Future Sex (20 page)

What my married parents imparted as the lessons from the 1960s was that it was fine to have as much casual (“safe”) sex as we wanted as late-stage teenagers and young adults, and fine to secretly “experiment” with the more benign and least-addictive drugs (although no teacher or relative ever openly recommended it), but eventually
we would grow up, stop using drugs, stop having sex with whomever we wanted, and settle into the nuclear families we saw on television, with an interlude in our twenties where we would live in cities with roommates. Some of us would be gay and that would be fine. Many of these families would fall apart, but we did not consider divorce a structural failure of an institution but a set of personal
problems.

Haight-Ashbury by 1968, when my father arrived there—one summer late, it turned out—was a depressing place. If I doubted his word, I could read Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Or whoever—I pick Ellen Willis from a dozen possible writers who lived the time and came to the same conclusion, in her essay “Coming Down Again”:

Freedom is inherently risky, which is the reason for rules and limits in the first place; the paradox of the ’60s generation is that we felt secure enough, economically and sexually, to reject security. The risks people took were real and so were the losses: the deaths, breakdowns, burnouts, addictions, the paranoia and nihilism, “revolutionary” crimes and totalitarian religious cults, poverty, and prison terms. Though the casualties of drugs and politics have been more conspicuous, sex has never been safe, certainly not for women and gay men: in a misogynist, homophobic culture suffused with sexual rage, to be a “whore” or a “pervert” is to “ask for” punishment. [From
The Essential Ellen Willis
, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.]

So people my age believed in rules, even if they were not always obeyed. We risked less, but we also expected
to suffer less punishment. I saw this as a kind of enlightenment. The nuclear families on television now showed interracial and same-sex couples. We had expanded our idea of normal. We therefore needed no science-fictional overhaul, no modified futuristic family model where we designated marriage as situated on the wrong side of history and raised our children in communal crèches guarded over
by free-loving communitarians or, as Arthur C. Clarke predicted in 1953 in
Childhood’s End
, signed limited marriage contracts of five to ten years. That was what the 1960s had taught us: not to tamper with the fundamental structures of the family and society. Even in the attempt to establish a conflict between gay sex and marriage, marriage would ultimately win.

Marriage
was the one word in our
era of sexual freedom that had not lost its specificity. In contrast to the linguistic murk of
dating
we still knew what
marriage
meant: a lifelong commitment, both sexual and familial, to another person. To be married in life was in perfect congruence with what it meant to be married on one’s tax form.

Among my mostly secular group of friends the ceremonies of marriage and death were the only
ritual sacraments left. In those years I went to weddings in rural Vermont, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Quebec. I went to weddings in Lisbon, Chicago, Brooklyn, and upstate New York. Most of my travel and spending money went toward weddings. They reminded me that there was one sexual relationship still governed by strict rules. People who married believed in commitment. Most of them believed they
could uphold monogamy. They planned to purchase single-family homes and eventually bear children. They wanted to care for each other when old.

This is not to say that the weddings I attended confidently asserted the institution of marriage. In marrying each other, my friends wanted to prove they had not succumbed to institutional conformity at the very moment they asserted their institutional
conformity. They didn’t want to cop out entirely, they didn’t want to blindly mimic a housewife-patriarch dynamic, but they wanted to move into the more stable sphere of adult existence. These neo-marriages therefore had to be an expression of the purest love and show a deliberate break with history. I went to Catholic weddings, Jewish weddings, and Hindu weddings, but cultural tradition was often
merely aesthetic adornment or enacted with perfunctory deference to please relatives. In many cases there was no ceremony, religious or otherwise. Just enough was included to add a patina of history without having to suffocate under history’s predilections toward intolerance. At other times the elimination of traditional wedding usage and terms was presented in apologetic solidarity with those communities
who were until very recently denied marriage. The rise of “partner” over “husband” or “wife” was increasingly mainstream, a successful linguistic flattening of hierarchies of sexual orientation, gender, and marital status. This made lots of sense in a business or professional context, but less sense, perhaps, with family and friends, where it begged the question of what marriage is worth,
if not a public declaration of the nature of one’s relationship to another person, and what equality is worth, if it demands the total obfuscation of the differences between humans.

The care my friends took to separate their marriages from the history of marriage tacitly acknowledged a recently agreed-upon truth: marriage should not mean one person losing her independence, her name, and her autonomy
to another. Having sought to eliminate this subjugation, we now tried to convince ourselves that marriage between men and women could carry the nice parts of its history without its gendered roles. Its mystique survived its reformation, and its well-documented downsides would still ennoble us: even my most sexually adventurous friends remained willing to risk the hypocrisy, dishonesty, diminished
sexual desire, or mute unhappiness of many marriages.

I did not doubt the nobility of such malaise. I believed in the mystique of commitment—that, as Beauvoir had once sarcastically described it, “routine takes on the cast of adventure; fidelity, that of a sublime passion; ennui becomes wisdom; and family hatred is the deepest form of love.” I could conceive of no viable alternative; the options
I could name were alien to me: open marriages, swingers, polyamory … But this left a vacuum of ideas for any future of sustainable sexuality outside of a narrative that culminated in marriage. Could I think of myself as an adult if I never married? Would my married friends become distant and remote? Was there a way to imagine a sexual relationship beyond the linear progression of a “relationship”?
In between weddings I entered the homes of monogamous couples who lived together. They would feed me and introduce me to their pets and later their babies. I looked for guidance in their towels and coverlets, the organization of the shared closet, their cake stands or seltzer machines and houseplants. I would enter the home of an ex-boyfriend now living with a woman and experience even greater
estrangement, looking at the hairpins on the glass shelf below the medicine cabinet, or the flaxseed oil in the refrigerator. This was the life he had chosen over our life together, which would have had different hair accessories, no flaxseed oil in the refrigerator. “I don’t know how to pin up my hair properly,” I would think, as an explanation.

To stop thinking of marriage as the only feasible
resolution to the question of what my sexual future might look like I had to at least consider polyamory, open relationships, and the other phenomena, to start seeing the changes not as threats to the ideal relationship but as ideals in themselves. Elizabeth, Wes, and Chris believed there were still primary choices to make about sexuality. They saw occasionally taking psychedelics and MDMA as
a way to suspend some of the suspicions and phobias that made consideration of such choices difficult. I thought that parade had already gone by, that it had ended with the Manson Family. I thought the secondhand sexual freedom passed down by my parents had been sufficient to my needs, until I realized it wasn’t. Nonmonogamy—or rather, free love—as an organizing principle of sexuality, adopted en
masse and recognized in language and law, would break with history, which was why it was such a popular theme in science fiction. Like outer space, the prospect of free love was always there, humans just had to figure out how to make it hospitable to our needs. I wasn’t the only one who kept thinking about the warnings of people who had observed the 1960s and felt hesitation. There was a phrase being
thrown around the Bay Area only half-jokingly: “responsible hedonism.”

*   *   *

In the spring of 2012, Elizabeth would spend most nights with Wes, and the occasional night with Chris or someone else. The three friends would see one another at work, too, staying late and having meals together in the cafeteria. When their relationships evolved, the shifts tended to happen not in slow increments
but with sudden tectonic upheavals, usually during out-of-town retreats that served as emotional crucibles, where the suspension of the usual barriers to human emotion, often through experimentation with psychoactive substances, would provoke the revelation of suppressed feeling. Chris later contemplated writing an essay called “2012: A Story of Sex, Love, and MDMA.” The essay would be punctuated
by a series of parties: New Year’s Eve, the night the three first made out at Public Works, and now, as summer approached, other events.

The decision to go to the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas was originally made with the intention of having a semi-ironic reconnaissance with the mainstream. EDC was a corporate perversion of rave culture, a party with none of the do-it-yourself communal
values that guided the partying of their group of friends. Still, it was probably going to be funny, and if not they would make it funny, so that June the three lovers and some thirty of their friends booked a block of rooms at Planet Hollywood and flew to Las Vegas.

The festival took place at the Las Vegas Speedway on the outskirts of town. One hundred thousand people were in attendance, and
the traffic from the strip to the speedway, normally a fifteen-minute drive, took two hours. The friends from San Francisco had chartered a bus to take them to and from the event. It quickly became clear that their bus driver pointedly hated them. He pulled over the bus in a fury to rage about their drug use, would take directions only from the men in the group, and saw some national problem embodied
in these young, handsome professionals dressed androgynously in Day-Glo.

Another downer came on the Saturday night of the festival, when high winds forced the music to shut down at one a.m., stranding the thousands of ravers who had carefully calculated their milligrams and micrograms for at least another five hours of dancing. The San Francisco group, their own reality somewhat distorted, carefully
made their way to the bleachers overlooking the speedway and watched the scene unfold like a weather event on television: organizers attempting to corral confused herds in furries and blinky lights hither and yon; an unfounded rumor that the festival would be reopening at a specific entry point, prompting a multicolored swarm.

These were logistical problems, but Chris felt depressed for other
reasons. EDC, of all places—it was supposed to be a joke! EDC was where some truths about his relationship with Elizabeth and Wes were being revealed. Elizabeth preferred to say that EDC was when Chris realized “Wes and I liked each other and our relationship was real.” If Chris thought the three of them had taken on an adventure on equal footing, he now saw that it was not quite that way. They were
adventuring as a couple. He was on his own.

When they got back to San Francisco, Elizabeth went to London for a couple of weeks for work. Wes simply disappeared, ignoring Chris’s calls, doing his own thing, work or something else. Chris felt abandoned.

Chris and Wes never had the deep discussions about feelings that Elizabeth and Chris had. When they passed through an intermediary period during
which Chris was feeling left out, it manifested more as a general, unacknowledged tension between the friends than an actual rift. When Chris was happier, the tension would fade, and the two men would be friends again.

Elizabeth had only a vague idea about Chris’s difficulties. He did not tell them a lot in the moment. Elizabeth knew he wanted emotional intimacy, and that he liked them a lot.
She liked him a lot, too, but she also knew there would never be a complete three-way match. It was not that she could not picture herself as part of a triad, but she knew that Wes would never be a part of such an arrangement.

The summer passed with a certain degree of estrangement, everyone punching in excess hours at Google. At summer’s end, the last week before Labor Day, Chris and Wes joined
Elizabeth for her second Burning Man and the three decided to share a tent. The first day was spent setting up their camp, in whiteout dust storm conditions. The second day of the festival was so-called Molly Make Out Monday for their theme camp. MDMA had never been a good drug for Chris—at EDC he had avoided it—but hey, it was Burning Man. He told himself he would be fine. He told himself he
wanted to do it. Instead of the hot-water-bottle warmth of low-grade empathogenic softness, Chris felt like all the Adderall, coffee beans, green teas, and Diet Cokes he had ingested in a lifetime were converging somewhere in his torso, his brain reduced to spinning hamster wheels and the relentless pulse of blinking lights moving in rhythm with electronic dance music. Having taken extra care to stay
hydrated, he drank too much water, and thirty-six hours into Burning Man, Chris was doubled over outside the phantasmagoric dance party at Opulent Temple, vomiting, panicking, and wishing he were anywhere else.

The third day he spent lying in the shade.

He had hoped for, and been told about, the likelihood of having a profound emotional experience at Burning Man. He had countered this expectation
with an internal dialogue, that all that was “phooey,” that he was simply attending an elaborate party in the desert, that he was not the sort to have intense emotional experiences, and that he was in it for the party. He ended up having a profound emotional experience, he just hadn’t supposed it would be so terrible. He remembered, for example, that he does not like talking to strangers. Riding
his dolled-up bicycle through the dust and heat, he experienced the dissonance of the tourist in a foreign environment, as if he had landed not at Burning Man but in rural China, where people were all around, each person with his or her own place in the universe, but he was profoundly alone, separated by a barrier of insurmountable isolation.