed self-evident to me, many questioned its methodologies and conclusions. From today's San Francisco Chronicle about the same researcher, who has now published her study:

They call them "San Francisco relationships." A term coined by the local gay community, it's defined as two men in a long-term open relationship, with lovers on the side. A new study released this week by the Center for Research on Gender & Sexuality at San Francisco State University put statistics around what gay men already know: Many Bay Area boyfriends negotiate open relationships that allow for sex with outsiders. After studying the sexual patterns of 566 gay male couples from the Bay Area for three years, lead researcher Colleen Hoff found that gay men negotiate ground rules and open their relationships as a way to build trust and longevity in their partnerships. "I think it's quite natural for men to want to continue to have an active and varied sex life," said 50-year-old technology consultant Dean Allemang from Oakland, who just ended a 13-year-open relationship and has begun another with a new boyfriend. "I don't own my lover, and I don't own his body," he said. "I think it's weird to ask someone you love to give up that part of their life. I would never do it."

Hoff has received a $3.5M grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue her research for five more years. (Cue wingnut outrage!) According to Hoff, of the male couples surveyed, "47 percent reported open relationships. Forty-five percent were monogamous, and the remaining 8 percent disagreed about what they were."

Obviously our enemies will once again leap on these statistics as "evidence" that gay people are undeserving of marriage equality. And once again, some gay men will decry non-monogamy in general and rip apart Hoff's research as unscientific. Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin is first out of the box in the the latter regard.

[B]ased on the pattern of the stories and my communication with the authors, I have a new conclusion: When the news repeatedly and consistently reports conclusions that cannot possibly be determined from your data, it’s not because you’re trying to correct them. Huff has, in all occasions I’ve seen, made broad generalizations about the nature of gay relationships – not just those in her study – that lead me to wonder if her research is little more than an attempt to provide talking points to support her presumptions. And Huff’s study – which does, at least, seem to have structure – now leads to press reports about a “study” which has almost no validity whatsoever.

My own opinion is unchanged. Regardless of the methodology in which Hoff arrived at her conclusions, my gut tells me she is not only correct, but that her estimation of the percentage of gay male couples in open relationships may even be low. I've been out for almost 35 years, and yes, that's a purely anecdotal conclusion, but I've known thousands of couples over these decades and most of them were non-monogamous. Of course, the places I've lived and my chosen social circles have surely influenced that perception.

But we shouldn't really care, whatever the number is. I think we do the truth about our lives and our unique culture a tremendous disservice when we try to deny aspects of our world just to buy a few meager points on some marriage survey. We should happily and proudly own all of the ways in which gay men build their lives, even if some of those ways seem alien to us personally.