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This attitude was common among the couples he met back in 1969, soon after he came out of the closet. "Sometimes they played together, and sometimes they played apart," he says. "But it was just a very healthy relationship with respect and love and total honesty." Like any couple, DADTs sometimes trip up, and occasionally one partner — out of curiosity, jealousy or masochism — will ask. When this happens, George feels obligated to fess up if Ian wants to know. "He doesn't always ask of the details," says George, "but I always tell when he asks." And this is where DADT relationships begin to skate thin ice: justified dishonesty. Serdna has lied in the past when Leslie asked about other women because he felt that, technically speaking, he didn't need to tell. And when he asks her? "When she says no, I trust that she's telling me the truth," he says. "Maybe." The term "don't ask, don't tell" is most commonly associated with the 1993 U.S. military policy signed by former President Bill Clinton that allowed gays and lesbians to serve so long as they kept their sexual orientation under wraps. Charles Moskos, the military sociologist who penned the policy, said on NPR in 2004, "The most important justification for the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy is the respect of people's privacy." Opponents, however, argued that DADT punished servicemembers for being out in the workplace. The pros and cons of DADT relationships echo those of the military policy. In a DADT relationship, a couple may agree that it's better to keep things quiet in the interest of not disrupting the whole. On the flipside, being tight-lipped implies that one's sexual behavior is secretive or shameful. Most in the polyamorous community (the go-to experts on open relationships) believe such a policy can only lead to catastrophe. DADT "creates way too much room for wishful thinking, denial, and make-believe," an anonymous poly wrote to me in an email response to a call for opinions. "Experience has drilled into the community that honesty and transparency — and the 'communicate, communicate, communicate' mantra — are, for most well-meaning people, essential to avoiding misunderstandings and crackups." Valerie White, executive director of the Sexual Freedom Legal Defense and Education Fund, thinks DADT couples are deluding themselves. "[They] don't actually have an understanding," she says. "It's just sort of a line to use to convince another person to get involved with them. If you don't know what your partner is doing, you can't consent to it in any meaningful sense. There's this black hole of mystery, and if there is a mystery in your partner's life, I don't think there is trust." But viewed another way, DADT requires a kind of trust that could be seen as even stronger. The idea is that these couples have so much confidence in their relationship that they're not threatened by what isn't known. "It's because we trust each other so much that there's less of a need to talk about it," says George of his relationship with Ian. "Trust is built up over time into honesty and respect and not wanting to hurt anybody's feelings. Because of that, it can't be anything but healthy, so long as everybody is playing safely." Why does a person choose DADT? Ask Serdna, and he'll muse about life being short and options to be seized, while for George, it's about his conviction that monogamy is a myth. Ask A.G., a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, and he'll say, "Because I wanted to visit a prostitute." A.G. lives with a girlfriend almost twice his age. Their sex life began to dwindle after six months — she heads to bed early because of exhaustion from her job, and she just isn't that into sex. "When she is, she can do it herself and gets off and it's almost like a release," says A.G. "It's not a big romantic experience." On a good
A month ago, A.G. asked his girlfriend if he could see a prostitute. She laughed. "She told me I could do what I want, but that she didn't want to know about it," he says. A.G. has visited the same prostitute twice, a woman in her mid-thirties he found on Craigslist. She was fake and so business-like that he didn't even feel turned on. "It was distracting and awkward and it felt like what it was: a cheap prostitute," he says. The experience sent him practically running home to crawl into bed with his girlfriend. And that, he says, is why DADT has actually improved their relationship. "When I get home, I'm happier about my relationship and feel more respect for my girlfriend. I even see her as prettier, but somehow, still not sexy. But I'm so love with this person. It's odd." Even if A.G. asked, he's convinced that his girlfriend would have nothing to tell. But he admits that if he did find out she had sex with someone else, it would be enough for him to drop DADT all together. "I wouldn't want that to happen," he says. "That would be the beginning of the end." Therein lie the early warning signs that can bring down a DADT relationship: A.G. takes advantage of the agreement, but can't imagine his girlfriend doing the same. "I recently asked her if we should break up," he says. "Because is this something people break up over? Should we go to therapy? But I don't want to break up. And I don't want to deny myself sex. I made the decision to be in this type of relationship, but I don't really want it to be this way." DADT couples say it's better to be candid than to cheat (a harsh reality of many monogamous relationships), and that it's more practical to be discreet than to provoke jealousy (a potential crisis among polys). In the end, DADT casts a new light on honesty by curbing the too-much-information highway. "Withholding information does not equate dishonesty," says Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University who studies marriage, divorce and adultery. "We make contracts with people all the time. I don't tell my girlfriends that they're fat. Am I lying? No. I'm simply trying to sustain a relationship. The world does not agree with the American attitude about honesty that everything should be said." Serdna, the painter from Queens, eventually wants to return to a monogamous relationship with Leslie. But the tables have turned. "It's at a point where I don't want [to sleep around] as much, and I thought about committing to her this winter," he says. "But I want to give her the space she gave me. If I want my freedom, she has to have the same thing. If I want to go out with another girl and have fun with another girl, she has to have the same right. I can't take that away from her." He hopes DADT serves as a temporary necessary evil. "I can't do this forever, and neither can she. Monogamy is a goal for me. I want to be with only one person one day, and hopefully, it will be her." But that's exactly why DADT appealed to him. He knew that hearing details about the men his girlfriend saw on the side could destroy their ability to be monogamous in the future. "I just don't want to know anything about what she does," he says. "I do want to end up in a monogamous relationship with her, but if she told me all those things, it would just be harder to be with her in the end." It's this ambivalence that lies at the core of DADT: the exhilarating ability for two people to maintain secret sex lives, while knowing that the details of those lives could destroy the one thing they're trying to sustain. Though DADT comes with this unique cost, these relationships attempt to take the brutality out of honesty. Whether they're realists or delusional, these couples have created a little world of their own where the rules don't apply, they don't have to compromise and the secret to having it all is just that — a secret. n°
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