After the debacle of the 2004 elections, in which, arguably, anti-gay-marriage amendments helped ignite the Republican right to defeat Democrats along with the wedding plans of millions of taffeta-loving homosexuals, it appears the tide is turning.
Gay bashing has lost none of its allure, but it has less legislative sway in the context of never-ending war, lobbying scandals and corporate chicanery, and an economy that continues to widen the gap between rich and poor. We even discovered that Brad and Angelina are not just U.N. do-gooders, adopting orphaned children by the boatload and setting the bar ever higher for Hollywood celebrity. They have some homegrown affinities, too, insisting in the September issue of Esquire that they would “consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able.”
Not to be outdone by Brangelina, the legislators of Massachusetts tried to affirm that gay marriages are a settled issue by voting to recess a constitutional convention, though the state’s legislative tussling in recent weeks has put the issue back in play; and the Supreme Court of New Jersey issued a legally mixed but unequivocally gay-positive decision. In November one state (Arizona — go figure) actually turned back an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative; South Africa joined the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Canada in recognizing same-sex marriages; and Israel’s high court agreed to recognize same-sex marriages performed outside the nation.
The tide may be turning, but we can’t forget that most states already have some sort of anti-gay-marriage provision and that outside Arizona, all the anti-marriage amendments passed with ease. The vice president’s daughter, Mary Cheney, is pregnant, but her home state of Virginia won’t “legitimize” her child with her longtime not-wife, Heather Poe. And while the Dems are back in action, it is no small matter that both abortion rights and gay rights appear — yet again — to be the always-expendable part of the party platform.
Like a Daily Show episode gone awry, we have, in one corner, the brave warriors of the Christian right (especially self-loathing leaders of evangelical megachurches), defending marriage against those devious gays whose hitching instincts are sure to bring down Western civ as we know it and will inevitably take us down the slippery slope of polygamous, animal-loving anarchy. In the other corner is our newly minted hero of civil rights — I picture him tanned and about 165 pounds — joined at the would-be altar by his life partner of many years. Their lovely child only wants to see them decently wed in front of God and family.
Foucault demonstrated that the regulation of the self adheres to a construction of identity indicated by acts and practices. For instance, acts of intimacy between people of the same sex become not merely acts but signs, indications, of a unique self: homosexual. That insight helps us understand dominant conceptualizations of gay marriage where the specific configuration of two people becomes indicative of a new identity: the good gay couple. This newly configured dyad may be seen as a threat to national unity and “family values” by those who see homosexuality itself as dangerous and aberrant. But many gays perceive a different sort of threat, as the marrying couple pushes aside other gay and queer folk who seek not marriage but perhaps something else, what we might call (for old time’s sake) sexual and gender liberation.
That discussion is largely lost in recent books and the general media maelstrom. Instead, what is projected is a simple debate between those who oppose gay marriage and those who support it. What we don’t hear much of is the internal critique from gay activists and writers, although there has been for a long time an active debate “from within” about gay marriage. Feminist and gay radical writers of all stripes have long been dubious of the centrality of marriage in national gay-rights struggles.
Most recently, Beyondmarriage.org (a Web site and position paper) engages a wide group of activists and intellectuals in broadening the national dialogue, and a November op-ed by Stephanie Coontz in The New York Times urges us to reach out more to larger communities of intimacy and care rather than invest wholly in marriage as the place of all sustenance. The historian John D’Emilio, in The Gay & Lesbian Review, argues that the marriage movement has been a dismal failure on any number of counts and that we should push to “further de-center and de-institutionalize marriage” rather than lining up at the chapel door.
For some critics, the response to the rise of the good, married, respectable gay couple is to trumpet the abject in the name of resisting assimilation. For them, gay marriage is the nail in the coffin, firmly snuffing out sexual liberation and social freedoms. Other critics focus more on questions of political priorities (How about national health care based on individuals, not marital status? Peace? An end to gender discrimination in the workplace?), and still others resist marriage in the name of feminist commitments to alternative forms of intimacy.
As a civil-rights issue, same-sex marriage is a no-brainer. To deny individuals access to any social and legal institution simply by virtue of their “gayness” is patently discriminatory and should not be tolerated.
That said, we need to reckon with why this issue has such enormous ideological salience for advocates and opponents, why a walk down the aisle has replaced a walk on the wild side, and why marriage and familial rhetoric hold such powerful sway. For conservative writers like Jonathan Rauch, in Gay Marriage, and Andrew Sullivan, in Same-Sex Marriage, the good of marriage is self-evident, the magic elixir that will cure society of its feckless amorality (Rauch), the taming influence on innate gay (male — these lads have little to say about lesbians!) promiscuity (Sullivan), or the glue that holds together the social fabric (both).
Rauch begins his book by asking us to “imagine life without marriage,” which is not only like a day without sunshine but is a postapocalyptic hell filled with unfeeling and loveless zombies only out for a good time because, as he asserts without even a twinkle of irony, “true love means, first and foremost, a love which ends in lasting marriage.” Pity the poor homosexual, adrift in a world “less healthy, less happy ... a world of fragile families ... in some respects not civilized, because marriage is the foundation of civilization.” Rauch wants to enlist rascally and pathetic gays in the grand effort to shore up the declining fortunes of marriage — a plague on alternatives, a plague on single parents, a plague on singles everywhere pretending to be whole. For “if marriage is to work, it cannot be merely a ‘lifestyle option.’ It must be privileged. That is, it must be understood to be better than other ways of living.”
This explicit paean to marital bliss (Britney, take heed!) hints at some difficult contradictions and absences in the arguments put forth by gay-marriage advocates. Well-intentioned and nuanced historians such as George Chauncey in Why Marriage? and Coontz, in Marriage, a History, challenge the right-wing canard that marriage is an unchanging force, a singular certitude through the proverbial thick and thin of the vagaries of time. Instead, they argue that it has been a markedly changing and pliable institution.
But I suspect the progressive historians overstate the case for progressive potential. While surely these eminent scholars have now corrected the historical record, it is also true that the record is largely one of state control, gender-based divisions, ownership, slavery, etc. Coverture and marriage may no longer be indistinguishable, but they did indeed have a long courtship that bears its inevitable scars. While Coontz is certainly correct that “companionate” marriage or love marriage is a modern invention (as, indeed, are the very concepts of homo and hetero as singular identities), that does not mean that this changing institution has no baggage, or that it is endlessly elastic. Certainly, we might question whether it is elastic enough to incorporate the claims of minoritized populations. Indeed, one sign of its deep heterosexism and ideological grasp is the almost complete absence (Brangelina aside) of any large-scale heterosexual boycott of marriage in the name of equality.
Gay-marriage advocates believe that in order to make their case they need to correct the misconception that marriage is in crisis, torn from its traditional moorings by rising divorce rates, secular feminists, birth control and abortion, and — most threatening of all — gays. Instead, these commentators see no crisis but rather an institution in flux. For Coontz and others, what is radically new is not gay inclusion per se, or even changing gender roles, but the idea that marriage is based on love and individual choice. Marriage, no longer fundamentally an economic necessity, becomes from the late 18th century on more defined by ideals of mutual affection, love, choice. These historians aptly chart the decline of marriage as the central economic unit, but that does not mean that the ideology of marriage — or more broadly a kind of hetero and gender-normative familialism — has lost its social and cultural authority.
While the cultural analysts are careful to illustrate the ways in which marriage has disempowered and isolated women, they also are anxious to treat the institution of marriage as sort of empty ideologically, or at least enormously shifty. It may be true, as Coontz asserts, that marriage wasn’t “created” to oppress women in the way that slavery was created to oppress Africans, but it sure has done one hell of a job of contributing to that oppression. The prevalence of battering in heterosexual marriage doesn’t mean all men are batterers or all heterosexual marriages potential battlefields, but it should push us to question just how equitable, peaceful, and gender-neutral such institutions can potentially be in a world marked and defined by gendered violence and inequity.
On the other hand, gay critics such as Sullivan and Rauch see an institution only superficially changing but essentially timeless in its social and cultural utility. Gay access to it is therefore akin to access to civilization or even humanness itself. So which is it? Pliable, modernizing set of practices with an unfortunate history, or transhistorical überinstitution of eternal value?
Further contradictions accompany such argumentation: In responding to the fear that gay marriage will shift the terms of marriage itself and somehow harm heterosexual marriage, most advocates insist that gay entry to marriage will not alter the institution a whit. Still others want to have it both ways and argue that gay entry into marriage will make it more equitable and less rigidly gendered.
But shouldn’t we make a much more provocative claim: that gay marriage will and should alter heterosexual marriages?
That gets to the heart of the problem for gay-marriage advocates. How can both these things be simultaneously true? Can gays reasonably argue that gay entry will not alter the social fabric but just gently expand it, while at the same time claiming gay marriage as a fundamental civil-rights issue? If it is basically a civil-rights issue, then shouldn’t we take the strong position: that integration of an institution (a school, a neighborhood, a workplace) radically changes that space, alters both its interior and exterior geographies?
At its simplest, legalizing interracial marriage (here we think of the problematic analogizing to the central case of Loving v. Virginia) legitimated existing and future couples and protected them from state-sponsored harm. But Loving (and the “issue” of interracial marriage) is part of a larger project of integration, which is all about change and challenging automatic privilege. The fact that we now live in a nation filled with multiracial children (themselves the subject of policy and census debates) points to the flaw in the “it won’t change anything” argument.
Is it inevitable that, in demanding marriage rights as fundamental civil rights, marriage advocates will invoke sameness, traditional family values, and the sanctity of the couple? If marriage is raised to the level of fundamental right — indicative of full citizenship — then doesn’t that elevate one particular form of intimacy to a level that should rightly be reserved for claims such as health, liberty, free speech, freedom from hunger, and so on? For Sullivan and others, what flows from the marriage-as-citizenship assertion is that marriage (and the military) is theorized as the last vestige of legal discrimination and social abjection.
Should I even mention here that we are still unable to pass the Equal Rights Amendment? Gay marriage but no gender equality? That the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would protect lesbians and gays from workplace abuses has been in limbo for eons? That gays and lesbians and transgendered people are still beaten up with impunity and still legitimate fodder for election mockery? That self-hatred is still rampant (see Mark Foley and Ted Haggard for that sad story), and that “gay sex scandal” is still enough to get you on Page 1 and in rehab?
I’ll date myself here, but I remember a much-argued-over 1981 book, Zillah R. Eisenstein’s The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, which posited the transgressive (unintended) potential of seemingly simple liberal demands for equity and inclusion. To many radicals, gay marriage seems the nadir of queer liberation. But maybe it is the Trojan horse in the war against gender inequity and sexual subordination. Or maybe that is wishful thinking in a cultural context in which “liberation” is a term more associated with “hands-free device” than political futures.
Coontz, Chauncey, and even Evan Wolfson, in Why Marriage Matters, go a long way toward debunking the myths of marriage and pulling the rug out from under the right-wing arguments. But few of our marriage mavens are willing to embrace the “radical future of liberal gay marriage,” to claim that gays may indeed alter an institution that — for all its variability — has historically been defined by sexual inequality, gender rigidity, and sometimes outright violence.
More troubling still, in arguing for marriage as the brass ring of civic inclusion, we risk consigning a utopian vision of sexual and gender freedom to the nether reaches of recalcitrant social theory. We may pave the way for a new gay class system, where wealthy gay insiders can play ball with the hetero big boys, the gay couple becomes the sign of gay legitimacy, and “other gays” become further marginalized, now by a gay movement eager to squelch its swishes and dim its dykes in order to champion homonormativity.
While progressives Chauncey, Wolfson, and Coontz would certainly not be pleased to be put in the same camp as rock-ribbed rightists such as Rauch and Sullivan, the truth is that it is hard to champion marriage without at the same time, well, championing marriage. Otherwise we really wouldn’t need all these books, we’d just say the obvious: Civil rights for all. Not a very long book. Thus, progressive advocates of gay marriage can’t just leave it at the civil-rights point nor push it to the critically feminist and queer point of questioning familialism and coupledom. They’re perched uncomfortably betwixt and between.
The gay progressives might not be as explicit as Rauch and Sullivan in trumpeting the inherent benefits of marriage to children, world health, and civilization, but they can’t help being benign cheerleaders for an institution that may not be responsible for international terrorism but that surely is troubling to those committed to gender equity, social justice, the flourishing of children, relational diversity, and sexual freedom. Hard too for these gay progressives not to join in the chorus of cultural conservatives bemoaning the high rate of divorce, single motherhood, and nonmarital cohabitation. To say, for example, that divorce is not inherently a negative social phenomenon, that single-parent households are potentially more constructive of egalitarian family life, that serial relationships are not necessarily a sign of emotional pathology — well, that would put our gay pundits far outside the acceptable range of cultural discourses. To speak of “families of choice,” envisioning a world of various and diverse intimacies and ways of living where marriage doesn’t loom as the mack daddy of institutional legitimacy, is simply beyond the pale of contemporary political discourse.
That explains a bit why queer and feminist analyses are so notably absent from the treatises of the major gay proponents of gay marriage, even when they know better. Marriage advocates wax eloquent (and problematically) on the black civil-rights movement, analogizing and comparing, invoking King and company to their hearts’ content. Fair enough. But those same advocates are curiously silent about gender and feminism. With the exception of (feminist) historians such as Coontz, most seem to forget — curiously — that the very reason for the exclusion rests on gender: Gay marriage is only gay because both members of the couple are of the same gender. It seems patently illogical to debate gay marriage without engaging theories of gender and power when its very difference is predicated on gender.
Indeed, that might be the very reason why gay marriage gets everyone’s knickers in a twist. Not one of these gay-marriage books speaks at length on questions of gender equity, much less reproductive rights or workplace issues. Some of this is due to the rabbit hole of single-issue politics (mustn’t mix ‘em up!), but I think it bespeaks a stronger resistance to placing the issue in the broader context of the politics of gender, sexuality, and family.
For example, a recent book by the Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. and the corporate attorney Darren R. Spedale, Gay Marriage, challenges “defense of marriage” arguments using same-sex marriage data from Scandinavia. The authors note the radical critique of gay marriage only to subsume alternative families as one in an emerging “menu of relationship options.” The authors’ prototypical couple (Jack Baker, the “dashing engineer-turned-lawyer,” and Mike McConnell, the “dimpled librarian”) are compared favorably to (viciously antigay and antifeminist) Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, who, the authors claim, share the same values of idealized and romantic marriage as do our besotted gay couple.
Feminism is the (pink) elephant in the wedding chapel of gay marriage. The real lavender threat is not most (gay) marriages. Some gays may or may not alter the institution by gaining access to it. The real lavender threat, perhaps symbolized by marriage but certainly not subsumed by it, is that gay kinship, gay sexual frontiers, gay intimacies will disrupt heterosexual familialism.
Now that would be a revolution worth all the tulle in Massachusetts.
Suzanna Danuta Walters is chair of the department of gender studies at Indiana University at Bloomington. She is author of All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY:
Gay Marriage: For Better or for Worse? What We’ve Learned From the Evidence, by William N. Eskridge Jr. and Darren R. Spedale (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, by Jonathan Rauch (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2004)
Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz (Viking, 2005)
Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader, edited by Andrew Sullivan (Vintage Books, 1997)
Why Marriage?: The History Shaping Today’s Debate Over Gay Equality, by George Chauncey (Basic Books, 2004)
Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People’s Right to Marry, by Evan Wolfson (Simon & Schuster, 2004)
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 53, Issue 20, Page B12