What's Love Got to Do With It?

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.

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