Editorial from The Guide	Editorials Archive

Open the pages of many gay newspapers and you'll find ads from therapists offering help to those afflicted with "sexual compulsivity." Guys are told that seeking out multiple, anonymous sexual encounters signals the inability to form rewarding, intimate relationships. Working with a sex-as-addiction model, such therapists laud their clients' efforts to avoid the parks and toilets and rest stops where they'd previously gone for their "fix." Getting guys into courtship-before-sex, one-partner-at-a-time behavior is seen as success, a move towards more "mature" relationships.

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Undoubtedly, some guys who cruise anonymous sex venues do feel shameful. Throughout their upbringing, no one ever told them that it was okay to make sexual adventures a priority. Any guy hanging out in a bathroom or loitering on a bike path was seen as pathetic, a misfit incapable of a "real" relationship, and quite possibly dangerous. Additionally, since such cruising is frequently targeted for harassment from law enforcement, it is easy for some to label those who flout legal prohibitions as "self destructive"-- who else would risk public humiliation and Draconian legal penalties for "just sex"?

But those who condemn anonymous sexual liaisons as impediments to intimacy and "mature" relationships reveal only their misunderstanding of intimacy and love. They conflate conformity to prevailing sexual norms with mental health. And by freighting sex with a meaning and import it does not inherently have, they end up compounding neuroses and anxieties rather than relieving them.

Gay people have often made themselves unhappy, and sometimes driven themselves nuts, trying to behave as they've been told they should. Therapists a few decades ago (and, sadly, some still today) saw a client's denial of homosexual desire as a "success." Every Herculean effort to have, and act on, only "respectable" sexual urges was presented as a victory-- no matter the psychic cost of denying basic sexual instincts.

But there has been a revolution in attitudes about homosexuality. Now, most thoughtful people recognize that anti-gay attitudes, policies, and laws were the source of gay peoples' woes, not their homosexuality itself. Same-sex sexual attraction no longer signals, to most, pathological immaturity or criminal predisposition.

Similarly, we can change the way we look at those who seek out anonymous sexual encounters. They need not be labeled "compulsives" requiring treatment, but instead as individuals possessing vigorous sexual appetites. Anyone cruising for the perfect dick can be seen as no odder than a diligent birdwatcher spending hours perched on a limb, hoping to spy a rare feathered friend. And if attitudes about cruising for anonymous sex were to become more accepting and less condemnatory, far fewer cruisers would feel shameful, no longer compelled into labeling their sexual recreation as "compulsive."

It is ironic that anonymous cruisers have been tagged as having trouble being intimate; how much more intimate can you be with someone you've just met than to lick their asshole, give them a hand job, or offer them your cock to suck? Sexual connections with strangers bring rewards in themselves and carry the potential to forge bonds and friendships that would have never otherwise formed. Anonymous cruisers can help us all to the mature realization that sexual affection does not yield more rewards for being doled out stingily-- a vital lesson to a world in need of greater sexual generosity.