Americans for the Truth About Homosexuality—Peter LaBarbera's outfit—is attempting to generate controversy by outing me as non-monogamous. Under the headline "PERVERTED PARENTING," LaBarbera has posted a long excerpt from a piece I wrote for Salon way, way back in 2004, most of which ended up in my book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family. So it's not like I was trying keep this non-monogamy stuff a secret or anything.

peter-labarbera-3.jpgI've long suspected that LaBarbera is a highly placed operative of the International Homosexual Conspiracy. He regularly attends BDSM and fetish events, like the Folsom Street Fair and IML, to take pictures of gay men in leather and fetish gear. LaBarbera's pictures are passed around suburban mega-churches as proof that gay people are unfit to marry or be parents because, um, gee, you see, like, no straight people have kinky sex or wear fetish gear. Or something. folsom-street-fair-2007-101.jpgI've always wondered how many deeply closeted gay men have seen LaBarbera's pictures and said to themselves, "You know what? To hell with this mega-church—I'm coming out and moving to San Francisco and buying myself a pair of chaps and going to this Folsom Street Fair! It looks awesome!"

And I've always wondered if that wasn't LaBarbera's secret gay agenda with all those Folsom and IML photos.

Anyway, reading his post about my perverted sex life—it's really not my parenting that's perverted, Peter—left me more convinced that LaBarbera is a highly-placed operative of the International Homosexual Conspiracy. If his intentions were to make me look bad, if he wanted to convince his readers that I was a deranged sexual libertine and a threat to my child, LaBarbera could've just written that I was openly non-monogamous and left it at that. His readers would picture slings in the dining room, late-night orgies after the kid went to bed, crazy fetish nights at the Savage's. But LaBarbera quotes the piece at great length and includes sections like this:

But of course straight couples don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy isn’t compulsory and its absence doesn’t invalidate a marriage. There are hundreds of thousands of heterosexual married couples involved in the organized swinging movement and God only knows how many disorganized swingers there are out there. Married straight couples are presumed to be monogamous until proven otherwise, and that assumption serves as a powerful inducement to be (or appear to be) monogamous. Even most swinging couples prefer to be seen as monogamous by friends, family and associates. But as with children, monogamy is optional. It’s up to each individual couple to decide for themselves if monogamy is central to their commitment.

And this:

All sorts of nightmare scenarios play out in people’s minds when a male couple—particularly one with kids—admits to being nonmonogamous. While married couples are presumed to be sober monogamists until proven otherwise, nonmonogamous gay male couples are presumed to be reckless sluts until proven otherwise. So, for the record: My boyfriend and I don’t hang out in sleazy bars at all hours, we don’t have three-ways with men we’ve met on the Internet, and neither of us is willing to take irrational risks for the sake of the next orgasm. Like a huge number of straight couples, we have an understanding. “Cheating” is permissible under a few tightly controlled and highly unlikely circumstances; finally, all outside sexual contact has to be very safe—indeed, it has to be hypersafe, almost comically safe. We’ve never done anything, nor would we ever do anything, that would put our child at risk. (There will be no Kramer vs. Kramer moments, i.e., no strange adults wandering nude through our house in the middle of the night.) For all intents and purposes, the limits we’ve placed on outside sexual contact have resulted in a sort of de facto monogamy. In the 10 years we’ve been together the planets have aligned on a couple of occasions. We’re more nonmonogamous in theory than in practice.

The bolds are all Peter's, not mine. Now is it just me or does it look like he's going out of his way to address any fears that his conservative readers might have about non-monogamous gay male parents? It's almost like he's helping to make my argument for me. So the only conclusion I can come to is...

Peter LaBarbera: highly placed operative of the International Homosexual Conspiracy.