If you asked me a few years ago whether I’d ever quit monogamy, I would have laughed in your face. I identified as a classic romantic before I even knew I was gay. The idea that someone was out there somewhere, waiting for me to find them and become their everything, got me through my (often unbearable) adolescence.
In conservative Poland, where I’m from, many bigots see being queer as a purely sexual thing. Even the more liberal ones view it as something that should remain “in the privacy of their own homes”. As if being gay was a fetish that doesn’t make any sense outside a sexual context. Deep inside, I knew that wasn’t true. I had my first crushes in primary school, and the purely sexual portrayal of queerness made me want a truly romantic relationship even more. And what’s more romantic than only having eyes forone person only, right?
Despite this desire for a fairytale love story, gay men in my circles never quite shared the excitement. One of my first ever hookups, an established orchestra conductor, told me that the older a gay man gets, the less realistic monogamy seems to be. Before moving to the UK in 2016, when I was 20, I had my heart broken by several young gentlemen who all promised me a happily ever after, only to then hook up with someone in a club or invite a guy over to stay when I was away. » | Tomasz Lesniara | Wednesday, November 2, 2022
