The first thing to note is that the wording of the civil partnership ceremony is different from that of both a civil or religious wedding in one major way. The wedding service used words such as honour and obey. It also has a point of both husband and wife making a promise of sexual faithfulness to each other "for as long as they both shall live". This is why when someone commits adultery it is so devastating - they broke a legal covenant they made before an official of the law. But the civil partnership ceremony has no wording about faithfulness and fidelity.

To stay sexually faithful to the partner is not one that the ceremony, and the authorities that created it expect? Yet Stonewall, Outrage, Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and others all cry foul when this is pointed out. They claim that homosexual couples are faithful to each other and relationships can last along time, in fact in the back of his book "Exchanging the Truth of God for a Lie" Jeremy Marks has an appendix that lists gay couples who are in long term relationships - some as many as 17 years.

But it isn't as simple as the pro-gay lobby would like to make out. Have these people made promises of sexual fidelity (what the gay community calls exclusiveness) to each other or are they another statistic that shows that the faithfulness is only on an emotional level. The idea is that two people can be in a long term, stable, faithful and true relationship by being "emotionally" faithful to each other but that if they need to get other physical needs met outside the relationship this is fine. How do I know? Because just over 10 years ago I was part of that community.

But don't just take my word for it. Last weekend was London Pride (not the flower sung about by Noel Coward but the celebration of the gay and lesbian lifestyle) and they were celebrating 40 years since the first gay pride march started by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). This is what the GLF had to say about monogamy.

COMPULSIVE MONOGAMY. We do not deny that it is as possible for gay couples as for some straight couples to live happily and constructively together. We question however as an ideal, the finding and settling down eternally with one 'right' partner. This is the blueprint of the straight world which gay people have taken over. It is inevitably a parody, since they haven't even the justification of straight couples-the need to provide a stable environment for their children (though in any case we believe that the suffocating small family unit is by no means the best atmosphere for bringing up children.

Monogamy is usually based on ownership-the woman sells her services to the man in return for security for herself and her children-and is entirely bound up in the man's idea of property furthermore in our society the monogamous couple, with or without children, is an isolated, shut-in, up-tight unit, suspicious of and hostile to outsiders. And though we don't lay down rules or tell gay people how they should behave in bed or in their relationships, we do want them to question society's blueprint for the couple.

The blueprint says 'we two against the world', and that can be protective and comforting. But it can also be suffocating, leading to neurotic dependence and underlying hostility, the emotional dishonesty of staying in the comfy safety of the home and garden, the security and narrowness of the life built for two, with the secret guilt of fancying someone else while remaining in thrall to the idea that true love lasts a lifetime-as though there were a ration of relationships, and to want more than one were greedy. Not that sexual fidelity is necessarily wrong; what is wrong is the inturned emotional exclusiveness of the couple which students the partners so they can no longer operate at all as independent beings in society. People need a variety of relationships in order to develop and grow, and to learn about other human beings.

It is especially important for gay people to stop copying straight-we are the ones who have the best opportunities to create a new lifestyle and if we don't, no one else will. Also, we need one another more than straight people do, because we are equals suffering under an insidious oppression from a society too primitive to come to terms with the freedom we represent. Singly, or isolated in couples, we are weak-the way society wants us to be. Society cannot put us down so easily if we fuse together. We have to get together, understand one another, live together.

Two ways we can do this are by developing consciousness-raising groups and gay communes.

Our gay communes and collectives must not be mere convenient living arrangements or worse, just extensions of the gay ghetto. They must be a focus of consciousness-raising lie. raising or increasing our awareness of our real oppression} and of gay liberation activity, a new focal point for members of the gay community. It won't be easy, because this society is hostile to communal living. And besides the practical hang-ups of finding money and a place large enough for a collective to live in, there are our own personal hang-ups: we have to change our attitudes to our personal property, to our lovers, to our day-to day priorities in work and leisure, even to our need for privacy.

But victory will come. If we're convinced of the importance of the new life-style, we can be strong and we can win through.

Out of the Gay Liberation Front came Outrage and Peter Tatchell who will be hosting a programme during the visit of Pope Benedict 16th has condemned the Catholic Church over the child abuse scandal but advocates "an age of consent of 14 - for everyone: gay, straight and bisexual." This lowering of the age of consent would make many of the child abuse claims in the Catholic Church and others invalid, and is especially worrying when the personal testimonies of people who have been found guilty of sex with a minor and classified under law as paedophiles have, as the age of consent has been lowered successfully had their convictions quashed claim the support of both Peter Tatchell - with his human rights hat on - and Stonewall.

And we can't think that things have changed since the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto was published in 1978. In March 2010 The San Francisco Bay Times published the following article "Long-Term Non-Monogamous Gay Couples" (http://www.sfbaytimes.com/?sec=article&article_id=12499). One of the couples interviewed had been together 34 years - what an advert for gay marriage, well until you read their words.

Blake Spears and Lanz Lowen have been together for over 34 years. They told me that they still have great sex, contradicting the common belief that sexual interest inevitably wanes in a long-term relationship. How do they do it? "One reason," Lanz said, "is that we've been in an open relationship from the very beginning. If we hadn't been open, we wouldn't have been able to grow individually or as a couple." But, they write, this was a journey they took "without a roadmap...Information about how couples navigate this terrain is surprisingly lacking. We were curious about the experience of others and assumed many long-term couples might offer valuable perspectives and hard-earned lessons." So, a few years back, they decided to use their combined training and experience in research and psychology to do an independent, in-depth study of other long-term open gay male relationships.

Not only Spears and Lowen put their being together so long to having an open relationship they have done research to show that this is the best type of homosexual relationship. Yes all the couples they interviewed who had been together for eight years or more had open relationships, the research can be found here at http://www.thecouplesstudy.com.

The writer of the article (Tom Moon who other work of interest can be found here: http://www.tommoon.net/articles/spiritmatters5.html and much of his other work appears to present a positive slant on homosexual behaviour) quotes the fact that the finding of Spears and Lowen supports others research about homosexual relationships.

Take the 2002 paper "Somewhere over the rainbow: love, trust and monogamy in gay relationships" published in the leading academic journal "Journal of Sociology" which says Anthony Giddens argues that late modernity is characterized by a democratization of intimate relationships and that gay men and lesbian women appear to be an expression of that movement.

This paper is based on interviews with 20 New Zealand men - representing 11 gay couples - who discussed issues of monogamy, trust and sexual behaviour negotiations in their relationships. Overall, they had conventional notions of relationships, romantic love and monogamy that prompted decisions to discard condoms for anal sex as proof of their love for each other.

They simultaneously believed that monogamy was not sustainable. Generally, the relationships were marked by 'infidelity' anxieties and a reluctance to disclose sexual encounters outside the relationship and to discuss or negotiate their possibility. These experiences serve as reminders to not assume that gay relationships are necessarily as democratic and open as Giddens suggests - pertinent when regarding the development of programmes aimed at reducing HIV transmission within relationships. The work by Anthony Giddens (director of London School of Economics and close ally of Tony Blair) is The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Then there is this article about gay marriage from 4 years ago: Gay Marriage and the "Pure Relationship" (http://www.roadtothemiddleclass.com/blog658_gay_marriage_and_the_pure_relationship.html).

Dean Jeffrey John, and nominee for the post of Bishop of Southwark, has written a book where he argues for sexual monogamy in gay couples - but the evidence is that even amongst pro-gay Christians his is a lone voice.

END