MONOGAMY AND NONMONOGAMY

The standard definition of monogamy refers to a kinship system in which a person can be married to only one other person at a time. In anthropology, monogamy is typically counterpoised to polygamy, a system in which a person may marry more than one other person, most often a man having more than one wife. In Western societies influenced by Judeo-Christian traditions, monogamy carries a strong moral valuation and is associated with a great many virtues such as stability, maturity, trust, and fidelity.

Today, monogamy is often opposed to promiscuity in the popular imagination, and promiscuity is inevitably constructed as a reserve of many unwholesome things such as irresponsibility, hedonism, failure to care or love, and even sexual exploitation. The contemporary binary opposition with promiscuity has meant that monogamy increasingly has come to be equated with the idea of sexual exclusivity with just one partner over a significant period of time.

Patterns in the Past

Recent scholarly work has brought to light a lengthy history of male and female same-sex couples and romantic friendships in Western societies. According to Alfred Kinsey's 1948 and 1953 studies of male and female sexual behavior in the United States, 71 percent of females and 51 percent of males who reported any same-sex sexual activity claimed that they had had only one or two same-sex sexual partners.

An equally long history of specifically male nonmonogamous sexual networks has become evident from studies that range from Guido Ruggiero's 1985 work on fourteenth-century Venice to George Chauncey's 1994 account of early twentieth-century New York. These works document the existence of extensive and well-developed "undergrounds" of male cruising sites in urban spaces where men have sought each other out for often fleeting encounters.

While some early twentieth-century sexologists linked lesbians with promiscuous sex as well, most evidence suggests that promiscuity has been less common among lesbians than among gay men. Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis's 1993 study of mid-century Buffalo, New York, argues that while "cheating" may have been common in working-class femme/butch lesbian bar culture, monogamy remained the articulated ideal. According to Kinsey, 22 percent of males who reported any same-sex sexual activity claimed more than 10 male partners, while the comparable figure among females was 4 percent.

Lesbians and gay men contrasted. Distinctive modes of sexual organization and experience have often been the grounds for very different political agendas among lesbians and gay men. The homophile activist Clark Polak argued in the 1960s that, insofar as men were naturally promiscuous and women were naturally monogamous, lesbians and gay men had a great deal in common because they, unlike heterosexuals, could be true to their natures in the context of their same-sex sexual relationships.

More commonly, these differences have led to misunderstandings and conflict. While gay men have often been concerned about the clash between their sexual transit through public space and the actions of antigay police and perpetrators of antigay violence, lesbians have been more concerned about sexual harassment and reproductive rights. The sexual libertarianism of many men in the gay movements of the 1960s and 1970s contrasted with the antipornography and rape crisis initiatives pursued by many women in the same era.

These differences and debates became more complex in the 1980s "sex wars" among feminists, when many lesbians critiqued the traditional lack of sexual agency reproduced in some feminist rhetoric and called for nonmonogamous exploration. Gay men, in the same period, began to seek ways to have "safe sex" and became preoccupied with caregiving and relationship rights, as friends and lovers succumbed to the AIDS epidemic. In other words, sizeable constituencies of lesbians and gay men spoke up for concerns that had been associated with the other gender.

The gay marriage debate. All of these trends have become further embroiled in the "gay marriage" debates of the 1990s and 2000s. While the plea for same-sex relationship recognition has broad-based support in most LGBT communities, the demand for marriage raises many questions regarding the degree to which LGBT people wish to adopt the full range of traditions and expectations associated with this quintessentially heterosexual institution.

One of the primary debating points of advocates for gay marriage is that marriage would have a salutary effect on LGBT people precisely because it would give greater visibility to existing practices of monogamy among many same-sex couples and would further promote monogamy in LGBT communities. Opponents fear the imposition of heterosexist regulations upon the indigenous practices of LGBT people who feel little affection for the strictures of conventional, monogamous heterosexuality.

Patterns in the Early Twenty-first Century

So what are LGBT people doing in the early twenty-first century? The research literature shows that for gay men as a whole, monogamy, understood as the practice of sexually exclusive long-term relationships, is a minority model. But far from simply falling into the promiscuity camp as imagined by the larger society, gay men typically seek romantic, caring, and mutually supportive relationships with another man, along with sexual adventure and plural partnering. Most male couples construct their relationships without many of the guidelines or regulations, such as monogamy, that are used within heterosexual relationships. Among the options that male couples may adopt is sexual exclusivity, but it is by no means a given.

Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz's 1983 study of male couples found that 82 percent had been nonmonogamous at some time during their relationships. For many, this occurred in a context of open relationships characterized by mutually agreed-upon nonmonogamy. Blumstein and Schwartz also found, however, that behavior often varied considerably from overt policy. Many of the men in open relationships, in fact, acted on their agreement infrequently, while a significant number (43 percent) of men in relationships with no mutual understanding on monogamy had additional sexual partners beyond their primary partner. These findings have been confirmed by other research on gay male relationships.

Studies of white and black men, as well as studies of gay men in Britain and Canada, arrive at similar conclusions. Most men in couples do not impose a sexually exclusive rule upon themselves or their partners; nevertheless, sexual openness or inclusiveness may or may not be practiced with any great frequency. At the same time, men in tacitly or overtly monogamous relationships also report engaging in some degree of sexual nonmonogamy at rates of 41 to 65 percent, depending on the study and the time period examined.

What these findings suggest is that the indigenous form of relationship development that has arisen in gay male cultures does not organize itself around the monogamy-promiscuity binary. Rather, if a modal form of relationship formation can be identified, it is that gay men typically enter into relationships with primary partners, and then with their primary partner retain the option to pursue secondary sexual adventures.

Having identified a modal form, it is important to note that there is no singular or dominant form of relationship system that characterizes GBT men as a whole. Many enter into sexually exclusive relationships in the early stages of forming a primary partnership. Some continue with monogamy; others add episodic partners after several years have elapsed. These secondary partners may be pursued either together as a couple or separately. And finally, some couples abandon sexual openness and adopt exclusivity later in their relationship. Monogamy, then, is an option rather than a requirement of gay relationships.

Nonmonogamy is not an indicator of relationship failure among gay men. Lawrence Kurdek and J. Patrick Schmitt found that "partners in open and closed gay relationships were equivalent in intimacy, security, satisfaction, and commitment" (p. 230), a finding confirmed by other researchers. More important than monogamy itself is a couple's understanding of the meaning of sex with another partner. For those who equate sexual exclusivity with the communication of the value of the relationship, sex with another may be read as an indicator of "infidelity" or "betrayal." However, polyamorous female or male couples may rely on other indicators of mutual affection and have tacit or explicit understandings that additional partners are, for example, "just sex" and thus do not jeopardize the primary relationship.

Though there has been a good deal of speculation on the effect of the AIDS epidemic on the rate of sexual exclusivity among gay men, there is very little firm evidence in the area. Sexual openness does pose additional challenges to the consistent practice of safe sex necessary to prevent HIV transmission.

Research on monogamy in lesbian relationships is much more unsystematic and anecdotal. It suggests that lesbians are much more likely than gay men to endorse monogamy in their relationships but less likely to do so than married, heterosexual women. Both lesbians and gay men (along with heterosexual women) are less likely to equate sex outside the relationship with relationship breakdown than are heterosexual men. As Weeks et al. remarked, "the principle of 'co-independence' that structures the operation of same sex relationships, the break from heterosexual assumptions, and the abstract possibilities of separating sex from emotional ties, mean that nonmonogamy is always (at the abstract or practical level) a possibility for non-heterosexual relationships"(p. 150).

Same-sex sexual relationships often draw on cultural understandings regarding friendship (which are usually nonexclusive) as much as they do on marriage (which traditionally demands exclusivity). They draw upon the larger (heterosexual) society for understandings of successful relationship development, but at the same time are disconnected from the social mechanisms that reproduce monogamy as a relationship ideal. It is only recently that LGBT communities have come to document and value the relationships that have grown up as autonomous and authentic cultural formations, rather than viewing them through the lens of heterosexist demands and aspirations. Monogamy and nonmonogamy are among the issues that LGBT people consider in their own relationships, often developing innovative alternatives to heterosexual models.

Bibliography

Blumstein, Philip, and Pepper Schwartz. American Couples. New York: Morrow, 1983.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky, and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Kinsey, Alfred. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953.

Kinsey, Alfred, Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948.

Kurdek, Lawrence, and J. Patrick Schmitt. "Relationship Quality of Gay Men in Closed or Open Relationships." In Gay Relationships. Edited by John De Cecco. New York: Haworth, 1988.

Ruggiero, Guido. The Boundaries of Eros. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Sheets, Virgil, and Marlow Wolfe. "Sexual Jealousy in Heterosexuals, Lesbians, and Gays." Sex Roles 44, nos. 5–6 (March 2001): 255–276.

Stein, Marc. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Weeks, Jeffrey, Brian Heathy, and Catherine Donovan. Same Sex Intimacies. London: Routledge, 2001.

Barry D. Adam

see alsocruising; kinsey, alfred c.; tricking.