before monogamy
by Douglas Messerli
1974, the year of Christopher Larkin’s film A
Very Natural Thing, was a year in which the LGBTQ community was, after the
events surrounding the 1969 Stonewall riots, occupied with speaking out.
Indeed, the 1973 annual New York City Gay Pride March down Manhattan’s Fifth
Avenue is featured in Larkin’s movie.
Nonetheless, in this pre-AIDS era (only the earliest of cases were being
diagnosed, the first US case being recognized in 1969 with the death a 16-year
old boy, with only a few single cases reported in 1973 and 1976) when,
moreover, most US citizens could not yet imagine the legalization of same-sex
marriage—for most of the interviewees of the gay and lesbian march Larkin
captured on camera, the central problem of the day was to simply achieve
acceptance by the society at large—people had highly differing notions about
permanent commitments and long-term relationships.
By
1974 Howard and I, then living in Washington, D.C. were into our fourth year of
a complete commitment to one another very much like a heterosexual marriage,
and I recall a friend of ours who fearing that he might never find someone who
might be interested in a true relationship, even threatening suicide at some
future date if he was still faced with that possibility (I presume he long ago
forgot that vow); yet many of not most—gays in particular—were happy with the
pleasures of open sex unavailable to their heterosexual peers. In urban bars,
public toilets, steam baths, parks, beaches, and sometimes even on side-streets,
the open sexuality of the day provided an enticement that was difficult to
ignore.
Unlike most heterosexuals who were expected after a normal period of
sexual exploration to find a partner, marry, and settle down into a permanent
relationship to raise a family, LGBTQ individuals who had already gone through
many long struggles to break from the normative values of the culture at
large—often endangering their careers, their familial relationships, and even
their own bodies—could rightfully argue they had gained the privilege to remain
outside those cultural values even if they might now be able to pair together
under the banner of being queer. Afterall, part of the definition of having
“come out” was to break with precisely the definitions of home and family from
which they had escaped.
Besides, argued many gay men, unlike their straight peers, they had
necessarily to be late to their own sexual lives and needed more time explore
the landscape.
As
I am about to celebrate with my husband our 51st anniversary early in 2021, so
may seem strange to admit that before I met Howard in 1970, I was most
definitely one of those believers in completely open sexuality; marriage,
either symbolic or literal, was something I just could not have imagined. In my
year in New York City and before that in Madison, Wisconsin where I was
attending the university, the lure of almost daily sex with other nubile male
bodies was something I couldn’t and didn’t even want to resist.*
Those
issues interestingly enough are at the heart of Larkin’s film and another gay
movie I recently re-visited, German director Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (Taxi
to the Toilets) of 1981. Both feature couples who find themselves in a
marriage-like relationship in which one the couple feels sexually trapped and
delimited, while the other hopes to retain him in a monogamous relationship.
Both films are also almost painfully honest, although the more literate
and sexually less explicit of the two, Larkin’s film, perhaps more thoroughly
portrays the issues which any couple of the time had to face.
*Perhaps at the age of 73 I can now admit that
early in our relationship, Howard and I were not always monogamous, and that we
experimented a few times with threesomes, and sought sex outside the
relationship.
Los Angeles, September 25, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My
Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).
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