A values conflict

And yeah, it's VERY long... but then, you don't have to read it.

I want to tell you a story about a guy that I will call "Howard" here.

I met "Howard" about 10 years ago at a support group for queer guys married to women (that was run by a narcissistic bipolar guy, but that's another story). Howard is from my home town, he's 5 years my senior, had gone to the same Catholic elementary school I had (though we didn't know each other in those days), and had come out to his wife as gay 2 yrs prior to going to that support group meaning. I think his wife was kind of like "that's nice, dear" at the time, because he didn't act on it at all. Attending the support group meeting that night 2 years after the disclosure to her was the first action he'd ever taken.

This was September 2006. We took to each other at first sight and started to see each other when we could. He said he was going to get through one more round of winter family holidays and then ask his wife for a divorce. (I felt creepy/ partly a cause, though he assured me he had made that plan already before meeting me, though he never did convince me 100% of that...)

But no matter, life intervened. We saw each other when we could for those first few weeks. He took a "man-cation" with some work buddies in November. They went down South for a few days of drinking and fishing.

I got a call from Howard that Sunday. He was slurring on the phone as he told me he'd had a CVA (stroke) in his sleep overnight.

No, wait, it gets better. He'd never mentioned me or separating or divorce to his wife prior to the stroke. He called her of course to report what had happened, and she took emergency leave from work and flew down to take care of her husband...

One of the things that can happen to folks who have undergone a CVA, esp at the beginning, they call "disinhibition." It's like their mental filter is not working, and they sometimes blurt out really inappropriate comments. That's how Howard's wife first learned about me, through a taunting comment from Howard in his hospital about having a boyfriend. Then he tried to force a cell phone conversation between her and me from his bedside.

Could I blame this woman, even now, if she hates me?

Long story just a little shorter, there was no divorce, wife takes husband back, though with a lot of strings and conditions, and on the way, both of his kids get hold of my phone number and independently send me "mister, I don't know who you are, but stay away from our family" calls -- I almost threw up after the first of these calls -- and Howard goes from briefly out of the closet to deeply back in it.

The only problem was, he was/ is still gay.

And now, in retirement, Mr and Mrs Howard have grandchildren to distract them, but from the stories he's told me since, it sounds like even their best days are still kind of sad, and most of the time, they are just going through the motions of being a couple married more than 30 years now. And he's tried to have a kind of "DL" life, but Mrs Howard very actively snoops now, and she snoops a lot. Howard calls me from the "Tony Soprano" pay-by-the-minute throwaway phone that he now keeps because Mrs Howard regularly reviews his outgoing cell phone calls in his Verizon family plan cell phone, for example.

You know what, if his wife gave him a few inches of space to be gay in at that point, even if it were just in the form of a few chaste but accepted friendships - I know other married-to-women gay guys living lives with stipulations like that that they find tolerable - I would have pulled back/ left this situation years ago. But she still regularly does things like monitor the record of Howard's cell phone calls, so my thought has been, I won't desert my friend. I get calls from him maybe twice a year now when he's able to duck her for a day or two, and I have gone to effort to rearrange my schedule so I am able to see him if I can. Sometimes there's been sex, though just as often not, we have just met for a beer and long chat. He knows he's the only person in the world I have ever done anything "DL" with, and that that's because of his circumstances and because when those two of my own values come into conflict, i.e. loyalty vs steering clear of the whole DL thing, the loyalty wins.

His situation caused me to think hard about my values.

A lot of my life has been lived with a question from my own childhood as the background. My parents were always squabbling, separated a few times, but kept trying to work it out, and according to the prevailing hetero mainstream value system of the early 60s, kept trying to make their marriage "work" (like it was an old used car)... no matter what or who was stray damage.

I know that my mom's mom made it clear to her that if the marriage failed, it was my mother's fault, and it meant that she was a failure... hey, so what if your oldest son becomes the "symptom bearer" for a troubled family system, and he has constant nightmares and wets the bed well into 4th grade? Blame him, or keep telling him to suck it up, that's what. Or just nag him for not living up to his potential, that's what!

And with that background, the Howard situation catalyzed the issue for me to "what's more important, propping up social institutions (like marriage), or the happiness/ stability of those in the institutions?" I spent many nights of my childhood wishing my mom and dad would just get a fucking divorce and move on with their lives, rather than stay married and keep making each other so miserable.

I am gay but married to a woman. That's a long story beyond the scope of this already overlong blog entry. My wife and I have been successful as a married couple now since 1981 about 3 weeks before Prince Charles and Princess Di tied the knot. I have been "back" out her as a queer man for about 12 or 13 years now. The conventional wisdom says that 80% of marriages between a straight person and a queer one will dissolve within 4 years of disclosure. We have found a way to be happy and still quite meaningful - and even sexual - as a couple that also allows each of us to be who he or she is. But we also agreed that if it stopped working for whatever reason and either person wanted out, that our need / right to be happy and have acceptable lives were way more important than any need to maintain appearances or honor the needs of marriage as an institution ahead of our needs as individuals.

The family narrative: just as my grandmother put the blame on my mother for not making her marriage work, so in turn my mother blamed her son for reacting to traumatizing conditions instead of filling the roles assigned to him by family place and birth order. The institution's needs once again trumped the individual's... well, that and an unspoken family value in my mother's family of origin that valued maintaining appearances, even amongst ourselves, over acknowledging unpleasant intrafamilial situations.

My parents: now, July 2016, they're both still alive and living at home, and my dad is the soul of devotion to my mom. Jesus, when did that happen? When did they stop laying violent hands on each other? Did they one day figure it all out and make lasting peace, or did they just reach a point where life and the aging process had just drained the fight out of them?

I flew that coop as early as I could. I remember the drive to college in the summer of 1974 for orientation, I stopped the car on the highway once I had crossed over the city line, got out of the car, and clapped the dust of my home town and my parents' house off the soles of my shoes. Over the next 5 years, I let go of one emotional connection after another to my parents, whose love and acceptance were never unconditional, but rather tied at any time to specific performance considerations. Life was just too unpredictable to depend on them for emotional support.

Oops, a long meander there, where was I? Oh yeah...

So yeah, so, Howard's wife, if I could, I would tell you that I will continue to meet him now and again as he is able to sneak around your overwatchful eye. Give him room for even one safe, approved "gay friend of the family," and watch me retreat. Meantime, ma'am, as far as I am concerned, I am performing a mitzvah, a good deed.

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Update, July 26, 2016:

I have studiously avoided situations where the guy presenting to me wasn't fully "out" to a partner or wife about playing since the "Howard" incident, but I am questioning my avoidance now, and may be backing away from that strict avoidance with male-male couples.

I think the reason I backed away so firmly had to do with the harm I felt I had been instrumental in bringing to Howard's wife. But I think that a lot of what happened in that situation was as peculiar and unlikely as a new lover having a massive stroke a few weeks into a relationship, a few things that are peculiar to wives but not so much to male lovers / partners, plus I have seen more of the world since then.

One thing I have NOT seen is a male male couple (1) who have been together for more than 7 or 8 years and (2) who are still having sex with, and only with, each other. (I suspect the same thing is true of most or all of their hetero counterparts, where they either settle into a once, twice, three times a month "going through the motions" sex, or the man is getting something outside the marriage, or he just "takes matters into his own dominant hand" and learns to accept wanking as his sole sexual outlet, or neither marriage partner is having any sex at all, kept in line by shame and an internalized hetero normative value system.)

Without exception, the MM couples I have encountered who meet that longevity specification are either now primarily property and housing "arrangements" where the guys are more roommates than lovers, or they have opened to outsiders whose role seems to be to keep some sex going on or rejuvenating the MM couple to each other.

[By the way, one reason I am posting this on Daddy Dater is to solicit refutational data: if you have made it this far, please, if you know of any MM couples who have been together for more than 7 years and are still having sex with each other and only with each other, let me know? I figure that if they meet both of those conditions, they are probably not going to keep profiles on dating sites (so I won't find or know about them), but they might have friends who do.]

I am aware that stated that bluntly, that sounds harsh. I don't mean it to. I think we as a species are wired more for either polyamory or at most, serial monogamy. The well-known line from the hetero marriage vow "till death do us part" hearkens back to a day when death was always just lurking around the corner, and that always offered the surviving partner the possibility of a new sex partner, and and prevailing religious doctrines discouraged sex except grudgingly to procreate anyway.

I have had some degree or another of Gay Awareness since the early 70s. I had reason at the time to think that "gay" had been but a passing phase for me, and I married a woman in 1981, and so I was on the sidelines of "Gay" during the earliest phases of the invasion of HIV.

When "Gay" reemerged in me years later, the Gay world had morphed from what it had been in the 70s. My gay political icons in the 70s had sneered at the idea of gay marriage, seeing it as a sellout accommodation to hetero bourgeois values, but now, meaning circa mid 2000s, it had become a rallying point, perhaps THE rallying point, of "mainstream" gay values... as might have been copying all hetero institutions that might have had parallel application, including a very hetero understanding of monogamy... this is my key to understanding how many of those MM couples who have been together for more than a few years and are no longer having sex with each other can cling so hard to insisting on monogamy from each other, even at the cost of "ain't no one gettin' nothin'."

All I can think, though, is "guys, it isn't working for the heteros, why would you want to copy them in this?"

And so, here I am at the end of July 2016, rethinking my strict avoidance of guys who are not being completely up front with a partner... as long as it's a situation where the partner wouldn't be devastated if he found out, i.e. specifically, "don't ask, don't tell" situations. I will continue to steer clear of situations where it feels like the other partner would be devastated if he found out.

I am posting this now because I am being approached by a guy in a "don't ask don't tell" relationship who wants to play. I like him enough that for the first time since the "Howard" situation, I am rethinking how I reacted to that... I am not worried in this case that if the partner found out, he'd be devastated, but I am concerned anyway.

The conflict in me now pits these two statements against each other: "the partner actually DOES know," vs "you're still going to be some kind of home-wrecker." And frankly, I am leaning toward continuing to avoid such situations altogether, for risk of doing harm.

I am posting this long-winded blog piece here in the hope of getting helpful feedback, but I am also aware that I am likely to get other kinds of feedback too... it was to feel free to put out blog entries like this one without concern of reprisal that I created this anonymous account. I have seen people get ripped up on public sites like Facebook for saying things far less controversial than what I am posting here. Let's see what I get back from y'all to this... and don't hesitate to send your comments to me privately here instead of posting them, if YOU are concerned about reprisal either.