QI’m a straight man at that age where the general public still considers me young. Although I’ve attended many weddings, I have no interest in marrying or even being in a relationship. I never have.
Forgive me for working my own sexuality into this, but I have to say: When I was at that age the general public unanimously considers young—still a teenager—I walked into my mother’s bedroom and informed her that I was a faggot. (Begging my parents for tickets to the national tour of A Chorus Line for my 13th birthday somehow didn’t do the job; five years later, I had to come out to them all over again.) If I could work up the nerve to come out to my very Catholic parents about putting dicks in my mouth—at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, at that—you can find the courage to come out to your parents and friends as not asexual, not unhappy, and not planning to date, cohabit, wed, or reproduce.
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And despite the negative stereotypes that slosh around about single people—they’re antisocial, unhappy, isolated—Klinenberg’s research shows that those who live alone do just fine in the friends and social-life departments.
“We’ve come a long way in our attitudes about sex and relationships,” says Klinenberg. “Now that living alone is more common than living with a spouse and two children, isn’t it time we learned to respect the choice to go solo, too?”
“Personally, I think some of the best gear you can get is hand-me-down gear,” says Schroder. “And there’s a great tradition in the gay leather community about passing gear from older folks to younger folks. But my gut tells me that a new girlfriend might wig out about used bondage gear. We have a lot of customers and couples that have a strong preference for cleanliness. But straight women in particular prefer that things be wiped down, well cleaned, and shiny. So a woman who opens a dresser drawer and finds restraints with signs of wear and tear—and signs of someone else’s sweat or fluids on them—is probably going to be turned off.”
But as @GetItBigGurl said on Twitter, where Lily and I engaged about my comments in last week’s column, “Openly pondering difference between orientation vs. lifestyle isn’t bigotry, legislating against polyamory is.”
