MINNEAPOLIS—During an anniversary get-together at their apartment Monday, Matthew Ledger and Dale Robertson told the story of their first meeting to a curious friend, omitting key details that took place in the men's room of a Hennepin Avenue dance club. "Oh, we met at The Gay '90s," Robertson said, making no mention of the fellatio Ledger performed on him in the second-floor restroom. "Matt bought me a drink, and we and ended up dancing together all night long. When his date was pulling him out of the club at the end of the night, he slipped me his number." Helen Meske, the friend who asked about the couple's meeting, said the story was "so sweet."
This story is telling in a number of ways, but I don't think it's right to assume that choosing not to disclose something need in itself always raises the specter of "the closet" that looms over gay life. I remember reading an article by Samuel Delany in which he said that the concept of "coming out of the closet" needed to be expansive enough to encompass choosing not to come out to someone. Yes, it's sanitizing one's experience. But gays have no monopoly on sanitizing our experiences - and weddings perhaps illustrate this best of all. Is queer politics a contest, with prizes reserved only for those who are maximally transgressive?
2. In this vein, George Chauncey provides a useful reminder in Why Marriage? that except in the context of gay people, the concept of assimilation is for all practical purposes dead:
If the original gay advocates of marriage had seen it as an instrument of gay liberation and social transformation, many of marriage's most famous advocates in the early 1990s, such as the New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, saw marriage as a means of mainstreaming gay culture. [Even today, BTW, Sullivan was still the only gay political voice on 20/20 last week.]...Such arguments produced a strong reaction from Michael Warner and other gay men and lesbians who felt making marriage a central movement goal (or even supporting it) would dishonor the innovative forms of intimacy that had taken shape in queer culture. Stigmatizing such alternatives was the last thing they wanted.
If one side embraced marriage's symbolic power to assimilate gay couples into the mainstream of American life, another side resisted it as an assimilationist retreat from the radical aspirations of gay liberation. That debate revealed genuine and growing disagreements among gay activists, but it also often seemed to me to misconstrue the likely significance of securing marriage in part because of the way it used the term 'assimilation.' Historians once used the term to describe the process by which Mexicans, Asians, European Catholics, and other immigrants were absorbed into American culture and became indistinct from it, as they shed all signs of their difference from the national norm. Although that framework still underpins the debate over gay assimilation, it has been refashioned by theorists of ethnicity, who recognize that even as immigrants were reshaped by their incorporation into American culture, so too was American culture. Securing marriage will have significant symbolic implications, but they will be more complex than the debate over assimilation usually allows. Just as problematic, neither side in the assimilation debate paid much attention in the 1990s to the tangible rights, benefits, and protections conferred by marriage. That would soon change....In the 1980s and early 1990s, few people who were debating the desirability of marriage so fervently thought there was much prospect of it becoming available to gay couples anytime soon. (pp. 121-22)
3. As I thought this over, I thought of an article by Pat Califia that I first encountered in 1998, while I was volunteering at an HIV/AIDS program in Philadelphia, which I found very influential:
The sad fact is that if all gay men settled down into pairs like animals clambering into Noah's ark, a world of possibilities would disappear. A culture that embraces nonmonogamy, casual public sex, erotic art, sex toys, costuming and a theatrical attitude toward pleasure is a national treasure, not a shameful anachronism.
Twenty years ago, who could have predicted that any gay activist worthy of the name would be preaching the same values as Anita Bryant?....And so now there are gay activists who say we need to shut the bathhouses, stop partying and devote our efforts to winning a legal right to gay marriage. They tout marriage as a means to maturity, monogamy, membership in the mainstream and, ultimately, as an escape from the epidemic, and they have little faith in condoms, safe sex or a vaccine....Same-sex couples absolutely ought to be allowed to marry. And for those who choose it, monogamy is a valid boundary to set. But the gay men advocating marriage and monogamy as our only hope of salvation from the scourge of AIDS haven't done their homework. They act as if AIDS were the only sexually transmitted, fatal disease that ever existed. But what about syphilis?
Last spring I said several times that I thought queers should come together in support of the right to marry for those who desire it, but that it must remain together when the battle concerns our right to have kinky sex. I still think so - and as time goes by, I find this viewpoint less contradictory than I once did. In part, Califia wrote at a time when Andrew Sullivan's interpretation of the meaning of marriage was virtually the only one getting any widespread play in the queer press. Today there are many more voices speaking today about the significance of marriage, and few of them have much to say about monogamy (though my friend Liz's recent piece in a new book on marriage does; more on that after I've read it). It has never quite seemed plausible to me to assume that marriage would transform gays but not the other way around.
4. And now, for a dose of reality - disturbing in some respects, but heartening in others - here's Scott McClellan on states' rights (Nov. 29):
[...] Go ahead Terry. Let me go to Terry, and then I'll come to you, David.
Q The United States Supreme Court declined to take the appeal from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruling that allowed for same-sex couples to get married in Massachusetts . What's the President's reaction to that?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the President continues to emphasize the importance of moving forward on a constitutional amendment that would allow the people's voice to be heard and not allow this issue to be decided by activist judges or local officials who seek to redefine what is a sacred institution. The American people strongly support protecting the sanctity of marriage. I think you can look to the recent elections in 11 states to see the kind of broad support there is for protecting the sacred institution.
And the President remains firmly committed to moving forward on a constitutional amendment that would allow the voice of the people to be heard and involve states in this process. And that's different from allowing the activist judges to redefine this without the people's voice being heard.
Q But the activist -- the judges of the United States Supreme Court, the Justices just said this is something for the states, that we aren't going to get involved in this. And 11 states are doing it. Why does the President want --
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think -- I don't think that they were looking at it from the federal law perspective, but looking at it from the state law perspective of the Massachusetts court. So we need to separate those out. You do have the Defense of Marriage Act in place, which the President strongly supported. There is some question of whether or not that will be upheld over time. And the President believes that this is an enduring institution in our society. That's why he has fought to move forward on a constitutional process that would allow the states and the people in those states to be involved in this decision.
Q But I'm just wondering why the President thinks that federal judges are going to overturn, or "federalize" the Massachusetts decision to allow same-sex couples to get married. One of the arguments the President made was that a federal court might get involved. Isn't this a strong signal from the highest federal court that this is a matter reserved to states?
MR. McCLELLAN: I don't think I would necessarily look at it that way. Again, I think they were looking at it from the state law perspective, not the federal law perspective. It was not something brought under the Defense of Marriage Act.
Q And so the President's position -- just to get this right -- is that if a state wants to decide through a majority vote that it will allow for same-sex marriages, the President wants to have the federal government smash that down and make sure that no state can decide that, right?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I think that you're talking about what activist judges are doing right now. The activist judges are seeking to redefine marriage for the rest of society, and the people's voice is not being heard in this process. That's why the President is committed to moving forward with Congress on a constitutional amendment that would protect the sanctity of marriage and allow the people's voice to be heard in this important debate facing our society.
Q But it would only allow -- it would give victory to the people who support that definition of marriage, wouldn't it? Because if the state --
MR. McCLELLAN: There are 11 states that recently voted on this very issue, and they voted to ban same-sex marriages overwhelmingly in those states. And I think if you look at any number of indications, there is overwhelming support across the United States for protecting the sanctity of marriage.
Q Just to get this straight. The President does not want to allow the people of a state to decide to allow for gay marriage. In other words, he wants a federal constitutional amendment that would stop a majority in the state --
MR. McCLELLAN: He supports the constitutional amendment --
Q -- from voting.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and the constitutional process would allow the state's voice to be heard.
David, sorry, go ahead. [...]
1 comment:
Actually, the comparison to ethnic and racial assimilation is a very good one, but not in the way Chauncey thinks. African Americans in particular were urged for about a century to stop demanding fundamental alterations in a white supremacist national order, and to simply 'assimilate' -- that is, to lose as much of their distinctive traditions and values and 'noxious' difference while remaining in conveniently subordinated positions in the labor force and cultural economy. It was only when black Americans rejected the illusion of assimilation, and demanded a fundamental transformation in the meaning of American democracy -- by extending its meaning in ways that a majority of this country still seems unprepared to deal with -- that significant, if incomplete, headway was made. Queers have about as much of a chance at transforming marriage through assimilating to it as blacks had of transforming white supremacy by assimilating to it, and I'm choosing my analogy carefully. Nikhil Singh's Black is a Country is good on this point.
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