Before dismissing me as someone who suffers from internalized homophobia, meander with me, if you will, back to 1992. With the defeat of the first Bush appearing more imminent by the day, the end of the Reagan era was, at long last, within reach, and calling that fact glorious is the ultimate understatement. And there to greet us after 12 years of grandfatherly Republican presidents stood something of a wonder: Bill Clinton, whose words alone suggested a rich and deeply felt understanding of how far we’d slid to one side and, at the same time, the urgency with which we needed to slide back. His voice, his words, the empathy behind everything he said came to me as nothing less than a love song. Remember, I was desperate. I think many of us were.
While I fell hard for Bill Clinton during the campaign and the early years of his administration, from the very beginning I disagreed vehemently with one of his alleged stances, and I still do.
I had a million reasons at that time for thinking that pushing the notion of homos serving openly in the military was questionable. Today, I have two million reasons, and here are just a few. Blind adherence to a hierarchy that rewards overt, male-dictated heterosexuality is a big thing in the military. So is following orders without question. So is the belief that brute force not only trumps diplomacy, but the notion that it should trump diplomacy. The military, in my opinion, is a Petri dish for conservative tendencies. And that was where we, gay and men women who I’d always believed had been born to fight the power, wanted to be? Wasn’t that like black people agitating for a seat on the board of the local KKK chapter? I was floored. Besides (keep in mind that this was the early 1990s), hadn’t enough gay men died already? I thought so. What the “gay community” should have been working toward, I thought, was not its place in the military machine, but a society where the military is but a showpiece for parades. That would be a more worthy pursuit.
I almost laugh out loud – LOL! – at my own naiveté, recalling the mid-20s version of myself, earnestly believing that what we should be striving for is a world where armed forces are not required, one where political candidates are judged not by their war records but by their peace records. But every time I get close to laughing, it occurs to me that today, two decades later, my reaction to the push for “marriage equality” is identical. When it comes to stifling my own urge to laugh, there are few things more potent than the realization that even though most everything else has changed (it’s even a new century), I have evolved very little.
But I’m far more troubled by the gay marriage issue than I ever was by the push for the “right” to serve openly in military. That’s because there are parts of it that seem matters of fact, the right-and-wrong, black-and-white kind, and because of those facts I have to agree with those who have decided to force the issue.
The first is that having one set of privileges for one group of people and one set of privileges for another is discrimination. It’s discrimination based on sexual orientation and it’s discrimination based on gender. Why can’t two women get married? Because there’s no dick. Work some of that rationale into a decision about whether or not to promote one employee rather than another, or whether or not to rent an apartment to a certain applicant, and you’ve got a nice little lawsuit on your hands.
The second factor that pushes me toward unconditionally supporting the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples is that the reaction to it proves to me that it’s still okay to regard homos as a notch or two beneath everyone else. It’s muddled behind a smokescreen of trumped up bullshit about “protecting the children,” as usual, but the millions of dollars spent each year to ensure that the gays and the heterosexuals are kept separate and anything but equal convey that millions and millions of allegedly heterosexual people in this country hold one simple belief near and dear: Marriage belongs to us, and unless you deviants arrive at the wedding with a gift and lots of well wishes, you are not welcome.
It’s that arrogance that motivates me to volunteer, to donate, to e-mail slick politicians and corporations that open their checkbooks for one side or the other. But I’d like to think that what motivates me is something beyond a reaction to attributes in others that I don’t like. Strange though it may sound, I’d like to answer to a higher calling.
But in my search for a higher calling, what I keep hearing is quite sinister: We’re seduced by a pull toward what I can only call cultural cathedrals, grandiose minefields of symbolism such as marriage and the military that are, at their root, fundamentally conservative. Having never been legally married myself, I am not an expert on it, but I’ve watched and listened and I think I’ve learned a few things. And apparently I’m going a little hard on myself for my failure to evolve: In spite of our advancements, the ancient dream of two people pairing off and separating themselves from the herd in order to enjoy state-sanctioned sex in the name of procreation seems to be alive and well.
The story, as I understand it, goes something like this. We consult with our religious leaders and sign papers with the lawyers and spend obscene amounts of money for ceremonies and then buy houses and cars and struggle with mortgages and health insurance and contributing to the college fund for our young. One bit of political activist improv at a time, it seems to me, we forget from whence we came and become, simply, “too busy” to get involved on behalf of the greater good. And then, in numbers that continue to shock the experts, wake up one day and realize we’re miserable, realize that we’ve made such a huge mistake that we fork over an even more obscene amount of cash than we spent on the ceremony for the legal privilege of walking away from it all and buying ourselves another shot at true happiness.
Where do I sign up?
Those are stereotypes, of course. Stereotypes are the octane of the entire discussion as best I can tell, so I thought I’d use a few myself. And there are more stereotypes to be found just beneath the surface of the entire movement, and to me they’re like gigantic, bright yellow cautionary signs on a slick road in the middle of the night. Here’s one: A group moves to the U.S. en masse. For a couple of generations they stick together. Then they get themselves some legitimacy, some assimilation, and some money, and next thing you know they’re not only voting for Republicans, they’re running for office as Republicans. The gays, I’m sorry to say, are just as prone to that sort of treachery as anyone, and my fear is that the push for gay marriage is but the beginning.
It’s already started. Log Cabin Republicans? What on earth. Young-ish gay guys who could easily pass as heterosexuals comfortable enough in their convictions that they will publically, in print and on the Internet, try to ban drag queens from gay parades because they’re bad for “the community’s image.” Never mind the fact that the drag queens in Greenwich Village who were not hiding in suburbs were the people who got the whole gay rights movement underway. It was certainly not the “straight acting/straight appearing” semi-closet cases. I shudder to think where we’d be had we had to rely on them. And I shudder to think what might become of the drag queens and many others as we march closer and closer to the altar. Hopefully they’ll stay under cover when the news cameras are out, because they do make the conservatives uncomfortable. Ditto for those who are “femmy” or “queeny.” They don’t look Republican enough.
And then, more recently (the week before last, in fact) the sex advice columnist. There was an interview on NPR, much of it about bullying, when the topic of gay marriage came up, as it often does. He doesn’t think it’s fair that he and his partner, who are raising children, do not have the same legal rights that male-female couples. I agree. He doesn’t think it’s fair that were he to find himself in a dire medical condition, it would be perfectly legal to exclude his partner from any and all decision making. I agree even more. He wants the privileges of marriage, the ones male-female couples simultaneously take for granted and expect. And he wants, “you know, the status of being married.”
Ahh, the status. The word “status” makes me nervous. People who throw that word around, in my experience anyhow, are usually quite aware of the rankings of things, aware of who is above them on the status scale, and aware of who is beneath them. How many years do you suppose it will be before we see and hear married gay folks, those with status on their side, wading into the ultimate conservative rite of passage, which would be to find another group – preferably one that looks quite a bit like they did at one time – to scapegoat? Pondering what I fear is that inevitability is what gets me thinking about sentences that are hard to read, and then start writing a few of them.
