...please make a note of it. The fundies and haters are jumping up and down about a study that found 47% of male couples in SF were in open relationships, 45% were monogamous, and 8% "disagreed about" whether they were in open or closed relationships. I strongly agree with Joe:

Obviously our enemies will once again leap on these statistics as "evidence" that gay people are undeserving of marriage equality. And once again, some gay men will decry non-monogamy in general and rip apart Hoff's research as unscientific.... [But regardless] of the methodology in which Hoff arrived at her conclusions, my gut tells me she is not only correct, but that her estimation of the percentage of gay male couples in open relationships may even be low. I've been out for almost 35 years, and yes, that's a purely anecdotal conclusion, but I've known thousands of couples over these decades and most of them were non-monogamous. Of course, the places I've lived and my chosen social circles have surely influenced that perception. But we shouldn't really care, whatever the number is. I think we do the truth about our lives and our unique culture a tremendous disservice when we try to deny aspects of our world just to buy a few meager points on some marriage survey.

And we shouldn't react defensively to reports about "more" or "most" gay couples being non-monogamous. It's a waste of time. Fact is, lots of gay male couples are openly and honestly non-monogamous, maybe most; certainly a higher percentage of gay male couples are non-monogamous than straight couples. (And some gay male couples are in dishonest non-monogamous relationships. A favorite quote from a study of monogamous gay male couples: one pair insisted they were monogamous because they only had sex with other people together.)

When the haters point to studies that find higher rates of non-monogamy among gay couples—and hold them up as proof that gay people shouldn't be allowed to marry—all we gotta do is point out that researchers also consistently find that lesbian couples are monogamous at greater rates than gay male or straight couples. By their own logic only lesbians should be allowed to marry. Point that out and they quickly change the subject.