We're Here. We're Not Especially Queer. Get, Uh, Used to It

Since my cosexualists may now marry in California, I thought I might take the moment to say some thoughtful things and some intemperate things about so-called gay marriage.

Advocates of marriage--and I mean simply those who approve of marriage in general, irrespective of the gender of the partners--tend to fall in two often overlapping camps: those who believe that outside sanctification, legalization, and recognition elevate the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual character of a relationship, and those who believe that the menu of legal rights and privileges that come with civil marriage constitute, in essence, a set of human rights. Those who lean more toward the former are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage, and those who lean torward the latter more likely support the right of gays to marry, but there's plenty of commerce, the one side to the other, and I think it's fair to say that proponents of marriage, regardless of their position on its gender universality, accept it as an unmitigated good, in theory anyway, and, as the saying goes, one of the foundations of our society.

Both sides of the gay marriage debate use phrases like "strengthening marriage" or "protecting marriage," meaning slightly different things, but sharing nevertheless the conviction that marriage is an institution under duress, whether because some inherent sexual inequity debases it in a culture progressing beyond old biases about sexuality, or else because its potential expansion to a whole new human varietal will undermine its sacrosanctity and its traditional place at the moral center of society. Both sides, incidentally, agree that divorce is bad, with many gay marriage proponents actually going so far as to point to the ease and comnmonness of heterosexual divorce as an argument for gay marriage. It's become commonplace to hear about le nozze di Brittany, or about the "half of all marriages that end in divorce." (Aspiring to membership in an organization or institution with a 50% rate of failure has always struck me as exceedingly bizarre.) The message is unsubtle: "You straights have already debased it enough, so how can we make it any worse?" As a marketing campaign, it has its . . . weaknesses. Deriding the very privilege you hope to acquire isn't very sensible. But I was not consulted, and on it goes. It's worth noting that the history of the emancipation of Western civilization from religious absolutism of the type that we're supposedly combatting in the Islamic world today is a history that's inextricable from the struggle for the right to divorce. Why is it necessarily bad that about half of marriages are eventually terminated? Consider the sum total of relationships you've encountered, others and your own, in your life. Not just marriages, but romantic or sexual relationships of sufficient devotion and duration that you think of them as couples. Most of them end in termination. The pressures of intimacy are great, and the capacity of something as fickle and fragile as love (it is not unending; nor unbreakable) to mediate the lifelong, or even monthlong, partnership of two individuals is more limited than we'd usually care to admit. We make poor choices, or our good choices run out after a while. Isn't it extremely retrogressive to call the right of people to dissolve unhappy and unsuccessful--or just plain impulsive or ill-advised--marriages a degradation?

Well, I've wandered afield. Here is the consensus. Marriage is good. Divorce is bad. Strengthening marriage (whether by expanding or maintaining current eligibility) will strengthen society.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on legal and economic privileges (rights?). There are some drawbacks in marriage. For instance, if two people with disparate incomes marry, then the lower-income person sees his relative tax load increase, sometimes substantially, but since the assumption is that a married couple is a single economic unit, a family, this is hardly a fair complaint. In general, though, married couples enjoy all the benefits you've seen enumerated before, from hospital visitation to untaxed inheritance to child custody. What interests me is the conception of these as "human rights" by gay marriage advocates, who remain entirely unaware of their contradiction and blind spot. If they are, in fact, human rights, then why must you be married to acquire them?

Well, the gays, or some of the gays, are clamoring for nuptials. Among more radical queer types, you will mostly hear derision; marriage is an inherently sexist, homophobic, gendered institution--a tool of the patriarchy and the forces of economic hegemony--a mechanism for social control--an anachronism--a farce. I'm largely in agreement with that position, but, sorry my fellow faggotarians, our thoughts on this matter are irrelevant to the mess of gays who took from the civil rights movement the lesson that equality proceeds from inclusion, and who therefore see their own struggle ending naturally with state-approved nuptials and inclusion in the state-run military. It would be understatement to say that this struggle rests on some shaky assumptions, and its self-identification with the civil rights movement represents a--you'll pardon the expression--whitewashing of that epoch. Cue Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and some very inspirational music. The truth is that the civil rights era was a fraught and riven one, and for all the Satyagraha in the world, there were plenty of loud, prominent blacks who looked at the shit and decided that the shit was fucked: why would they want to wallow in a lot of fucked-up shit? The currents of black nationalisms and separatisms are largely lost in our Tiger-Woods-Barack-Obama post-racial whathaveyou, and certainly no one wants to talk about the fact that Dr. King himself grew increasingly pessimistic about any hope of racial reconciliation in America, and turned his eye increasingly on the wider mechanics of the empire, which he saw driving and fostering racism, and it was then, when he began talking about empire--not before--that he was shot.

In my mind, the question of the value of inclusion remains an open one. Does it really bring about equality? More pretinently: in what endeavor, in what society would such equality come about, if it does come about? Here, I think, the answer is very unflattering. By and large, gays believe that the highest measures of fairness and equity are the rights to be contractually joined by your government and the right to kill for your government in its armed forces. Along with the right to buy and own or otherwise acquire have children, no other seems comparable, especially as it becomes more and more difficult to fire someone for his or her sexuality, even pretextually.

My cosexualists, in other words, largely look at straight, imperial America and say, "Yeah, I want some of that. You guys are doing just fine." All the caveats in the world don't alter that base reality.