I am about to get married. Maybe. Probably. And as a part of this whole thing, I find myself spending hours—hours—discussing the particulars of what this marriage is going to look like. What rules are we going to have? How are we going to keep each other safe and make one another feel chosen, loved, and special? How indeed. How, when I know for a fact that he is going to stick his dick in other people. And that just is not the hill I am willing to die on. I joke with him that he can fuck other women once I’m dead. And seeing as I have cancer, that might not be too long. He has noted this with feigned relief. And I laugh. Because I know he loves me, and I know he is (sort of) kidding. But without that little half-joke-half-truth, I am certain we could not get past it. I might not be happy about the whole dick-in-another-person thing, but I can laugh about it, be secure in my relationship, and see all of it as sort of funny. Because all of it is sort of funny. From me getting married to the fact that I am marrying this guy. This guy who turns almost everything into something I can giggle at. Because were we to sit down (probably at some annoying artisanal coffee place) and share our feelings—yuck. Just…yuck. It’s the laughter that gets me—us—to the other side of the hard shit.

“Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who is tired of fucking her.” Mae West said that—I think. And I myself counted on that exact sentiment for pretty much all of the nineties and most of the two-thousands, an era in which I bedded a long line of married or otherwise attached bar-going, sleazy, dishonest but hot-as-hell dudes. I am ashamed to admit that more than half of them fall pretty squarely into the Rockabilly category. But I was younger then and had different standards. I did some things that to this day make me cringe and sort of want to throw up. Not because I have shame around sex (I do, as do most people from Judeo-Christian societies), but because I was causing harm. Not just to myself, but to the women these dudes left at home, or at the other end of the bar. And I do not feel good about what I was doing, or who I was doing, and even worse than that, a lion’s share of that illicit sex was terrible. Actually, it was worse than terrible. It was mediocre. And the day I stopped faking orgasms was also the day I realised I had grown up.

Eddie Murphy preached in 1987 that “there ain’t no such thing as a loyal man…All men fuck other women. We are low by nature and have to do it. Men have to find and conquer as much pussy as they can get. He is a man and has to conquer women…It is a dick thing, do not try to understand it.” Now, I do know some men who don’t fuck around, I do. But there is not that much difference (about three drinks, it turns out) between “I can’t, I’m married” and “How about a BJ in the bathroom?” There are men in my life—good men, even. And there are men in my life who I love and respect, and for whom cheating is anathema, but Eddie had a point. He really did. Because we all know more guys who cheat than who don’t. Do y’all think it was women who came up with polyamory and “ethical non-monogamy?” Be serious. If you have to wedge the word “ethical” into anything, it probably is exactly the opposite. My not-boyfriend calls polyamory the word that exists simply to provide cover for people whose actual kink is scheduling. And a friend of mine pointed out that you can trust white people to gentrify cheating.

“Sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when it’s one on one,” George Michael said that. To be fair, he said it back when people (which people, I have no idea) thought he was straight. Two things are important about this song: one, he was attempting to address the division between lust and love so prevalent in society; two, he later stated, over and over, how much he himself hated the song and never performed it live. I believe there is another subtext that is speaking to the AIDS crisis, and George (Saint George to me) was not necessarily promoting a hetero-normative lifestyle so much as trying to keep people from dying. Because I think we can all agree that George was not a hugely monogamous person. He lived next door to a friend of mine in London, and I can say with absolute certainty that he liked variety when it came to dick. A much better, and more honest, portrayal of George’s position (see what I did there) on sex is to be found in the song and accompanying video recorded right after he got busted cruising in Central Park, in which he looks like the sexiest, gayest, most swishy cop on the planet. I miss you, George, and I think we would all do well to take your advice and go outside in the sunshine.

George Michael? He did not come out publicly, officially, until 1998, which breaks my heart, still. But when he did, he did it with such humour, such grace, and such a playful flip-the-script and “fuck you, homophobes” panache that I look at this moment as one of profound importance. It was a moment illustrative of a truth I hold to be unimpeachable: You win a lot more fights with humour than you do with earnestness. Humour is what sustained my butch, dyke mom through four decades of working in the trades, in an environment so hostile as to be almost unbelievable, and it is what will sustain us all, if we can just get our heads out of our asses and laugh at ourselves.