We Were Never Being Boring...

"Yes! Done it!" I exclaimed, as I punched the air triumphantly.

"Done what?" asked Scott, who sits opposite me at work.

"Navigated that stupid phone payment system that I have to use to pay my council tax..." I explained.

"You've changed..." observed Scott, shaking his head as he returned his attention to the laptop screen in front of him.

He was right. I had just got excited about paying my council tax. What sort of person had I become? My head was reeling – without even realising it, I had become a sensible gay, a grown-up gay, a respectable gay.

Like most gay men that I know, growing up I had always been desperate to fit in. The kids at school seem to know that I was gay before I did. They at least detected that I was different to them. I didn't want to be different. I wanted to be one of the guys, to fit in, to not be singled out, to not be noticed.

As the years passed and I began to understand a bit more about who I was, and my self-confidence grew, I learned to understand the value of being different, to embrace the liberation that comes from not being like everybody else.

I love feeling a sense of community with other gay men – knowing that simply by being visibly and outspokenly gay that we are automatically at odds with the accepted order of things, that we don't have to follow the rules and expectations of the world around us. We are different by our very nature – knowing that you don't have to conform gives you an incredible level of freedom and power.

The fight for equality, the fight against discrimination, has seemingly inevitably led us to a pursuit of marriage equality – a pursuit that has been successfully realised in an increasing number of countries.

The logic of marriage equality is fairly self-evident – if people shouldn't be discriminated against because of their sexuality, why should same-sex couples be prevented from having the same recognition and validation of their relationship as everyone else?

However, the triumphant march of marriage equality highlights one of the ongoing tensions that gay men face in finding our identity in the modern world.

The reality of marriage equality seems to have resulted in an assumption or an expectation that if you're a gay man, you will want to (and will eventually) meet a nice guy, settle down, get married, and probably create a family of some kind. Hand-in-hand with that happy family scenario is that your relationship, your marriage, will match the Hollywood-ideal that is the benchmark that the rest of the world seems to measure their relationships against – that it will be monogamous, vanilla, respectable. The assumption and expectation is that getting married means that the days of open relationships, casual sex, and threesomes are a thing of the dark and distant past.

Perhaps it's an unintended consequence, but the flip-side of marriage equality is that the gay men who don't get married, who don't "settle down", are seen as the bad gays. It's the bad gays who are going to chem-sex parties, getting their rocks off at sex-on-premises venues, cruising for anonymous sex in the parks or the toilets, and using location-based apps for quick and easy no-strings-attached encounters with other guys. Far from being respectable, it's this kind of behaviour that gives gays a bad name.

How did we get here? Were we all so desperate to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted that we've given up the freedom, liberation, and power of being different, of being outsiders? Is this a case study in how we are still being tormented by our internalised homophobia?

I have nothing against marriage equality. I am a firm believer in equality – if two guys want to get married then there's no reason that they shouldn't be able to. But being equal doesn't have to mean being the same. Being equal doesn't mean that there's any value judgment on those who choose not to exercise those rights. If you meet a guy and want to get married, that's cool. If you want to have a monogamous relationship, that's cool. If you choose not to have a monogamous relationship and that works for everyone concerned, then that's also cool. If you want to go to sex parties, or saunas, or cruising, or have a threesome, or meet-up with guys using hook-up apps (and that works for everyone concerned – married or not) then that's also cool.

Let’s not be ashamed to acknowledge that as gay men we enjoy having sex. Marriage equality is about legal rights – it doesn’t mean that gay men have to adopt the heteronormative ideal of the nuclear family, or that this is somehow the aspiration that we should all be aspiring to.

Love is love. Sex is sex. Marriage is not a stepping stone to acceptance or becoming respectable.

However, getting excited about paying your council tax bill probably is – I'm not sure that I'm ready for that.