How to do the wrong thing right
Just how long is a “long-term” relationship? Acid-witted American essayist/historical novelist Gore Vidal and his life-partner, the mercurial Broadway stage manager Howard Austen, may very well hold the Gayness Book of World Records entry (celebrity edition, at least) for venerably maintaining the most triumphantly long-lived same-sex partnership in civilized history: 53 years (it expired upon Austen’s death in 2003). Whenever asked what stuff of destiny’s better angels he attributed to their relationship’s enviable endurance, Vidal (who himself passed away in 2012) would deadpan, “It’s easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible, I have observed, when it does.” Angelic Howard here couldn’t have quipped Gore one better with even all the winged spirts of Heaven helping by my side.
Let’s just get all Vidal-Austen right to it.
Dear Howard: I’ve been monogamously dating my boyfriend now for almost three months, but still he’s on Grindr, and on Facebook he’s even still “single.” Now, I’m hardly one of those devious queens who goes snatching up his husband’s iPhone every time he steps in the shower, but Manny and me, we’re firmly into a long-term relationship here. We ain’t just dating casually anymore —I commanded his seedy ship of boy toys sail off into the sunset, lost at sea forever — at right about our six-week marker. So imagine my nausea upon discovering by accident that he’s begun calling some number up in Frisco that I don’t recognize, and quite regularly, too …but only on those rare nights when I don’t sleep over, and always after 11 p.m. when I’ve been asleep for nearly an hour. Howard, why must I be the one forced to woundedly point out to my randy juvenile what’s so obvious here? Should I just tell this ramblin’, amblin’ man flat-out that without monogamy he’ll soon be without me? — Almost Golden
Dear Totally Leaden: Yes, absolutely, would you, please? A rare find it is, indeed, to run across someone so aglow with the radiance of such insecure pettiness as you — another stealth-ninja who surreptitiously steals another man’s private property to snoop through his intimate correspondences that are none of your business, while rapaciously trying to wrangle some phantom, “long-term” commitment out of a man whom you’ve barely met — in a relationship that’s withstood all the blistering, infidel sands of time now for 12 whole weeks? Honey, you don’t deserve “long-term” love. And certainly not to any real man cloaked in the humble possession of real, human fallibilities. Likely sooner than later do I most duly anticipate receiving my wedding invitation celebrating the noble nuptials of yourself to an XXXL anatomically correct, life-size beefcake stud of a blow-up doll.
Bottom line, Deviantella: Three measly months does not a “long-term relationship” make, remotely: Fully two years, in Howard’s estimation, meet only the bare minimal qualifying-time for the rigorous standards constituting “long-term” anointment. In layman’s terms, until you’re both on your third bottle of Tabasco purchased together; until each of you are able to echoingly pass one another in your hallway with the walking farts sans even a whiff of mutually mortifying embarrassment given to it; until long silences when facing one another opposite a table in a restaurant are no longer remotely uncomfortable … then, and only then, will you at last know you’ve entered into a bona fide relationship of long-haul legs, munificent merit and death-do-us-part substance. My, but, oh my! Can you even imagine what rapture shall be your jilted, long-term lover on that gloriously golden day when, finally, Manny’s released from the putrid, shackling maw of your priggish purgatory? Through streaming tears in his eyes shall he again, at last, see shimmering blue skies! Or, as we say back home in Alabama whenever it’s raining yet the sun’s come out: The devil’s beating his wife at the door.
Dear Howard: How do I go about telling my husband, Mr. Vanilla Extract, that a single jar of Vaseline rattling around in our nightstand’s “date night” drawer doesn’t exactly set Saturday night’s mattress on fire with passion? I feel ashamed as a nun in a wimple even admitting to my own husband that I harbor such wicked lustiness as S-M bedroom fantasies, even though Roger’s totally addicted to daddy/twink bondage porn. (He doesn’t even bother anymore to erase his search histories.) But so far as he thinks of me in any sexual context at all, it’s almost like he fears even broaching the topic of bondage play with me, whom he takes to bed with him every single night. I suppose taking a flogger to the man to whom he vowed his eternal protection and devotion might irreparably diminish, if not outright demean, the sanctity of my spousal pedestal. Apparently, I’m too deified to be sullied with anything raunchier than a dab of petroleum jelly on anal Tuesdays…. why can’t Roj instead see me more as his very own Saturday night, private love machine maniac? — Rory Upchurch
Dear Whore In Church: Fortuitously enough, just this past spring, X-Tube revealed the results of a gay audience survey that asked each of its anonymous participants to reveal what his/her secret favorite gay sex fetish is — the results of which you’ll find frustratingly vanilla: Being shackled, prostrate upon bent knees to your bed in chains, whimpering naked and blindfolded whilst mercilessly defiled by Master ’Nilla Extract … yeah, no worries, Twinkalicious, this list has your twisted, true-self totally covered:
In descending order, 2019’s top 10 gay fetish sex fantasies were: 10. Partialism (sexual interest in a specific body part other than the genitals). 9. Role play. 8. Narratophilia (aka “dirty talk”). 7. Uniforms. 6. Bondage. 5. Submission. 4. Exhibitionism. 3. Voyeurism. 2. Maschalagnia (armpits). 1. Macrophilia (sexual interest in someone of a much greater body size).
Dear Howard: I’m a top and my newlywed husband won’t bottom. He just refuses. Nor will he acknowledge my logical argument, “But we entered into this marriage together — a sexual team. As teammates, someone has to always be pitcher; someone has to always play catcher.” I can’t be the only one of us who’s always willing to compromise my preferred position in the pyrrhic glorification, every time he hops aboard me with his wicked Louisville Slugger. (Who’d he inherit that monster creature from anyhow — Godzilla?) Howard, the true miracle afterwards, upon my insistent pressing of Jared as to why he would never swap-out turns playing catcher for me occasionally being allowed to pitch, was how I managed to refrain from coming just totally unglued once he answered my question. And talk about some more kind of prize revelation to pull out from what I assumed was just a box of Cracker Jack! Suddenly, it’s bottom of the ninth and the bases are loaded, and my husband quietly took a deep breath, tapped his cleats atop the mound, dusted a cloud of chalk into his hands and tossed straight down the center of home plate an ash-splintering, stadium eruption game-changer: “OK, truth is, sweetie, I don’t really much even enjoy anal sex — neither the bottom bunk nor the top, if I’m being totally honest: The human anus just doesn’t turn me on. At all. Never has.”
It took a few moments for the effects his stun gun’s paralysis to fully wear off. Eventually, though, I mouthed, “And yet you decided to go male for your marrying gender of preference, to accompany this amusing little fetish glitch? What kind of card-carrying homosexual suddenly announces that men’s buttholes don’t turn him on? On the gender-malfunction scale, it’s equivalency, in reverse, has his identical heterosexual doppelganger abruptly decreeing, “Well, if I’m being totally honest, college cheerleaders’ pompoms, televised pro-golf tournaments and a Fire Magic Diamond Echelon Outdoor Barbecue Grill just don’t really much turn me on.” Howard, have I gone crazy, or did some killer bees’ larvae hatch inside Jared’s ear? Or what if he’s really saying to me that it’s only my butt that doesn’t much turn him on? Oh, what a pretty pass we’ve now reached — our perfectly-paired same-sex union of two throbbing erections — and nary a demonic soul around for either of us to ejaculate in … well, don’t that just fuck a duck? — Bill Taft
Dear William Howard: In Gayville’s new 21st century lexicon, your pitcher-by-default husband is what we now classify as a “side” — as in, he’s not a top, he’s not a bottom. YouTube “personality” Bradley Birkholz, a self-professed side and tireless promulgator of the term (as a very needed alternative, in his opinion, to the “butthole binary” of forcing gay men to choose between but two sexual-branding options — or, in varying meaningless degrees, a frustratingly begrudged “versatile”) elucidates: “When exploring my sexuality, I began discovering a world of sex far beyond the realm of butt sex. When you’re a side, you get to have fun no matter what. My message is that you don’t need to feel pressured into conforming to the expectations of gay sex fed to us through porn and popularized media.”
Nonetheless, William Howard, despite this sound argument in the defense of sides, it offers precious little comfort in your own defense. The bottom-line truth still remains that you were, for all intents and purposes, basically shanghai’d into marrying a man who conveniently negated ever mentioning beforehand that conjugal relations revolted him; worse, on whatever occasions he did deign to engage in sexual intercourse with you, it amounted to little more than a mercy fuck of duty, rather than the euphoria of lovemaking between an equal pair of testosterone-charged newlyweds. For a man who professes an equal disgust at playing either a top or bottom, the fact that he still refused to compromise with you halfway in the bedroom, or even bend a little, says to Howard that there lurks deeper letdowns in your husband’s psyche than merely his abhorrence of rectums.
— Howard Lewis Russell
Have a question about love, sex, relationships or etiquette? Send it to AskHoward@dallasvoice.com and he may answer it.
