Heterosexual men and women search the world over for love and when they find it settle down together and, often as not, soon grow weary of one another. Often the loving couple becomes bored and alienated. The search begins again, looking for someone higher in the pecking order than the one they're stuck with. Buying into this sad selfish little system of passion and pain, gays, lesbians and the transgendered seek to imitate it. Looking for love in all the wrong places, we limit ourselves to those same choices, the only choices available to heterosexuals.
Biological investment is not relevant in our relationships. Our need for love and companionship isn't motivated by the same impulses that motivate heterosexuals and we need not be subject to their rules concerning the game of sex, love, and family. We aren't threatened, at least we need not be threatened, if the person we love spends a night in someone else's bed. True, if it's done clandestinely it's shameful, but we aren't going to be cuckolded by another man, nor are we going to have our breadwinner purloined by another woman. When our lovers are unfaithful it is painful, but the enormity of the betrayal that exists when it takes place in a heterosexual relationship, simply isn't there. We won't have wasted twenty years of raising some other man's kid, nor will we have devoted decades to a man, only to discover he's run off with some young bimbo. Read my lips, we can do better.
Heterosexuals have few options in the structure of relationships: one man, one woman, and typically children by chance, planning, or adoption. Should a couple introduce a second man into the relationship, there is considerable risk. The two men, probably not homosexual, won't love one another and, with both loving the same woman, even friendship might prove awkward. They are, after all, in competition. Perhaps having two men might prove flattering to a woman, but it is explosive to hopes for a stable, enduring relationship. Introduction of a woman as third partner, instead of a man, offers a somewhat better scenario, but one still fraught with tidal forces of jealousy. It is thus that the typical heterosexual conception of the family was legitimized as protection for both the biological investment of the man and the financial security of the woman and children. It isn't a perfect system, but it works after a fashion.
It is clear that heterosexuals have few options; there is little opportunity to change the programming. But, what about the rest of us, those who aren't rigidly heterosexual? Many of us were raised to believe that love comes only in a single form; one person loves another person who should love them in return. We have also been taught that gays, lesbians, and the transgendered are perverts. Years of agonized soul-searching exposed this teaching as nothing but phobic paranoia. Perhaps the time has come to realize that the rest of the paradigm is also crap, at least, in so far as it concerns us.
When we are homosexual or bisexual, we can love more than one person at the same time, without it threatening our first love. Two men who love each other can meet another man and all three can fall in love, three lesbians can do the same, as can three transsexuals, and we can do so in virtually any combination. Jealousy, that infuriating devil in heterosexual relationships, is much easier to keep at bay. Three people, in love with one another are concerned mostly with insuring their fair share of appreciation and attention. When personal needs and feelings are met, the highest joy is in the happiness and satisfaction of one's lovers. If two are making love and the third feels welcome to join in, the participation becomes optional instead of obligatory. That means that a loving partner's sense of security isn't threatened by some sinking feeling of being left out. The love is aways genuine, present, imminent. Three adults together are family, a homosexual conception of family. These are three consenting adults who have joined fortunes, energies, and lives to create a firm foundation against the cold and strife-torn world.
One of the chief advantages of heterosexual families, and one heterosexuals use to profess superiority over gay couples, is that they can have children. Conceptually, to heterosexuals, two adults are a couple, and only with the arrival of children does the couple become a family. The producing and rearing of new lives gives meaning to their union. When we, gender variants, embrace a third person into our love life, we too become more secure, and have as strong a claim for family as heterosexuals. Three consenting adults, having taken oaths, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, to commit their lives and their fortunes, are indisputably a family. The support we offer to one another, the dynamics of a triad, make for a full and meaningful life.
Not to mention, children cost a fortune to raise and heterosexuals often struggle on the edge of fiscal disaster. When homosexual couples, already likely to be financially secure, add a third adult, it increases their stability. When we, gender variants, recognize that we are free from the restrictions and limitations imposed on heterosexuals, step out of the limited and preconceived notions of what constitutes a loving relationship, we open the door for wondrous new possibilities. Among them is that we forge a much more defensible position for ourselves within society.
However, there are some significant elements to be considered in homosexual families. Everyone who comes into the family must be loved by each and every member. Not necessarily to the same degree, nor necessarily in the same manner, but sufficient that when commitment is made, that it be sincere. Heterosexual commitment, dressed up by law and religion, has no greater weight than any other oath. The strength of an oath is in the integrity of the person giving it. This is attested to by the plague of divorce in heterosexual marriages and families, not even constrained when children are present. The commitment of the parties in a homosexual family must be no less earnest and hopefully more constant than that in heterosexual couples.
We, gender variants in any combination, therefore, can create our own families, set our own ethical standards, form our own families, and, by the integrity which we bring to these families, we can build a foundation unsurpassed by heterosexual families. Indeed, we might find ourselves in the enviable position of not only being secure with ourselves, but in a position where, from that surety, we can offer support to heterosexuals families stuggling with their hardships.
Who then could say, even lacking familiarity with us, that our lives serve not the common good of all? Above all else, alternative families increase the strength, the power, and presence with which we confront a too often hostile world.
This page last updated 25 Dec 97
