Hectic lives, job stress and a lessening of sexual desire as men age can all play a factor. Adopting a child, as a growing number of gay male couples are doing, doesn’t help. Gay men who, when single and in their 20s, might have been having sex multiple times per week, suddenly find themselves behaving a bit, well, suburban. “Spontaneity is completely out of the picture,” says James Sie, 40, who is raising an infant son with his partner of more than 12 years, Douglas Wood, 39. “We’re exhausted at ten o’clock. Suddenly it becomes, ‘Do you want to have sex or watch “Will and Grace?”’” Yes, adds Wood with a laugh, “Tivo has saved our love life.”
Although these couples jokingly bemoan the decline in their sex lives, both are still finding time to be intimate at least once every two weeks. If this is downhill for gay men, lesbian couples are plummeting off a cliff. In their 1983 book, “American Couples: Money-Work-Sex,” sociologists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz concluded that lesbians have less sex in their relationships than any other group. The term “lesbian bed death” soon entered the vernacular, and although the research has since taken heat for being overstated (or fatalistic), it still holds some truth. When NEWSWEEK asked one gay woman if she knew any lesbian couples who were not having sex, she replied, “Yes. All of them.”
“Part of it is just hormonal differences between men and women,” says Dr. Robin Holmes, PhD, director of the Counseling and Testing Center at the University of Oregon. “When you have two women, you don’t have someone initiating sex as much as you would in a heterosexual relationship. The second part is that lesbian relationships tend to be egalitarian, and very companion-oriented. To introduce sex sometimes breaks up that dynamic. If we’re improving the yard and we just picked out plants together and it felt really good, it’s a different type of energy to be like, ‘Now let’s run upstairs and have sex.’” To help rejuvenate her patients’ love lives, Holmes often recommends date nights, and gives them “homework assignments” that motivate them to become physically intimate again. “You help them build that spice back into the relationship,” she says.
To put the spice back into their relationships, some gay men consider adding another partner. All the couples interviewed for this story are strictly monogamous, but they know others who have brought a third man into their bedrooms, or have even allowed one or both partners to stray outside the relationship. This “negotiated infidelity” can be dangerous territory, however. “I’ve seen it be successful only in relationships that have a very strong foundation,” says Dr. Howard Gluss, a Beverly Hills therapist and author with a primarily gay clientele.
But even if couples such as Sie and Wood never explore that option, they can comfort themselves with the knowledge that they’re still getting more action than most. “We’re not having that much sex, but we’re having more than those straight people,” Sie says with a laugh. And much more than lesbians. True, he says, “but they have beautifully landscaped backyards.”
