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I started to go out with Norm Rathweg though it was understood that he and Louis Keith Nelson were a couple and would stay together. Back then, in the 1970s, these questions of fidelity and couplehood didn’t come up and we wouldn’t exactly have known to respond to them. Introducing the issue now slightly falsifies the quiet, natural way in which we assumed everyone would have multiple sex partners, that jealousy was definitely not cool, and that new people could be regular fuck buddies or part-time lovers, that the molecule could always annex a new atom. Of course everyone tacitly feared that a new dalliance might take a lover away forever, but this seldom happened. It was as if the three elements (love, sex, friendship) that straight people centered on one other person we gays distributed over several people and this distribution was a more solid form than companionate marriage.
-- Edmund White, City Boy
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