The Love, Peace & Marriage Equality Rally took place on May 17 on Sixth Avenue and West 45th Street in Manhattan. It was ostensibly a political rally to encourage people to call their State Senators and demand that they support a bill, currently before the New York State Senate, that would allow New Yorkers to enter into civil marriage with a same-sex partner.
The marriage equality movement’s focus is primarily on civil injustice. But no throngs of lesbian parents with uninsured children were in attendance that day. Nor were there obvious masses of long-term, loving, committed middle-aged couples legitimately concerned about such things as inheritance taxes, social security benefits or hospital visitation rights. Instead, hundreds of mostly young, gay men (and a few lesbians) smiled and sang along. Some were even lovingly coupled up.
An organizer with a bullhorn did his best to encourage the crowd to chant slogans in unison: What do we want? Marriage equality! When do we want it? Now! But this wasn’t really a chant-in-unison crowd. Eventually the guy with the bullhorn gave up and turned to offering prizes for people who could correctly answer trivia questions about gays and marriage. It took four minutes for anyone to come up with the correct answer to the question “How many states already allow same sex marriage?” I knew the answer: five. One person hazarded a guess of 12… Really?
A clear generational divide was apparent. So, I asked the various, mostly male couples and eager, mostly male singles—who weren’t in relationships but were hopeful they would find someone and they’d be allowed to marry soon enough—and their straight best-friend gal pals why they were at the rally. I basically heard the same answer over and over: love. Or a variation on that theme: “I want to proclaim my love for him (sometimes her) for all to see.” “I want to secure the space for me to marry my love when I find him (or, sometimes, her).” “I want to show my love for my gay best friend by supporting him here today.” (Sorry, I found no straight men that had come in support of their lesbian best friends.) In short, people there wanted their love (and, by extension, themselves) respected and validated by others.
From my 40-year-old gay male perspective, it is nothing short of inspirational to see that many young, mostly gay men (and some lesbians), holding hands and proclaiming their love out loud and proud. But of the many defenses of the marriage institution and the LGBT community’s demand to have access to it, young love is probably not the strongest. In reality, not marrying a first love has probably spared countless gay men and women the emotional and financial toll of divorce and marital frustration.
The event, like the cast of Hair’s selection of song, was well intentioned but misguided. And it illustrates the difference between what the marriage equality movement justly claims to be at stake from a civil rights perspective, and what may actually be driving it. “What’s particularly interesting about the U.S. is that, despite the fact that marriage in this country remains, essentially, an economic institution, the prevalent ideology is that it is one of love,” says Sarah E. Chinn, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY). “In fact, the connection of love and marriage is a relatively modern concept and couldn’t be further from the reality.” That’s probably why the song “Love and Marriage” played so well as the theme song for Married With Children, a sitcom about a loveless marriage.
Marriage equality is absolutely a civil rights issue. As is the military’s Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy. The LGBT community, and the country as a whole, doesn’t seem as fired up about that one.That’s likely due to the fact that far more people want to get married than want to go into the military, and advocacy, like charity, apparently begins and ends at home.
As Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, explains, the marriage equality advocacy movement is not about “suggesting or implying that marriage is for everyone, or that, without it, [someone] is less. [It] is about having choices.”
Her sentiment is echoed by Marriage Equality Board President Cathy Marino-Thomas, who says, “I feel that our [the LGBT] community should have access to all things that the government provides.”
I agree. In fact, I believe that all U.S. citizens should have access to everything the government provides regardless of race, religion, gender and/or sexual identity. I also personally believe that legal, same-sex marriage is likely where the nation is ultimately headed.
Marino-Thomas continues, however, in defense of an accusation occasionally lobbied at the marriage equality movement: “I don’t want our community to assimilate into some perceived greater whole. I want our community to feel wholly accepted.”
That’s the troublesome engine I fear might be driving this machine. What does the idea that being allowed to legally marry a same-sex partner will lead to feeling wholly accepted imply? Accepted by whom, exactly? And what do we think is wrong with us if we don’t get that acceptance?
That lesbians and gay men (and straights, too, for that matter) have been getting married in order to feel accepted is nothing new. It’s been going on for decades. Just ask ex-Governor Jim McGreevey. There is bitter irony in the homophobic response to the marriage-equality movement that says that lesbians and gays already have the right to get married, as long as they marry someone of the opposite sex. By and large it’s been a technique that hasn’t delivered the goods.
And, if, indeed, lesbians and gay men are still motivated, to any degree, to get married in order to feel accepted, I wonder if the results will be any better with same-sex partners then they have been with partners of the opposite sex.
So what happened? When did the LGBT community start coveting what straight, married people had?
“AIDS happened,” explains Dagmar Herzog, a CUNY history professor and the author of Sex in Crisis and Intimacy and Exclusion. Her writing explores the history of sexual liberty through the lenses of fascism and extremism in politics. She states that, because of AIDS in the mid-1980s, there were legions of young men, mostly in New York and San Francisco, in their twenties, who were faced with the sort of mortal, life decisions—such as health-care proxy and inheritance rights—that men in their twenties rarely have to deal with. “People would be dying in the hospital, and families, often estranged, who hadn’t seen their sons in years, and who didn’t accept their lifestyles, would show up and kick their sons’ lovers out and take over the whole operation. It was one of the first times that the queer community sensed, en masse, how vulnerable it was without those civil rights.”
Herzog further contends that, at the same time in the mid-’80s, as a direct result of the woman’s movement in the 1970s, women with school-age children from previous heterosexual marriages were now living in lesbian relationships.“There were great complexities,” she explains, “in attempting to co-parent with a partner who didn’t actually have any legal, parental rights over the children.”
According to Herzog, however, it wasn’t marriage that people sought in the beginning. It was civil rights. “I don’t think that people really thought that marriage, as the solution, was even possible at the time.” She poses that the next big shift occurred in the early ’90s when the Republicans, who had just lost the presidential election to Clinton, in their desire to rally the troops and to court the religious right, spearheaded the Defense of Marriage Act, before many people on the other side of the issue were even talking about marriage.
Of course, a defense without an accusation is a confession. The Republicans having confessed that the institution of marriage was malleable enough to require a defense was all anyone needed to wage a battle. The first nationally
profiled, constitutional challenges to a state’s attempt to deny
same-sex partners civil marriage licenses took place in Hawaii in the
early ’90s, and we’ve been in a quagmire ever since.
Herzog
says that there was one very strong push for marriage from within the
LGBT community during the ’80s. She contends that conservative gay men,
like Andrew Sullivan, responded to the AIDS crisis by theorizing that
if gay men were allowed to marry one another they would stop acting so
promiscuously. It’s an odd assertion, assuming as it does, that gay men
married to other gay men would automatically adopt the cherished
heterosexual convention of monogamy. Also, the notion has in common the
same homophobic, judgmental implication that gay men shouldn’t be
allowed to marry one another precisely because they are so
promiscuous. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Joseph
DeFilippis, director of Queers for Economic Justice and its subsidiary
project Beyond Marriage, contends that the same-sex marriage movement
is still one primarily driven by gay men, particularly economically
privileged, white gay men, “for whom,” he states, “this particular
issue is likely to be the only sort of discrimination they ever face in
their lives.”
DeFilippis contends that many lesbians and
non-white gay men, while they may be interested in marriage, often have
other, more pressing concerns, such as sexism, racism and class
struggle to worry about.
Sommer says that it is actually
poorer lesbians and gays that can stand to gain the most from same-sex
marriage, since privileged, wealthier lesbians and gays often have the
resources to both set up whatever legal arrangements they need and to
do without government benefits, such as surviving spousal social
security benefits.
“That may be true in theory,” counters
DeFilippis, “but proposing that marriage is the solution to an
impoverished person’s personal financial disadvantages is insulting, at
best. It smacks of the Clinton-era welfare reform approach. Too
poor to afford food or medical care? Why not get married and then you
will be deserving of help.”
If both Sommer’s assertion, that privileged
lesbians and gays could afford to do without these civil benefits, and
DeFilippis’ contention, that those less privileged have more pressing
concerns, are true, it calls the marriage advocacy movement’s deeper
motivations even further into question.
DeFilippis asserts
that many of the movement’s civil grievances are already being
addressed in other ways, ways that incur less national rancor and
benefit far more people than gays and lesbians alone. For example,
President Obama’s push for universal healthcare addresses the issues of
spousal insurance; children’s and adoption law reform address parental
rights; access to legal documents and tax reform address inheritance
concerns; and growing sensitivity on the part of hospitals to
non-traditional families addresses visitation rights.
Sommer
concedes DeFilippis’ point that many of the marriage equality
movement’s civil rights grievances could be and are being addressed in
other ways. She counters, however, by saying that civil rights are only
one side of the equation. “The importance of the symbolism,” she says,
“family and community participation, being seen as equal within the
culture, that cannot be underestimated.”
So is this movement actually about equal access or about being seen as
equal? Have some lesbians and gay men become so fixated on the, justly
observed, civil inequities of marriage discrimination, and the idea of
being seen as equal, that they have stopped asking themselves whether
or not the institution of marriage is desirable in the first place? The
benefits of living lives free from the obligation of marriage have been
quietly dismissed.
“When I was coming out [as a lesbian] in
the ’80s, it was one of the privileges of gay life that you didn’t have
to get married,” says Chinn, of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.
“Sure, you were alienated from society, sometimes jettisoned from your
own family, but the plus side was that you didn’t have to play by their
rules.You could create your own family on your own terms.You could
question values like monogamy or constraints like being together
forever.”
Say what you will of living an LGBT lifestyle prior
to the marriage equality advocacy movement, but one thing we have not
suffered under has been the oppressive sense that we were supposed to
be married. Same sex partnerships have always been primarily driven by
a genuine desire to be together. In general, homosexuals have seen
themselves as being free from the social restraints of sexism, ageism,
racism and classism associated with heterosexual marriages.
Few,
if any, lesbian or gay couples came together to please their parents or
stay together for the sake of the children. “Being queer in the ’80s
was an exciting opportunity to create a family of friends, lovers,
ex-lovers,” says Chinn. “A network of humans, if you will…
that the heterosexual nuclear family didn’t have and wasn’t set up to
allow for. It was a chance to learn about the immense variety of human
relationships that the script of marriage didn’t make available.”
That’s
what we built for ourselves and it would be a shame to lose it. I spoke
with many lesbians and gay men, in and out of relationships, with and
without children, who were not interested in getting married. Just as
there seemed to be one dominant ideology driving the Love, Peace &
Marriage Equality Rally—that of young queer love being validated—there
also seemed to be an umbrella belief among these folks. Most of these
men and women were older, and each possessed a kind of confidence and
security in their identities and their relationships that resulted from
having defined their lives and families on their own and working out
personal solutions to personal challenges. It’s clear that there’s a
generational divide.
William Lippincott, 39, has been in a
relationship for eight years with a man with whom he hopes to have
children. He cherishes his identity as a gay man and worries about a
diminishment of that identity if he’s legally married. “I don’t feel
that I’m missing a thing,” he says. “I feel that my relationship is
strong and committed and that in the eyes of my family, our families,
we are—for all intents and purposes—married.”
Kay, 40, lives
with Alice, her partner of eight years, and their 8-year-old son. (They
preferred not to use last names for the sake of their son.) Kay says
that she is “…utterly and completely secure” in her relationship and
that she doesn’t “need approval or sanction of [it] from any outside
source.”
Guy Kettelhack, 58, currently single, no longer has a
“sentimental notion that a ‘shared life’ is better than a solitary
one,” and he also has, “a number of ‘soul-deep unions’ now, no need for
marriage to provide one.” Reverend Deborah Lake, 57, a
non-denominational minister in Chicago, twice married to men, seriously
examined the motivations behind her desire to marry her current
partner, a woman, of almost 11 years and realized that she had “grown
into herself and no longer bought into the idea of marriage.”
Of
course, quoting a few older lesbians and gay men who are not personally
interested in marriage doesn’t imply that the institution need not be
made available to others.When we honestly examine what marriage
equality advocacy is about, however, it seems less clear to what degree
it’s about access to civil rights and to what degree it’s about outside
validation and acceptance. The confusion is easy to understand. It’s
something that every lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individual
has to wrestle with throughout their lives in very specific ways that
heterosexual people do not. But if our history has taught us anything,
it is that the more we seek validation from sources outside of
ourselves the less likely it is that we will find it.
Marriage is an
institution, not a solution. If we’re completely honest, we will
realize that marriage isn’t going to provide us with anything
emotionally that we couldn’t create for ourselves. It’s one means, not
the only one, toward certain particular ends. As access to the
institution becomes more commonplace for lesbians and gay men, we
shouldn’t look to it for validation for ourselves, our relationships or
our families.
For better or for worse, it will be up to us to
learn to love ourselves and cherish our families with or without the
word “marriage.” And that would really let the sunshine in.
Seth Michael Donsky is a NYC-based filmmaker, fiction writer and journalist. www.sethmichaeldonsky.com
