Dear Editor:

Your article in the May 3rd issue of the Gay and Lesbian Times (“Dirty Laundry: Infidelity in Gay Relationships”) should have been called a book review of Intimacy After Infidelity: How to Rebuild & Affair-Proof Your Marriage. As a gay male psychotherapist who works with gay male couples, I had a number of both clinical and even journalistic objections to the article.

Instead of a comprehensive look at non-monogamy in gay male relationships, the article’s sources are limited to interviews with two authors, (Steven Solomon and Lorie Teagno), who are heterosexual and admit they do not address gay relationships in their book. I would say that their ability to speak on gay relationships with any credibility is severely limited. While some books on relationships written generally for straight people can be re-interpreted to apply to gay couples, one on “infidelity” or non-monogamy (two different concepts) cannot, because in gay male culture (much more often than heterosexuals), gay males often can negotiate very happy, healthy, and committed relationships that are not monogamous. Research has shown that monogamous and non-monogamous gay relationships report similar levels of satisfaction and longevity. Michael Shernoff’s article, “Negotiated Non-Monogamy in Gay Male Relationships”, in the journal Family Process, explains this in detail.

Solomon and Teagno ignore in men a natural impulse for sexual variety. Monogamous men, gay or straight, still have sexual feelings for others, but it’s whether they act on that impulse that makes the difference. For some gay male couples (some research shows nearly two-thirds of them!), they negotiate a very strong, loving, committed relationship, but allow outside sex with other partners under certain agreed-upon circumstances to get both their sexual and emotional needs met. I help gay couples negotiate the specifics of this together in couples therapy, and I explain how I do it in my article, “No More ‘Cheating’: How to Have an Open Relationship without Hurt Feelings” (see my website at www.KenHowardLCSW.com, and recently published in two parts in the Los Angeles gay magazine, Frontiers).

While there is a difference between negotiated non-monogamy and the betrayal of “infidelity”, “infidelity” can be defined as sex outside the relationship (in heterosexual terms), or it could be defined as any action that is dishonest, breaks the agreed-upon rules of the relationship, or creates a lack of feeling of safety for a partner. For the author of this article (Brian van de Mark) to ignore putting gay male relationships in a different social and cultural context in a discussion of “infidelity” fails to take into account important cultural differences and tries to make our gay male relationships fit into a heterosexist model, which simply does not work. The article is an incomplete examination of a very complex and important issue in gay culture and has the potential in its conservative outlook to further shame and devaluate gay relationships. I encourage GLT to re-examine this issue more thoroughly; I offer my article for re-publication if GLT would like.

Ken Howard, LCSW

Dear Editor:

I read your recent article asking “Should we side with the Sisters?” and wanted to share with you how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence impacted my own life when I was a kid in Southern California.

At the time I was living with my family in Irvine... the plastic city behind the Orange Curtain. I was on my way home from school with my nose burried in a book, when I heard familiar words....tho I’d never before heard them in the same sentance before. “Faggot.... Dyke... Sissy!” and I looked up to find the words weren’t being flung at me as I’d at first thought. (oh yes, I’ve been called them all)

I noticed instead a small group of people, maybe 20, clustered together in the middle of the street holding up signs, chanting, and looking shaken. They were scared because people from the neighborhood were screaming insults at them and shaking fists, and generally looking dangerous. When all of a sudden I noticed a clown... no... I’d never seen a clown like this before it was a man in a dress... with clown face. I wasn’t sure what to make of this but she was SO happy! It was Sister X-plosion, bless her. I remember thinking, “Wow there’s someone else like me out there. Someone people don’t know quite what to make of, who doesn’t fit the norm. She’s beautiful! Something was lit inside me. A hope perhaps...a glimmer of the future.

There were no Order of Sisters in Southern California at the time, she had moved there temporarily and I’m glad she did. I think she saved my life that day. Not just because the tiny gay pride cluster was attacked, but because she gave me hope. It was the last year they tried to have a pride parade off of the UCI campus for years to come...I don’t know if they’ve had one off campus since. I grew up in an atmosphere that told me it was NOT ok to be who I was. But I remembered that beautiful Sister X and held onto the hope that some day I’d find others like me.

I remember she was dancing around the outside of the cluster, telling people in the crowds they were beautiful, and that she loved them. Mostly, she was just being a joyful and loving Sister. She came up to me, put her hands on my cheeks and said “you’re fabulous just as you are darling! Now run along home!” I did, chanting all the way, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re Fabulous!”

Years went by before I was able to come out of the closet and I finally found other Sisters. The Sisters in Los Angeles and San Diego brought me much joy and I am grateful to them for all their support and encouragement along my path to being the fabulous queer man I am today.

Should we side with the Sisters? For the sake of all the kids like me out there, I certainly hope so.

Sean-Michael

Dear Editor:

I’m sorry, but I can’t join in the hosannas Robert DeKoven is singing to departed U.S. Attorney Carol Lam in his column in your May 3 edition. I will always remember Carol Lam as the person who killed one of my closest and dearest friends, the late medical marijuana activist Steve McWilliams.

No, Carol Lam didn’t murder him directly. But she did launch a prosecution against him under the contemptible federal law that declares it as official U.S. policy that marijuana has no medicinal uses, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it does — much the way the Roman Catholic Church in the 1600’s declared it as God’s truth that the sun moved around the earth instead of the other way around. That prosecution, in which McWilliams pled guilty because was not allowed under federal law to plead the medical necessity of his marijuana use, led to five years of hell as federal judges micromanaged his pain medications, often overruling his doctors on what drugs they could let him have, and finally drove him to commit suicide.

For most of her tenure as U.S. Attorney, Lam was a good and faithful servant of the Bush administration. She did her part in John Ashcroft’s jihad against medical marijuana laws and Karl Rove’s dream of Republican full-spectrum dominance by a politically motivated prosecution of three Democratic City Councilmembers, one of whom died while under indictment while the other two were stripped from office. Councilmember Michael Zucchet’s conviction was later nullified on appeal because Lam’s evidence was not legally sufficient to sustain a guilty verdict — a fact DeKoven conveniently omits in his column — but it was too late to save his political career. Lam also jailed three animal-rights activists, including my friend David Agranoff, for up to three months for refusing to testify before a grand jury in a ridiculous case in which activist Rod Coronado was prosecuted for what he said in a speech here — and Agranoff investigated and imprisoned for having helped sponsor the event.

It was only when Lam went off the reservation and actually dared to prosecute a Republican — former Congressmember Randy “Duke” Cunningham — that she put herself on the Bush/Rove/Gonzalez chopping block. Though it didn’t come soon enough to save Cunningham from a bribery conviction and removal from office, Lam’s firing was conveniently timed to sabotage the prosecution of the long-time Friends of Bush who allegedly bribed him, defense contractor Brent R. Wilkes and former high-level CIA official Kyle Dustin “Dusty” Foggo.

Much the way former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was lionized by the administration when she spread their lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, only to be jailed when she refused to “out” Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, Lam was screwed over by the Bushites once she was no longer useful to them — but that doesn’t make her a good prosecutor or a moral person. As far as I’m concerned, she will always have the blood of Steve McWilliams on her hands.

Mark Gabrish Conlan