"A common refrain from Exodus pulpits is that gays don’t form lasting relationships…"

That gem of wisdom was tucked into the Time magazine cover story on "The Battle Over Gay Teens" (October 10, 2005) and it’s a theme that will be repeated over and over by conservatives and the religious right as they bang the drums of bigotry heading into the November elections. Same-sex marriage along with gay and lesbian adoptions will continue to be headline material, though hardly news and it will continue to be a cash cow for organizations that choose to milk it.

This fictional instability of gay and lesbian couples is a part of the stereotype that homophobes like to perpetuate in order to enhance their own holier-than-thou image and to fan the flames of fear of same-sex marriage and of same-sex adoption. However, with the national divorce rate hovering around fifty percent, and with 118,000 children in state care programs waiting for adoption, but an inadequate number of traditional households interested in adopting them, it seems as if the straight community is in a poor position to be tossing stones at gays.

The fact is that there’s no solid data to support the claims that gay and lesbian relationships are any more unstable than straight relationships. We don’t have, and never will have, solid data on gays and lesbians, their stability or their instability, as long as there’s an economic or psychological price to pay for being identified as homosexual.

The reason the Exodus refrain that gays don’t form lasting and healthy relationships makes me semi-apoplectic is that it simply doesn’t jibe with my experience. As a senior living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—a city which arguably has the greatest concentration of gay seniors in the United States—I know gaggles of gay guys in long term relationships. As a retiree avocation, I contribute House and Garden articles to The Express Gay News, South Florida’s largest gay newspaper.

I report on singles and couples who have a unique home or garden, or a unique experience in developing a home or garden and in the two years that I’ve been playing Brenda Starr, I’ve been impressed that many of the couples I interview have been together a long time.

In one sense that doesn’t come as a surprise. Anyone who has developed a home or a garden knows that, unless you are financially loaded and can simply call the decorator or the landscaper, development of a home and garden takes a long time, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears, not to mention money. So the folks I interview are not a random sample. They are couples who have been together long enough to develop a home and a garden that they are proud of.

Irked by the Exodus charge that gays and lesbians can’t form stable relationships I reviewed the twenty-nine articles that I’ve published and the couples whom I’ve interviewed have been together a total of five hundred and seventy-one years. That’s an average of nineteen and a half years for each couple. They ranged from a minimum of three years together to a maximum of forty-three years together. Six of the couples were female and twenty-three were male. Five of the couples have been together more than thirty years each and two of the couples met as service men during the Second World War and are still together.

Those numbers, in one sense, mean nothing. It’s a small number and a biased sample with no statistical validity. But, nevertheless, those couples stand as living proof against the charge that gays and lesbians can’t form lasting relationships. They can and they do form lasting relationships but most frequently they are under the laser beam of the larger straight society and go unnoticed. Seldom do they make the front page of The New York Times.

Having now lived almost as many years after Stonewall as I did before, and having personally played out the Brokeback Mountain drama of sexual repression in Pennsylvania rather than Wyoming, I fume at what young gays and lesbians must still face. Straight society, in establishing heterosexual marriage as the be-all-and-end-all that children and teens should aspire to, has created a self-fulfilling prophesy of defeat and instability for gays and lesbians.

Most gay teens, before they can name or identify their difference, know that they don’t fit the mold endorsed by their parents, their church and their community. They are different. As they undergo the psychic trauma of trying to adapt to the majority mold, alienation, low self-image and depression are common, almost inevitable, experiences. Suicide, sex, and drugs may seem like the only reasonable response to the unrealistic expectations imposed by a straight majority. Then, that very same majority leeringly says, "See, I told you so. Gays and lesbians can’t form stable relationships."

Ironically, many of the organizations involved in enforcing their Taliban approach to social mores masquerade as the Moral Majority when, in fact, they might more appropriately be termed the Immoral Majority. But given this basic scenario that all of us are immersed in, the amazing fact is not the high suicide rate among gay teens, or the HIV rate, or the drug and alcohol statistics; the amazing fact is that large numbers of gays and lesbians succeed in a society that’s rigged against them. They hold steady jobs, serve in the military (whether the government wants them or not), raise families and pay taxes.