I have worked as a mental health counselor for gay men for 24 years both in private practice and in public clinical settings. For the past twelve years I have offered pastoral counseling as part of my role as spiritual director of Ashram West, a gay spiritual community based in traditional Hindu Tantra. What follows is a distillation of decades of experience both personal and professional, during which time I have corresponded with gay men all over the world from whom I have heard essentially the same lament expressed in numerous variations: Why can’t I find a man serious about forming an intimate relationship? I write this with the full understanding that casual sex has been and continues to be a norm in gay society, so I expect some readers will disagree with my characterization of casual sex as a curse. I admit I have participated in this aspect of our gay culture from my very first sexual experience 34 years ago, though always with reservations, if not always with restraint. I believe my considerable experience over the past decades qualifies me to share my observations and judgments about what I have found to be the net negative aspects of casual sex despite the inherent pleasures of sex, about which there is nearly universal agreement. I ask only that the reader consider my points carefully before forming any conclusions.
First off, I think that sex, which is an inherently intimate act, can never be entirely casual. By this I mean that sex involves a comingling of physical, emotional, and possibly even spiritual elements that carries consequences for everyone involved far beyond the encounter itself. At the physical level, unless one avoids any contact with bodily fluids, there is always the possibility of transmission of disease, whether relatively mild, as in the case of a cold or mild flu, relatively serious, as in the case of HIV, syphilis, or gonorrhea, or chronic and incurable, as in the case of herpes, hepatitis, and HIV. It is all too easy in moments of intense, mutual attraction, especially if one is impaired by alcohol or other drugs, to simply ignore potential risks and go for the immediate pleasure and hope for the best. Having experienced health consequences in all three of the above categories, I can testify to the lasting effects of sexual encounters I considered casual at the time. My curse is taking handfuls of pills daily to stay alive and relatively healthy with some unpleasant side effects, though I’m happy to have the pills, as not having them was far worse. I don’t expect this information will change anyone’s behavior, since more than two decades of HIV/STD education have mostly failed to prevent many gay men from taking risks in order to experience fleeting pleasures. But I do use this information to challenge the notion that sex can ever be considered casual, any more than playing Russian roulette with a loaded pistol can be considered a casual sport.
Although sexual sharing clearly need not flow from love—indeed, it can just as easily be motivated by hatred or the desire to feel powerful or attractive—it is only through an act of deadening oneself to one’s feelings to some degree that one can fail to experience any emotional consequence of a sexual encounter. The payoff of deadening one’s feelings, of course, is immediate gratification of a powerful, instinctive urge with no further thought needed. The cost of deadening one’s feelings is a diminished capacity to feel anything and a consequent difficulty initiating and maintaining intimate relationships that require one to be in touch with one’s own and one’s partner’s feelings. This fact should give pause to those who indicate in their dating profiles that they are seeking a long-term relationship but are willing to hook up or play around in the meantime. When you habitually deaden your feelings to treat the intimate sex act as something casual, you create an emotional habit that in time becomes a personality style that may be impossible to turn on or off at will. Those who claim they are not interested in long-term relationships often have been so damaged emotionally already by loveless, “casual” encounters and disappointments in love, that they simply stop trying and convince themselves that they don’t really need anyone special. Being unwilling or unable to love certainly is a curse in my book, and Freud considered this a key symptom of mental illness. (“Zu lieben und zu arbeiten,” “To love and to work,” was Freud’s definition of mental health.) In a culture that glorifies casual sex, as popular gay culture does, it should not surprise us to find some form(s) of mental illness normative.
None of what I’ve written should be used to beat ourselves up or to fire blanket criticisms at gay people; we get beat up enough by family and society as it is. I offer these observations as an invitation to sober reflection on the possibility that better, healthier, more-fulfilling ways of relating to one another are available to us than those that have become normal in our subculture. It is no accident that loveless, casual sex developed as a norm in a subculture deprived of the healthy routes of psychosexual development taken for granted by our het peers. Imagine if there were no stigma attached to homosexuality, and we were free and even encouraged by family, friends, society, and religion to experiment with dating in adolescence according to our natural tendencies. Imagine bringing our first crush home to eager, approving parents, or friends of our parents offering to arrange a date with their same-sex child. Imagine dating with het and gay friends with no shred of a sense that either het or gay feelings are superior or inferior. Imagine religious leaders citing the story of David and Jonathan in the Bible as admirable models of romantic love. Imagine not having to fight tooth and nail to win rights other citizens enjoy without a second thought. Would some of us still seek casual sexual encounters under these circumstances? Almost certainly some would, as some of our het peers do. But I argue they would not be accepted as normal, much less glorified.
My brothers (and sisters, if some of you are also reading this), I urge you to take the next step in liberating yourselves from the oppression of homophobia and abandon patterns of dysfunctional sexual behavior that developed in gay society under the pressures of pervasive, emotionally toxic homophobia. At the very least let us stop treating one another as objects to be used once and discarded like disposable syringes. For every time we treat someone this way, we perpetuate the cycle of emotional hurt and numbing of feeling that cripples our ability to love and poisons our community. There is no doubt that dating and taking the time to know someone before jumping in the sack, i.e., letting the physical intimacy develop naturally from emotional intimacy, requires some personal discipline and the willingness to delay gratification. But I believe the payoff in loving, more-fulfilling relationships and mutual caring is more than worth the effort. My experience tells me the sex will be better, too.
So, what does it mean to be “clean?"