Ew, but only because they look like crosses between Sting and Malcolm MacDowell, and there are two of them.

As the older sister of a pair of male twins, I regret reading any of this.

What, is this ratings week? First Carolyn Hax (WaPo) does a column on porn addiction (and commenters reference you Dan, several times), and now Prudie does Gay Male Twincest?

BTW, I'm all for lesbian twincest! I knew a couple of twins who were not lesbian at all, but were rather lusty and did...um...make some twin fantasies for a few guys come true. They were close and comfortable with one another, and in that light, it really wasn't so squicky. Sadly, I am not one of those guys.

I swear to FSM I was just reading the comments in the Gawker piece before I clicked over here. Lots of 'em were from gays and gayelles who seemed to think the letter certainly rang true as far as the parental pressure to settle down was concerned. Now that gay marriage and kid-having are getting easier all the time, they note parents, especially those who are "somewhat to totally gay-scared", are getting maniacal that they hurry up and marry and have kids lest they fall into being "that kind of gay".

Whether the letter is phony or not, who cares, the interesting thing is how it rings at least a little true because of that.

The day that Gavin Newsom started having San Francisco perform same sex marriage my mother called to ask if I was going to run down and get married, and was very dissapointed when I said "no". Later, after the court decision that made same sex marriage (briefly) legal in CA before Prop 8 passed, when I did get married my mother flew across the country to be there.

Everyone in the family is constantly still asking us when we are going to have kids.

So yes, the idea that parents and families are now pressuring gay family members about settling down, getting married and having kids is VERY real and believable. But unlike what Gloomy suggests at post 4, I don't think it has anything to do with them being scared or worrying about the kids becoming "that kind of gay".

I think it is just normal expectations no different than the same pressures that straight family members get.

My family, despite being generally conservative on most issues, is completely and 100% OK and accepting of gay people and gay relationships. I have an older cousin who has been with his partner for over 40 years, and they were married as soon as it was legal in MA. It is just the standard assumption that families typically make. If you love someone you get married and settle down and have kids. As gay relationships become seen as just like any other relationships it only makes sense that the same expectations get laid on gay people.

It is both extremely annoying and incredibly endearing at the same time.

As far as the twin thing goes, who knows, but I wouldn't write it off completely. I knew two gay brothers in college who had a sexual relationship. They weren't twins, but they were brothers. They kept it very quiet but a few of us knew about it. So it happens, just as I am sure there are a few cases out there of brothers and sisters ending up in relationships. My personal reaction is, it's not my business.

There were a pair of sisters on a This American Life podcast a while back, who had lived together all their lives and never married - they're in their 80s or something now. They claimed to be virgins and had never slept with anyone, but that their friendship was like a companionate marriage. If Prudie was suggesting that these men tell their families that they have a non-sexual but devoted relationship, then there's precedence (presuming these men exist at all).

This could easily be real. There really would be no way for a cultural taboo against sibling incest to develop without the practice being sufficiently common. For example, we don't, as far as I'm aware, have a specific taboo against taking a nap in a vat of spiders, even though the idea is really squicky to most people (right?) - not enough people do it (I've only ever seen it on Fear Factor).

Also, I think the advice is solid. As far as I can tell, they're not harming anyone in any way, so there's nothing ethically problematic with their relationship, even if I or anyone else finds it creepy. Actually, I don't even find it that creepy; while I certainly wouldn't want to have sex with any of my siblings, the fact that they do has no impact on me and therefore no reason to bother me.

I always like Prudie's advice.
I see no reason not to believe it is a real letter, and there are probably a lot more cases of sibling/sibling incest than people imagine--and it is none of our business.
(Though, considering the way a lot of siblings fight and the petty resentments they hold, it is impressive to think that they could "fall in love.")

Since I don't watch gay porn, I was unaware of the twincest theme. But I've always wondered what the thrill is about the idea of twins? Double the pleasure, double the fun? Wouldn't that just be achieved by two people? Why the twin-allure?

@5 (Fortunate): I agree with you about familial expectations.

As long as you can't make babies, who cares? Resolve to make yourselves happy. The rules people make seldom have any relevance, anyway. Others will grow tired of asking.

@5, I'm glad your folks are mellow but my @4 was just passing along what I saw in Gawker comments, not claiming the experience as my own.

Gloomy, wasn't trying to dismiss your comments, but I'm just saying, the pressure from family to settle down and marry is normal. As same sex relationships become more visible and, for lack of a better word, "normal", it is only expected that parents will have the same expectations of their gay children as they have of their straight children. I see the same thing with most of my friends who's parents have come to simply accept that their kid is gay.

As an aside, it is also one of the few arguments of any validity I have heard from gay people who question the push for marriage equality. Not a convincing one, but the only one that has some actual reasoning. That once gay people are allowed to get married we will start to get pressured to do so. That one of the benefits of being gay is that we are inherently forced to create our own relationship models and are free from the expectation of conforming to some preset, cookie cutter idea of how we are supposed to manage our intimate relationships. Marriage equality would undermine that.

I don't buy it, because people still have the same options, they just need to learn to tell others to mind their own business. But the idea is that the more common, and accepted, same sex relationships become the more pressure is going to be put on same sex couples to conform to the established parameters expected of romantic partnerships.

Incest, whether between straight folks or gay folks, still has a high "ick" factor to me.

I know what happens to identical twins who fall in love and fuck each other. They wind up in a mental institution.

That would be like masturbating in 3-D or something... Well, fuck me!

Funny Gawker posted two porn twins (Peters Brothers) as a pic of the Prudie letter writers... WTF? Any pair of twins will do for a headline?!

Well, the Peters brothers ARE incestuous porn twins and not just any twins.

The taboo against incest isn't just a cultural thing, guys. We're biologically hardwired to not be sexually attracted to individuals we grow up around (birth to six years of age seems to be the key interval). It's called the Westermark Effect.

You can be sicked out by something that's ultimately harmless and still be tolerant of it--that's kinda the point of tolerance. I thought Prudie was spot-on---she's really come a long way from her latex panic days

@14, they're probably not especially into you, either.

Ms Cute - You actually LIKE the Prudecutor's advice in general? How did this happen?

Even in this letter, she not only couldn't resist the chance to make snarky references that had nothing to do with her answer, but she completely missed the main point of wondering why the non-letter writer had suddenly developed such an urge for openness. My original working hypothesis, sketchy due to such limited data, is that the brother in question liked being gay because it was naturally controversial or edgy enough for him but that now his public life is a bit bland. Settling on the perfect thing to tell pushy relations (and, no, this sort of pressure is not in the least endearing, only a sign that the relations in question haven't grown in any significant way despite their good fortune in having such diverse relations) won't do much good if the other half of the couple isn't on the same page.

Side note... this Prudie letter was published THE DAY AFTER I FOUND OUT I WAS PREGNANT WITH BOY-BOY TWINS. Yuck! Ick! I now have a new nightmare about ways my children could disappoint me.

Mr. Ven, I think generally Prudie gives very good, often compassionate advice. The letters/problems are frequently complex, too. And I like her snark; I like that she doesn't let people off the hook easily.

@jeccat, if you can imagine even a single way your children could disappoint you (I'll assume the part about having nightmares is hyperbole), that's a huge red flag. You might be well on your way to become an abuser. Please, please set aside an hour or so to contemplate what your children mean to you, what their duty to make your life better entails, and what your duty to make their life better entails.

@Mr Ven, I also found Prudie's letter quite all right. True, there was a bit of snark, and she did not answer the question about the sudden urge in the LW's brother to reveal everything -- but she did address what I think was the most important question, namely, could they just go on like that forever? (I agree: they most likely couldn't). And she answered it in a way that was good and compassionate.

Maybe you're right and the LW's brother wants something to make his life less bland. That's something the two twins should discuss among themselves.

Anyway, I wish them all the luck. There seems to be more happy sibling incest going on (gay and straight) than meets the eye. But it's not their time yet. It will come some day, but it's not now.

Sorry this will be a bit sharp-toned:

She has the sort of mediocre mind that thrives under Don't Ask Don't Tell sorts of policies. When a palliative partial truth is called for, she always suggests such an Obvious Social Lie that the situation will either fester or inflame, depending on the perceptiveness of the other party.

While she can form her lips around politically correct jargon regarding the non-straight, it looks very flat next to anything she ever has to say about race. Her true heart was pretty clearly in her Operation Brokeback Ambush advice of about a year and a half ago, for which she only offered the most quarter-baked of apologies she could get away with, which made it quite clear that she regards sexual minorities as little more than pun fodder. She meets the tolerance standard, and she can sometimes say the right thing, but there's no real acceptance or compassion there, at least not in my field. Mr Savage is entitled to give passes to people who meet the tolerance standard. And individual opinions elsewhere obviously may vary.

On the other hand, it's quite entertaining to treat her as opposing counsel. At her best, she reminds me a bit of George Frobisher.

@26, no problem, Mr Ven. I haven't seen much of Prudie's work -- basically only a couple of columns, and only when I found a link to them elsewhere (like this one here from Dan's), so I clearly know next to nothing about her usual tendencies. I only defended this one letter, not anything else she may have said or written.

That letter sound way too much like yaoi fanfiction to be real.

It's really borderline as to whether it's fake or not.
The before college bit, I could believe, but the also being twins, monogamous, the exhibitionist streak throughout, and mainly the idea that they're *still together* (how many highschool fuckbuddies/relationships are still together, right?), all pings as suspect. I call overall, fake, but...

Unfortunately, it's got enough accurate information to be useful as a hypothetical (in answer, no, no you do not tell your family).

Furthermore, while I know about the Westermark Effect as does no. 18, I have wondered whether that effect is well... *genetic*.
Because, if it is, then, is it possible that some families might be genetically predisposed for that to have *less of an effect*?
I know that seems like a creepy theory.

Warning: Creepyness follows
I only say this, because I knew someone who really didn't seem to have much of an incest taboo, and, well, yes (with his brother throughout high school, along with some other suspect incidences), but more creepily, when a family member of his researched the family tree, it turned out that several ancestors of his were products of incest, on *both sides* (half-siblings, siblings, and Uncle/neice I think? He joked that his family tree needed more than 2 dimensions...!), and while I'd've initially assumed that that was a nurture thing, it was previous to family members being adopted out, and yet, the er, same issue had come up in more recent generations.

Really not wanting to make them sound like the 'Peacocks' (off the X-Files), but it was weird enough to be morbidly fascinating.

It's as simple as this: If you're both hot, then go for it. If not, please don't.

I've known two guys who had sexual relationships with their sisters from the time they were teenagers. In one case, the boy was two years older than the girl, and in the other case the girl was two years older than her brother. In the first case, they stopped having sex after a few years, but remained friends (the girl got married). In the other case, the brother and sister are still together, although their parents don't know about their relationship. They would get married if they could. The guy had a vasectomy so his sister wouldn't get pregnant, and they bought a duplex that they share. They're both veterinarians and they have a lot of the same hobbies, so people don't think it's weird that they spend so much time together. They seem pretty happy.