What century is this anyway?

Just when you thought it was to be lulled into the romantic notion of monogamy, EDMUND WHITE, acclaimed novelist, journalist, and creative writing professor, launches a full frontal attack of the mere thought of being sexually faithful to only one person

In the 1970s, the early triumphant years of liberation bracketed by Stonewall and AIDS, no gay man would ever have imagined that two decades later there would be an issue of The Advocate dedicated to a serious discussion of monogamy, of all loopy things.

In those years young gays in New York, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., thought monogamy was something heterosexual and historic, a practice that was neither possible nor desirable for gays to imitate.

We noticed that straights were faithful for a variety of reasons, none relevant to us. Marriage was an economic pact in which fidelity was essential to maintain a stable home for kids and, in more traditional societies, to ensure the purity of bloodlines--only the wife's chastity could assure the father that the children he was raising, and to whom he would pass on his property, were really his, The family was primarily an economic institution, and monogamy guaranteed that it would remain a closed corporation.

For us gay guys, however, who couldn't marry each other or propagate with our lovers and who seldom stood to gain anything material from our affairs, sex was based on spontaneous attraction and love on nothing but affection.

We also couldn't help noticing that the 19th-century ideal of the bourgeois companionate marriage--in which the faithful husband and wife are each other's best friend, helpmeet, coparent, and sole sexual partner--hadn't worked out all that well. My generation watched our parents, then our friends and brothers and sisters, separating at a faster and faster rate until 1 out of every 2 marriages ended in divorce.

Not only did we observe, that the marital ideal was a flop, even for those straights who had been carefully coached on how to make it work, but we also thought it was hopelessly dreary. We'd seen the loneliness of the suburbs, the alcoholism and mental disorders of family members--or, what was almost worse, the long-suffering colorlessness of neighbors, their persistent but never critical depression. We'd known firsthand the domestic violence perpetrated by Daddy in his cups as well as Mom's pledge to foster soul-killing conformity.

We suspected that most of the straight couples we knew weren't having sex at all, an abstinence suggested by a general corpulence in which food had replaced fornication. We learned early and repeatedly that even if we wanted to pull up a chair, there was no room for us at the groaning suburban table and that we'd never be considered virtually normal. When we confessed our perversion to priest or parent, we were attacked not so much because we lusted after other men but because we lusted at all. Sexuality was the problem, not homosexuality. Hadn't all our relatives abnegated their sexual ambitions in the interest of stability, gardening, dinner, career?

Imagine our delight when we finally left Kalamazoo and were set loose on Manhattan! Suddenly the streets were thronged with other gay refugees, and the self-evident way to celebrate all this, well, availability was through delirious, riotous promiscuity.

Simultaneously many straight men and women were also kicking over the traces. I remember that when a heterosexual scabrous magazine, Screw, reviewed my 1980 States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, the critic said, "What Mr. White doesn't seem to understand is that the cities where he has detected gay life are also the the only places in puritan America where straight life is happening in pleasurable abundance."

Promiscuity, no matter how much fun, never replaced the need for intimacy, but we felt that closeness could come in many forms and that it could be experienced with several people. No longer would we subscribe to the unworkable model of marriage. Now we'd buy a house or start a business with a compatible partner, who might call forth our deepest sense of commitment. But we'd also have extracurricular sex, either with regular sex buddies, who might or might not be friends, or with a succession of strangers, met at the baths or on the street.

If marriage was claustrophobic and exclusive, we would break the door down and let in a whole cast of characters, and we would not automatically expect passion to be the same thing as love or excitement to be the same thing as esteem.

All this was new. Maybe a tiny elite in New York in the 1930s or servicemen during World War II or members of postwar beach communities in Southern California had known such cheerful sexual freedom, but before the 1960s the rank and file of ordinary peacetime gays had been fearfully oppressed. One seldom met a gay couple living openly. Most gay men were trying to seduce "real men," i.e., unavailable or hostile trade. Even gay friendships were rare, just as friendships among women before feminism were troubled.

Stonewall gave birth to not only gay pride but also gay friendships and sustained gay loves. All of this newfound (and never very confident) gay cohesiveness was built precisely on a rejection of religion, psychoanalysis, the family, and all the other mechanisms of control in our society.

In the 1970s the silence and discretion of middle-class life gave way to a greater and greater frankness. Gays especially were progressive in politics, skeptical about America's past, demonstrative against the war in Vietnam; we were a group eager to travel, to read, to learn, to throw off our childhood conditioning that had stigmatized pleasure and made love between men a dirty joke or shameful secret.

AIDS changed everything. Those people who'd bravely flouted conventions returned, repentant, to traditional ways. Everyone had a guilty conscience. If only we hadn't had so much sex, we wailed. If only we'd been more like Mom and Pop. This renewed guilt characterized the first confused years of AIDS, before the viral nature of the disease was revealed.

Once safe-sex guidelines could be set up realistically on a scientific basis, gay men were remarkably quick to learn them, put them into practice, and follow them year in and year out. Unfortunately, our helplessness during the first five years of the epidemic had meant that a very large population had already become infected.

A few of the more vocal new gay leaders--hysterical, sexphobic, power-hungry--were quick to play on the renewed guilt in their followers. They seized on the crisis to preach monogamy and other middle-class values, as though if only we were joined in marriage and were to become the proud possessors of a mortgage and an adopted family, then AIDS would go away.

These leaders were not talking about the less sensational but more relevant questions. Like the fact that the leading cause of unsafe sex was the 25% rate of alcoholism among gays; drinking, by tranquilizing fear and clouding judgment, automatically promoted noncompliance with safe-sex practices. Or like the fact that certain sexual behaviors, mainly anal intercourse, were the cause of 9 out of 10 infections. What's extraordinary, as Samuel R. Delany has pointed out, is that the first 15 years of AIDS research virtually neglected the crucial question of the relationship between particular behaviors and risk.

No, gay spokesmen were too busy hectoring us about our promiscuous past or warning us to either abstain from sex altogether in the future or enter into a monogamous air lock. No matter that unsafe sex with, one partner was more dangerous than safe sex with 20 and that many men had contracted HIV from their lovers. No matter that a couple's pledge of fidelity so often did nothing but promote hypocrisy and dangerously unacknowledged sexual escapades. No matter that the whole moralistic climate meant that many gay men careened suicidally from long periods of abstention to brief, lethal sex binges.

I would argue that monogamy is part of a pleasure-hating package being sold by aging gay leaders, now in their 50s and 60s, people who through some ghastly process of natural selection managed to survive the plague precisely because they were so dysfunctional that they never could get laid. Whereas normal red-blooded gays in the late '70s were breaking down roles and indulging themselves, these tight-asses were too unredeemably macho to experiment or too drunk to stay awake for the coupling or too homely or self-loathing to attract partners. The virus selected against men who were affectionate, progressive, and fun-loving and left us with these boring old prudes.

I am not an assimilationist. I don't want to win a perfect-attendance pin at church or head up the PTA. For me, being gay seemed at first like another way of being a bohemian and later a concomitant to fighting for social justice. I wanted gays to be in the vanguard, battling against racial and economic injustice and religious and political oppression. I never thought I'd live to see the day when gays would be begging to be let back in to the Christian church, which is clearly our enemy, or would chuck aside public-mindedness and take up the most narrow, creepy, selfish sort of conformism.

To my ears, monogamy is only one more depressing word in this dispiriting vocabulary. I'm not against love. Anyone who's bothered to read my novels knows that. But I'm too experienced not to recognize that monogamy--as an iron rule rather than as a spontaneous, passionate commitment--is an enemy to love. Real love is built on feelings, not Old Testament guidelines. Those feelings will lead some lovers to be faithful, and for certain mature couples nothing suits them better than monogamy. I say more power to them.

But even if monogamy were generally desirable, it seems merely hypothetical for most people in their teens and early 20s (their most sexually active years). The kids I teach rarely have an affair that lasts longer than a month, whether they're straight or gay. We need to teach them safe sex, not monogamy, which they're not even close to approaching.

If our leaders would only travel around the country a bit, they'd see that published fiction and circuit parties (two recent subjects of belligerent debate) affect only 1% of our population. They'd see that the hundreds of thousands of gay youngsters living in the streets as runaways from their tyrannical Christian homes are too harassed to read books, too dirty to get into the White Party, and too poor to afford monogamy. If our graying leaders weren't in full cry pursuing middle-class respectability, they might notice that most of the issues they're squabbling over are irrelevant to the young and desperate, the very people who most need their help. I know in my bones that gays, sometimes consciously but most often blindly, come out by rejecting conventionality; if we're paying serious heed to stuffy old ideas now, it's only one more sign of how frightened we are.

White is the author of A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He teaches at Princeton University and has just completed a biography of Marcel Proust.