Back to your question, Keith. If it appears to you that there are an awful lot of people around you not interested in monogamy, it may be your age cohort, plus the few inevitable older, recalcitrant interlopers. I remember a time in my life when it appeared the monogamous were a dying breed. Key West in the 1970’s, for example. It’s a sunny little isle and at the time it was inhabited by quite a hearty, traditional fishing community.
Two openly gay authors, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, both famous and wealthy, independently but during the same period, colonized the town with their own separate retinues made up of sun-worshiping, body-building, youthful males from the New York City metropolitan area. They brought their friends and friends of friends and everyone brought good New York cash with them, bought and rented lodgings in this economically anemic community and thus softened the cultural shock experience by the traditional town locals.
The town became more festive over night, the tourist industry became year round and catered to a younger and more moneyed crowd, new businesses, new bars, whole new small industries opened up. Whereas a Friday night on Duval Street looked relatively sedate with some a few bars peopled by local fishermen and a few tourists in 1970, in 1973 there were wall-to-wall hordes of young men and women crowding the sidewalks going from bar to bar—whole streets of night clubs of every conceivable theme—clubs side by side radiating off Duvall onto every street in the business district.
Suddenly here was always something to celebrate, there were spontaneous street marches of heavily made-up, very tall ladies dressed from head to toe in the finest Las Vegas Showgirl regalia, rank and file, high-kicking it to disco music down the middle of downtown. Nobody cared that they had prominent Adam’s apples. There was always a festival, organized or not. Monogamy was anything that lasted for more than three weeks. Very unusual and the culprits involved were suspect of being crypto-establishment.
I was down there to find work as a diver, hopefully for Mel Fisher, but I would take anything. Once established, I found that I belonged to a minority of young heterosexual males. But I still couldn’t walk across Duvall Street without getting my butt pinched. But this was considered just another part of the Key West experience of that day. It was one of the many things that occur daily in a place that has decided to carve out it’s own brave new world, it’s own reality safely insulated by a body of water from all other realities. A place where the fire chief was the main source for weed and his firehouses his retail outlets, while he used the profits to build a modern Little League baseball field and team uniforms for the local kids. This is just one of many examples of how these wiley, practical locals adapted to the situation rather than resist the inevitable.
Anyway, I digress. Fast forward to 1995. A quiet town again. Wealthier, cleaner and prettier than the seedy boomtown of 1976 with it’s unique architectural heritage well preserved (something that was in doubt back when the town was hungry). The two writers were long dead but a lot of those crazy kids stayed in Key West, found a way to make a living, started small businesses and matured. The town matured. By the 1990’s they had taken a lot of the old Victorian homes and made them into first class, beautiful bed-and-breakfasts. They have the most unique shops one can find anywhere on earth. Always the tourist town, it now has established festivals celebrating their 1970’s past. It was one of the first towns in the U. S. to have a gay pride parade. They seceded from the Union when many of their radical ideas were threatened by an invasion of federal police in the 1970’s. Today it is an economic powerhouse in South Florida.
In 1995, I went down there and looked up some old friends from the crazy days. I found guys—the same guys who used to pinch my ass, cruise the bars, march in full regalia, were now presiding over B&Bs, antique stores, doing the interiors for hotel chains, writing books, creating art, members of the City Council—guys who, like me, were now greying at the temples, had soft bellies, lived in comfortable homes. There are still festivals, fewer and highly organised, but they are more inclusive, nationally promoted by a first class PR apparatus.
Most of these guys had found life partners and most of them were monogamous. War stories of the old days would elicit a quiet smile, maybe a knowing sparkle in the eye, but nothing more.
I think, for all the reasons in the posts above, this is what happens to most people. After you have had your fun, as you begin to realize your immortality and want to make the world a better place and realize there are rewards in stability far greater than that which you can get out in the field, you settle in with a like-minded partner. For some, the maturing process takes longer, but I think monogamy is as natural as an afternoon mango mojito on a shaded porch in laid-back Key West.
Sorry about the length. but I love writing about this place.
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