Being a Couple Shouldn’t Be So Odd : That’s the message that Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd aim to present in their new ensemble show, which dares to take on the gay community’s anti-couple bias.

Funny guys Tom Keegan and Davidson Lloyd, a.k.a. the performing duo Keegan & Lloyd, are as affable and congenial in person as they are onstage. Known for their own particular brand of romantic comedy, they’ve frequently drawn on their 18 years of living together for artistic inspiration.

Their comedic duets--”Crossing State Lines,” “Two Lives, One Pair of Pants,” “Naked & in Love” and others, all of which blend monologue, dialogue and movement-based theatrics--have earned the pair such blurbs as “arguably America’s most talented gay couple,” “a poster couple for commitment” and the like. Consequently, the veteran performers have come to reign, at least within the gay and lesbian community, as veritable mascots of coupledom.

Now, though, they are about to break out of the darling-duo mold. Their new ensemble show, “The Last Queer Taboo,” opens at Highways on Thursday.

Enlisting the talents and insights of four other same-sex pairs, the piece challenges directly what the performers see as a “hidden and forbidden” aspect of gay and lesbian life: the bias against couples.

“In the gay world, coupledom is really not a hip thing,” says Lloyd, seated near Keegan on the floor of the Santa Monica studio where they’ve been rehearsing. “There’s the idea that couples are a ‘straight thing.’ ”

When you’re gay or lesbian and part of a pair, Keegan adds, “there’s some sort of banner that goes up that says you’re fat, 40 and finished. It’s always been there.”

“But that’s a lot of oppression from outside turned into a lot of self-oppression,” Lloyd continues.

Both Keegan and Lloyd are trim, muscled and charming, but there the outward similarities end.

Keegan, 40, is a talkative redhead who still sports the quick energy of his native New York. He is the more antic of the two onstage and the prodder in person, often gently soliciting the more reticent Lloyd’s thoughts and remarks.

Dark-haired, Texas-born Lloyd, 47, is the more introspective and quiet in person and the more lyrical onstage. He pops in and out of a conversation yet is always keenly attentive to what his partner is saying.

Each, though, seems to dote on the other--despite the many ups and downs that they have documented in their works.

They have been together since meeting at a theater and dance colony on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in 1978. They made their first work together that year as well, but the idea of performing professionally as a duo didn’t really take hold at the time. Instead, they continued to pursue individual careers as actors and dancers.

About four years later, the act known as Keegan & Lloyd gelled.

“In 1982, we decided that we were going to do a piece about our relationship,” Keegan says. “We did a piece called ‘I’ll Love You Forever’--and the tag was ‘Or at Least Until Friday.’ ”

Based in New York, they first played Los Angeles on tour, as part of the 1987 Fringe Festival. Times reviewer Ray Loynd called their work “a hilarious and poignant odyssey.”

It was a good time for the pair, Keegan says, as well as an exhilarating moment for the gay community in general: “After the [gay rights] march in Washington in ‘87, things really turned. Suddenly, there was queer culture.”

Still, Keegan and Lloyd remained painfully aware that that culture didn’t endorse their lifestyle.

“We were fighting almost an uphill battle with the relationship and couple thing,” Keegan says. “We’d go places and play to primarily gay and lesbian audiences, and it would be like sex education. People would say to me, ‘Are you really involved with that man?’ ”

Encouraged by fellow gay performing artists such as Highways co-founder and artistic director Tim Miller, who had already left New York for L.A., Keegan and Lloyd decided to see if things were any better in California and moved here in 1989.

“It just felt like there was more of that amorphous community feeling here,” Keegan says. Lloyd also cites “the climate for developing work” and their association with Miller, whom they had known from New York’s experimental performance venue PS 122.

Los Angeles has, in fact, welcomed their work. L.A. Weekly reviewer Robin Podolsky, for example, said the 1993 “Naked & in Love” brought “a rich maturity of skill and insight” to the stage.

Yet no matter how audiences and critics have welcomed the work, they have yet to embrace the pair’s bond, Keegan and Lloyd say. Hence, the impetus for “The Last Queer Taboo.”

“I chose the title to be provocative,” Lloyd says. “One of the definitions of taboo is ‘constituting a risk,’ and being a male or female couple [means] you take the risk by being in that relationship.

“You take the risk to relate to another human being, to move beyond one’s own narcissistic ego to encompass another person. People in the gay and lesbian community need to try and take that risk.”

The AIDS epidemic has tempered the negative attitude toward coupling somewhat, though the prejudice still remains. “There’s a little less now, but it’s an imposed less-ness,” Keegan says. “There are more people who think they should get into a couple because of the AIDS crisis, but we’re not about that.

“We’re [talking] about people connecting, bonding and being committed. It’s [about] being more than a fashion couple, having a longevity and a vision that goes beyond that.”

The goal is difficult even without the barriers. “It’s hard enough to stay together,” Keegan says. “As gay couples, we are fighting not only the oppression of heterosexual culture but also our own culture.”

On both levels, it boils down to a pressure to conform. That, in part, is why Keegan and Lloyd have assembled a pointedly diverse ensemble for “The Last Queer Taboo.” The performers are lesbian and gay, married and unmarried, HIV-positive and HIV-negative and in a range of occupations.

The duo also wanted the input.

“We wanted other bodies onstage,” Lloyd says. “We wanted their stories, to make it feel more like this is a community effort, because Tom and I don’t have all the answers, or all the questions, about being two people together.”

And they would like to broaden their audience as well. “We have a crossover audience, and quite often we get heterosexual couples,” Lloyd says. “But there is this separation between the men and the women, and we want to help break that down. I feel like we haven’t had enough women, especially lesbians.”

One thing that gays and lesbians may find that they share, for instance, is a feeling of being denied society’s rites of passage.

“I was somewhere today where a man and a woman announced they were getting married, and there was such a feeling in the room of awe and wonder, happiness, joy and continuity,” Keegan says. “I feel like we miss out on that a lot, that feeling of myth, ritual and things that become life’s turning points.”

Instead, the lone wolf remains the dominant ideal. “Gay culture is set up to be about being single and making money off that,” Keegan says. “But I feel really bored with the sex culture.”

Adds Lloyd: “If you’re a gay person, you’re supposed to be into many multiple partners, sex clubs and the gym. But can’t we break through that?”

What the duo offers instead is a kind of antidote to that paradigm. “Here’s something richer and deeper, an underground river,” Keegan says.

The trick, they say, is breaking down the idea that stability equals boredom.

“Here we are, having been together 18 years, and we’re both in good physical shape and very physical with each other,” Lloyd says. “Part of being a couple does not mean you have to ‘settle.’ You need to work to keep yourself attractive and attracted to the person you’re with.”

” . . . And emotionally present and raw, willing to go places emotionally and sexually,” adds Keegan, finishing up his partner’s thought, as they are wont to do, without missing a beat.

Nor does it hurt to get help. Quips Lloyd: “We’ve both had a lot of therapy.”

And of course, there’s always hearts and flowers.

“I’m the romantic of the two of us,” says Lloyd, turning his dark, long-lashed eyes toward his mate. “Eighteen years ago seems like yesterday to me. It goes by really fast.”

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“THE LAST QUEER TABOO”: Highways Performance Space, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Dates: Opens Thursday. Plays Thursdays-Sundays, 8:30 p.m. Ends Sept. 3. Prices: $12 ($20 per couple this Thursday). Phone: (213) 660-TKTS.