La Rosa Knows

Over the weekend I went to the Cinespia screening of Nightmare on Elm Street, which was really fun because there was a dude dressed as Freddy Krueger running around and scaring the hell out of everyone.

But, before the movie, my friend Allie mentioned this little article she’d seen on Gawker called, “I’m a Gay Mormon Who’s Been Happily Married for 10 Years.”

Oh boy, this one’s a doozie!

Behold: Josh Weed—family therapist, blogger and openly gay man married to a woman.

This is definitely an article everyone should read and then try to have made into a Lifetime Made for TV movie but, until then, here’s an excerpt:

If you’re married to a woman, how can you really be gay?

This is a really good question and I can see how people can be confused about it. Some might assume that because I’m married to a woman, I must be bisexual. This would be true if sexual orientation was defined by sexual experience. Heck, if sexual orientation were defined by sexual experience, I would be as straight as the day is long even though I’ve never been turned on by a Victoria’s Secret commercial in my entire life. Sexual orientation is defined by attraction, not by experience. In my case, I am attracted sexually to men. Period. Yet my marriage is wonderful, and Lolly and I have an extremely healthy and robust sex life. How can this be?

The truth is, what people are really asking with the above question is “how can you be gay if your primary sex partner is a girl?” I didn’t fully understand the answer to this question until I was doing research on sexuality in grad school even though I had been happily married for almost five years at that point. I knew that I was gay, and I also knew that sex with my wife was enjoyable. But I didn’t understand how that was happening. Here is the basic reality that I actually think many people could use a lesson in: sex is about more than just visual attraction and lust and it is about more than just passion and infatuation. I won’t get into the boring details of the research here, but basically when sex is done right, at its deepest level it is about intimacy…. the circumstances of our marriage allowed us to build a sexual relationship that is based on everything partners should want in their sex-life: intimacy, communication, genuine love and affection. This has resulted in us having a better sex life than most people I personally know. Most of whom are straight. Go fig.

• Tags
• LGBT Issues
• gay
• homosexuality
• josh weed
• marriage
• mormon
• pop culture