When I visit an ice creamery, I literally order vanilla, and this appreciation for basics done right extends to the boudoir. Nevertheless, life has provided me with a wealth of opportunities to indulge my vanilla tastes in wild and crazy ways, thanks in totality to my gayness. When this year's Queer Issue assignment landed on my desk—Share a wild-and-crazy story from your sex life!—I was ready to go. My first three ideas:

1. My semi-accidental extended adventure in polyamory, wherein an iffy connection with someone shaped like my soul mate but missing some key internal ingredients was allowed to stretch into a six-year LTR, thanks in large part to our status as a couple who had sex with third parties. (Know what's an even better ass-magnet than a dog? A hunky boyfriend. And why should we spend time dissecting our barely-there relationship when we could be co-boning that hot guy? The gay open relationship lets you indulge in all the fun parts of being single—the buzzy flirtations, the sporty sex, the possibility of possibility around any corner—with the drama-dispelling safety net of knowing in whose arms you'll be waking up tomorrow.)

2. My post-fake-LTR season of solo sexual adventure—I believe the medical term is "sluttiness"—wherein I revisited the greatest hits and most promising missed connections of my years of slutty coupledom, ameliorating the surprisingly real pain of the breakup with sex. Hilarious highlight: An impromptu wrasslin' match with a former NorthWest Cable News personality in a showroom suite at the grand-opening party of W Hotel.

3. The actual Kinkiest Event of My Entire Life, wherein a 17-year-old me was given a tag-team blowjob by a pair of female friends looking to practice their oral-sex skills. (This was not my first blowjob, which had come a few months before at the hands—and mouth—of a high-school drama coach, which I thought was cool at the time, but now that I'm an adult and see what 17-year-olds are from this distance, it creeps me out. Shame on you, Mr. Krikac.) The two-girl, tag-team blowjob occurred in the backseat of my parents' car, parked outside my high school, at night, and it lasted an hour and a half. This is the kind of story that drives straight guys insane with jealousy. "It's like fags are rich with something they don't even value," lamented a hetero male friend. He's right: Devoid of sexual promise and/or threat, the friendships of straight young women and gay young men can look almost pornographically permissive to horny young straight dudes. But it's just another "bonus" of being a fag: Girls will change clothes in front of you, allow you to grab their boobs in jest, and sometimes put your penis in their mouths.

But all these ideas suddenly seemed beside the point—the whole idea for this kinky-sex issue seemed silly and irrelevant—on June 11, aka DOMA Doomsday, when the Obama administration, whose leader declared himself a "fierce advocate" of gay equality on the campaign trail, filed a brief supporting the Defense of Marriage Act. The ridiculously crude brief, which defended marriage inequality by casting gays as degenerate freeloaders, would've been galling from the Bush administration. From the Obama administration, it was a mindfuck, opening up the horrifying possibility that our newly elected leader was a say-anything slimeball of beyond-Clintonian proportions.

Of course, putting your trust in anyone involves banking on his or her motives, and with Obama, I'd consistently taken him at his word and filled in the blanks with stupid romantic hope. This was particularly apparent the first time Obama kinda-sorta hit me, by announcing his selection of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Clearly, Obama was throwing a bone to the evangelicals, but why did he have to pick such a demonstrably anti-gay bone? Surely this insult to his gay and gay-friendly supporters was part of a larger political maneuver...

Thus commenced my first descent into abusive-relationship narrative overdrive, wherein I mentally constructed a Jane Austen–worthy universe where Obama's dubious actions are revealed to be the products of a faultless soul. In my greatest fantasy, Rick Warren was the Christian consolation prize/lubricant for Obama's soon-to-be-forthcoming repeal of DOMA and "don't ask, don't tell," and the ensuing golden age for secular humanity.

I was slapped back to my senses this month, when the DOMA brief came out—the second punch to the face. The first had been easy to explain away. But with that brief, Obama was officially becoming the Chris Brown to my Rihanna. I tried to understand, but there's only so much explaining away and narrative spinning you can do before you start looking like a deluded lovelorn masochist.

And yet, what am I supposed to do? He knows I'm not going anywhere. It's not like I'm going to become a Republican or something. Like any abused boyfriend, I find myself equivocating. He's not all bad. He's doing nice things for the environment, the economy, abortion rights, and "America's image in the world," right? And really, he only shoves me when he needs to. Where Obama is concerned, I will apparently walk into as many doors as need be. But he can suck my butt before I give him any more money. I mean it this time.