All sex, all the time - having sex can be an addiction or compulsion - includes article about lesbian sex clubs and parties, and also article on sexually inhibited men, and also list of support groups for sex addicts - Cover Story

Whether it's an addiction or a compulsion, some people can't stop having sex--and they're finding the repercussions last far past the orgasm

When George Michael was arrested April 7 on a charge of engaging in a lewd act in a park bathroom in Beverly Hills, the tabloids went wild. The New York Post's April 9 cover screamed DOWN AND OUTED IN BEVERLY HILLS, and the banner for the article inside was ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO. Much fun was made, mostly because Michael had always been coy about his sexuality, never really making a firm statement about which gender he preferred. Boy George told Michael not to be ashamed. "We are sisters under the skin, " he wrote in an open letter published in The [London] Express after the arrest.

The shock, though, was not so much that Michael was gay. Rumors about that had been circulating for years, and in an interview last year he talked about his love for a male Brazilian fashion designer who died of a brain hemorrhage in 1993. What everyone kept asking was, "What the heck was he doing in a bathroom?" This is a wealthy, talented, attractive man. If he was doing what he is accused of, if he was trying to pick up a man in a public rest room, then how down on his luck must he have been that a toilet stall was his best bet for human hip? A few people wondered aloud, Is George Michael a sex addict?

When Michael talked to CNN a few days after his arrest and said he is gay, he also implied, without coming right out and saying so, that he has a problem. "I think it was the danger of the situation that must have compelled me to do it, because it was absolutely compulsive, " Michael said to interviewer Jim Moret. Earlier in the interview Michael had said, "I won't even say that it was the first time that happened. You know, I have put myself in that position before. I can only apologize. I can try to fathom why I did it, to understand my own sexuality a bit better, but, ultimately, part of me has to believe that some of the kick was the fact I might get found.... I feel stupid and reckless and weak for having allowed my sexuality to be exposed this way."

While it is impossible to know what is going on in Michael's mind, his words are similar to those used by many sex addicts to describe some of their worst actions and how they felt when they hit bottom.

Reaction to the Michael incident epitomizes a recurring debate among gay men and lesbians concerning differing interpretations of sex addiction and sexual freedom. Talk to therapists and self-identifying addicts, and they say Michael must be a sex addict. Talk to Keith Griffith, Web master of www.cruisingforsex.com, the site that described the park in Beverly Hills as having "an exceedingly cruisy men's room," and you'll hear anger. "The question I wish the cops would be asked," Griffith says, "is why they waste so much tax money on this type of activity."

Griffith and many other gays, such as members of Sex Panic!--a free-sex advocacy group established in 1997--see public sex as the solution to centuries of sexual repression. But equally as many gay men and lesbians equate public sex with something quite different--addiction. By relegating sex and love to the literal gutter, they say, bathrooms and sex clubs are the ultimate repression.

As an idea, sex addiction arrived with political baggage. Events of the 1960s and `70s, when gay men and lesbians first started to come out in large numbers and when so many people were fighting in the sexual revolution, led to the disappearance of some so-called sexual mental illnesses--namely, homosexuality and nymphomania--from the bible of mental health, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, commonly referred to as the DSM. Other problems that involved having too little or insufficiently pleasurable sex, such as impotence and premature ejaculation, were added. But then, with the epidemics of venereal diseases such as herpes, syphilis, and, later, AIDS, there was a reaction against the free and easy sexual lifestyle--the lifestyle that gay men and lesbians came out into and historically consider part of their golden age. People were having too much sex, and bad things were happening.

"In the `70s sexual behavior didn't represent pathology," says sociologist John Gangnon of State University of New York at Stony Brook. "But in the `90s, because of the AIDS risk, having a large number of partners is [considered] wrong. This seems to me to be the wrong construction."

Still, sexual addiction is a concept that took hold. And it may have been helped along in the backlash atmosphere of the early `80s by Patrick Carnes's seminal book on the subject, Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction. To Carnes, sex addicts have a "pathological relationship with a mood-altering experience." They can't stop having sex; they can't stop seeking it out, thinking about it, doing anything within their power to get off all the time.

"Sex was the only thing that was important to me," says Ken, who has been in recovery for sex addiction for ten years. "It was like trying to eat only sugar. It may fill you up, but you starve anyway." Addicts, experts say, will continue their behavior even when faced with horrible consequences, such as the loss of their family, jobs, freedom, and lives. They are out of control and feel powerless. "I was starving," Ken says, "and I was on the verge of suicide."