Welcome to Struggle Session, a weekly bonus column where I respond to comments from Savage Love readers, Savage Lovecast listeners, and the occasional online rando.
First up… one of those online randos:
Ben is tired of my stupid voice that he follows me on Twitter. Or he did, until I blocked him. (It’s orgy, Ben. If you’d ever been invited to one, you would know how to spell it.) To read what Ben was responding to — an excellent tweet from the always whip-smart Mistress Matisse that I retweeted without saying anything myself — click here.
I shared a “these kids today!” (clip here) moment of exasperation with Eli McCann on Episode 937 In my defense, Eli started it — he brought up those hypersensitive and hyper-online queer kids today — but I took the bait. For the record: As far as I’m concerned, Eli is a kid (he’s just 4o! a baby! with a baby!), which I believe gives Eli standing to opine on the seeming and sometimes actual hyper-sensitivity of queer kids today.
StandardHeart pushed back in a comment on my Instagram post…
Isn’t it wonderful that we’ve come far enough that the queer youth can point out the more subtle systemic oppressions they face and feel safe expressing their pain? We do not wish our thicker skin on others just because we had to become calloused ourselves to survive. That is not the future I wish on our children, and I hope I can join them in being softened instead of the other way around.
You’re right, StandardHeart. It is great wonderful that today’s queer youth are pointing out subtler systemic oppressions, oppressions older queers barely noticed — or noticed and didn’t complain about — because we were too busy fighting for basic protections, e.g., anti-discrimination laws, basic partnership rights, halfway decent representation by the media, etc., which is why we’re only now just getting around to problematizing the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I’m not being sarcastic here. I would even add that olds like me — and aspiring olds like Eli — shouldn’t assume that youngs complaining about things that would’ve seemed trivial compared to the far-less-subtle systemic oppressions we faced decades ago aren’t right to complain. Nor are their complaints evidence, by themselves, of weakness or irresiliency.
I remember when Terry and I were adopting and this wonderful older gay man — a fixture in the gayborhood — told us we were crazy. All he’d wanted when he was our age was the freedom to suck dicks without risking arrest. The problem with younger gay men like me and Terry, he told us, was that we wanted too much. An older lesbian friend also pulled us aside to tell us we were crazy. She’d only barely escaped compulsory heterosexuality — she was only able to come out as a lesbian — because she didn’t have kids with the man she’d married under duress before coming out as a lesbian.
Anyway, my point is… movements move on. That’s what movements do. That’s what movements are supposed to do.
In addition to being old enough to remember a man could get arrested for sucking dick, I’m old enough to remember when some members of the queer community objected to the movement for marriage equality on the grounds that marriage was a betrayal of what gay liberation was supposed to be about. (I’m online enough now to know that some queers are still making this complaint.) Queer opponents to marriage equality (some, not all) argued that gay liberation was supposed to be about sexual freedom without constraint and marriage was a constraint. For them, being queer was supposed to be about — if I may borrow a phrase — giving ourselves over to absolute pleasure. But at some point between the Stonewall Riots and Lawrence v. Texas, we’d secured the right to suck all the dicks we wanted without fearing arrest along with the right to parade down 5th Avenue in jock straps and/or leather and/or sequins. For gay and lesbians who didn’t want more, that was enough — no need to fight for marriage equality or military service — but for those of us who wanted more, there other things worth fighting for, other rights we hadn’t yet secured.
And so… the movement moved on. It wasn’t a betrayal, it was a progression.
The same could be said, I suppose, for the queer kids complaining about micro-aggressions and parsing Rocky Horror for thought crimes. We’ve won some major battles! We can suck dick now without risking arrest (unless you’re in Moscow) and we can get married, which, as married gay couples prove every day, doesn’t have to be a constraint on sexual freedom. So, the movement has moved on to those subtler systems of oppression, as StandardHeart put it.
And like the older gay men and lesbians who told us we were crazy for wanting what we wanted thirty years ago — gay men and lesbians who grew up fearing arrest and eviction and rejection — we look at today, kids who didn’t grow up reading about military witch hunts or fear being barred from your partner’s hospital room during a medical emergency, and think they’re crazy for wanting what they want.
I get it.
One thing I would toss out there… we knew when we’d won the right to love each other without fearing arrest (June 26, 2003) and the right to marry (June 26, 2015). Whether you could get married or not, whether the police could burst into your bedroom and arrest you for having gay sex or not — binaries, both of them. You could or couldn’t marry, they could or couldn’t arrest you fuck sucking cock. We knew when we’d won battles against these unsubtle systems of oppression. How will we know when we’ve won the battle against subtler systems of oppression like micro-aggressions? (Which are protected under the First Amendment!) And does elevating an un-winnable battle against slights to the same plane as the fight for marriage equality — whether those slights are motivated by malice or just evidence of clueless — empower queer youth and make them more resilient or does it have the opposite effect?
For the record: Rocky Horror was where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and gender-nonconforming folks of all stripes could find each other and create communities before the Internet came along and made finding your community and isolating yourself so much easier. (And what he said.)
Says LesbianContent4U…
Ok so we put up with hate because we were trying to move the dial — but that doesn’t make hate acceptable, does it?!? In this day and age you are within your right to set boundaries around what you find offensive.
Eli and I weren’t referring to hate, which is always unacceptable, but to assumptions and/or slights that could be evidence of malicious bigotry but is often evidence of simple ignorance.
The example I always use is a question I used to get about my relationships from straight friends, siblings, aunts, and uncles: “Who’s the woman?” Gay men of my generation got that question a lot from our families and friends and we didn’t refuse to answer it — we didn’t declare it out of bounds — and, if you’ll forgive me, we didn’t have the luxury of falling to pieces each and every time we were asked that question. And it was an remarkably offensive question! Not because there’s something wrong with being a woman — or being “the” woman — but because we all knew what we were really being asked: “Which one of you takes it in the ass?” It’s a very weird question to get from your aunt.
But instead of declaring the question unacceptable… or shaming my aunt for asking it… we answered it, sometimes opaquely (“Neither of us is ‘the woman,’ Aunt Alice”) and sometimes quite explicitly (“We take turns, Uncle Fred”). But we answered it again and again — and we laughed at and with the people who asked it — and you know what? They stopped asking.
A little love from an otterpup on BlueSky…
Thank you @dansavage.bsky.social for giving me the words to perfectly describe my sexuality as a side pup and furry: “you can touch the bone, suck the bone, but you can’t bury the bone.”
IndivisibleBy3 on BlueSky asks…
@dansavage: please define polyamorous relationships vs. friendship networks.
Polyamorous relationships are usually — but not always (because everything is a spectrum these days) — intimate, romantic, and sexual. Friendships, on the other hand, are intimate but platonic/non-romantic and non-sexual. Which is not to say that friendships aren’t important or are that they’re less important than romantic relationships. Rhaina Cohen wrote a terrific book about the importance of friendships in which she advocates — quite persuasively — that friendships are often more important (and longer lasting) than romantic relationships.
But trying to identify the precise differences between poly relationships and friendships is complicated these days… thanks mostly to queers, of course. Think of all those gay men out there — some of them married — who have sex with their friends and all those blue-haired, hyper-online kids who identify as platonic poly and/or queerplatonic.
Last week it was my opinion on kids menus — restaurants shouldn’t have them — that almost got my cancelled. This week’s controversial Instagram post: complaining about never getting enough ice in my soda in Europe. (My very own GPTH.) Says MLupoi…
Ice is bad for you (Italian speaking).
That’s what my BF is always telling me. But I’ve been consuming ice-cold drinks all my life and I am still not dead. (My BF also believes that a light breeze coming through an open window at night has the power to kill an otherwise healthy adult human male.)
Says BHillionB:
That’s our way of punishing you for ordering soda with your meal.
If I’m not allowed to order soda with my meal — and I don’t have soda with every meal — what is it doing on the menu? Is it a trick? Am I not supposed to order the Wiener Schnitzel either?
Says Vera:
We like our drinks undiluted.
If you’ve ever ordered juice in Europe — which always comes with water or already mixed with water — you know that Europeans do, in point of fact, like diluted drinks. And here’s the thing about sodas: they’re better when they’re ice-cold, of course, but they’re at their best — they’re at their most delicious — when they’re ice-cold and slightly diluted by slowly-melting-but-not-fully-melted ice. It’s science. And to all the Europeans who jumped in to say you get more soda if there’s no ice in your glass… do you seriously think Americans aren’t getting enough soda in our diets?
But last word to Stacy, who makes an excellent point:
Love your work, Dan, but I really do get annoyed by Americans who complain about ice all the time. It takes a lot of energy and space to freeze ice. America lives on cheap energy compared to the rest of the world. You’re not in America. Try to remember this next time you order ice.
Okay, here’s this week’s letter that was way too long for the column…
I want to apologize in advance for the length of this. There is a lot more to this story, but these are the most relevant bits.
I am a 36-year-old gay man on the west coast. I have been married to my husband for ten years. We moved faster than lesbians typically do. On top of everything, we are also in business together, which comes with the good, the bad, and the ugly. We used to enjoy spending time and doing things together but now we can barely be in the same room. I avoid outings with him when possible to keep the friction to a minimum. It doesn’t always work. We have been having problems for years.
I come from a very conservative country. My parents, though loving in their own way, have a very narrow worldview. My parents spent the 90s trying to survive. Broadening their horizons wasn’t really a priority.
I left home at 13 to go to an all-boys boarding school on a scholarship. I wasn’t as macho as most of the boys around me. I’ve repressed the bullying, trauma, some abuse, death threats, and everything that happened during the first two years at school. I moved to the USA in 2003 and never looked back.
I came out to my older brother when he moved in with me. He initially had a hard time with it, but he came around quickly and has been very supportive. He begged me not to tell our parents. It was easy when they didn’t live here, but they ended up retiring and moving to join us here. My father is now almost ninety years old. I have tried broaching the subject, but the conversations end fast. They prefer a strict “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which has led to a very strained relationship with them.
The reason this is relevant is that this is one of the first problems in my marriage. When I started dating my husband, I explained the situation to him and that I would work toward resolving it. And I started to.
I’m the youngest of three, so I figured I’d start with my sister. She’d been living in the US since the mid-90s and is 12 years older than I am. We used to chat often and had a really good relationship. The last time I spoke to her and saw her kids was ten years ago. She stopped talking to me after I came out. That hurt immensely, and I shut down any hopes that I had with my parents.
My husband tried to be understanding for a while. Empathy isn’t his strong suit.
I was undocumented when we met. After Trump became president, his “second mother” urged us to get married. We weren’t sure what else the orange one would mess up. My husband’s real family didn’t attend. It took his mother a few years to warm up to me. She was finally accepting her son was gay — and made peace with the fact that I was a “foreigner.”
Cue the honeymoon period. Things were great — for about two years. Then the cheating, anger, and gaslighting started.
I came across one of his fetish websites, and going backwards through the chats, there were conversations dating to days before we got married. I confronted him, and he said that I didn’t understand, and this was just his fetish and an online outlet for it. It was a website about gainers and feeders. My husband then was a very muscular twink. I was in shape but had started to gain some weight after I quit smoking and our sex life had fizzled, which was puzzling given the fact that he was into bigger men. That took a toll.
He started getting more and more controlling of my life. I had to give reports of my spending, where I was going, etc. If I had a bad day at work, he wouldn’t hear it and would tell me to stop whining, while I heard long tales of terrible customers at his old job. Things got worse when we started working together. If I forgot an appointment, or said the wrong thing, he scream and have meltdowns. This was demeaning and scary. I would beg him to calm down and lower his voice. I know now I have ADHD, and some of my scattered personality traits are due to it — traits made worse by stress.
This behavior spilled over into our everyday life. When I would stand up for myself, he would mention my unaccepting family and how unfair it all was to him, and that was the reason he was always angry. Eventually, there were episodes in front of friends as well — some called him out on it.
Then I found out he was cheating on me. Which I should’ve seen coming, as he is a very sexual person and he wasn’t having sex with me.
I confronted him on all of the cheating and his anger issues. He started working on it and toned it down a lot. We learned how to work together. Our business started thriving. Things were going great, and for a year we were happy again, even though there was no sex life.
Three years ago, I knew the cheating had not stopped, so we talked about opening up our marriage. I wanted him to have sex freely, and I wanted that for myself as well. We started by bringing thirds into the mix, which reignited our attraction to each other. We found out we are into really different men and started having our solo hookups. My self-esteem got better, and I started hitting the gym hard.
The angry outbursts were rarer but still there. Fast forward to summer 2023. I got into the best shape since I turned 30. At bars or gatherings, I was now getting a lot of attention, and that didn’t go well. He started to get angry and resentful, and the outbursts returned, especially after a full day of drinking. The insults got worse. He likes to hit below the belt. When I would talk back, it was always because of my parents.
He always had a more intense and frequent sex drive. We tried setting boundaries so our home wouldn’t be a frat house. It didn’t work; he didn’t particularly care. I had gone through his messages and found out he had talked about love, feelings, and dating with other men. It was just okay. Things weren’t necessarily great with us.
Then I met someone this summer at the gym. At first, it was just physical, but there was definitely more — a connection. I kept my distance because I knew he made my husband very uncomfortable and very jealous. Until my husband told me, randomly, that he was going on a date with someone — that wasn’t on the menu for us. After that I really leaned into talking to my new crush, and we developed feelings quickly. NRE x100. He made me feel safe and, for the first time in a while, loved.
My husband picked up on it, and we had a huge fight. He asked me not to talk to him anymore. It was kind of too late — you can’t put those feelings back in.
A couple of weeks later, my husband read through my messages, called me a lying whore (among other things), and asked me to leave “his house.” He sent screenshots of my conversations to all his and our friends to show them proof that I was the one betraying him all along.
I told him I developed feelings for the new guy because you treated me like shit. He told me — yet again — that his resentment stemmed from my issues with my parents. We had many more fights, and everything I had bottled up came out. These fights turned into conversations, and he started to take some accountability. Now he says he wants to go to couples therapy and has given me an ultimatum to stop talking to my lover.
My mental health is at its worst in a long time. I am getting anxiety attacks and am constantly depressed. I have set an appointment with a therapist for myself alone.
My friends say I should try couples therapy and that I shouldn’t throw this relationship away because of an affair. Everyone focuses on the affair. All I can think about are all these toxic scenes over the years.
We have so much intertwined — our friends, our business, our dog, and all our finances — what do I do?
A.
Long-ass letter, short-ass advice: DTMFA. If you’ve got something to add — if you have advice for A — drop it in the comments thread!