Happy Valentine’s Day: Gay Marriage
Posted on | February 9, 2010 | 9 Comments
I like being married. I was married for 14 years and even though that didn’t work out at all (as readers of my book well know), I ended up meeting a fantastic woman following my divorce and three years and a few months after I’d become single, I got married again. (If a really bad marriage doesn’t put you off marriage, you obviously just like it.)
So for Valentine’s day and in honor of my own marriage, I’d like to say a few words about why I am passionately in favor of extending marriage rights to gay and lesbian Americans and then I will propose a strategy for getting to that goal sooner.
Why am I for gay marriage? Doubtless, marriage is not for everyone, and many deeply committed relationships survive and thrive without it, but when chosen, the institution of marriage sends a signal to your community, family, friends and government that you’re not just giving this person a try because you like the cut of their jib, but rather that you are building something important. With or without kids, a marriage makes a family and a family is the essential building block of our society. By making it illegal for gay men and women to be married, we as a people are saying to them, loud and clear, “Your relationships are not important and you are not in any way a family, maybe just a weird parody of a family but no way are you a real family.” This is an intolerably cruel and an un-Christian thing to say. We must stop saying it.
I fully believe that, fifty years from now, gay marriage will be commonplace and the folks of the future will find it hard to believe that gay people couldn’t choose to commit to one another like everyone else. (It’s hard for me to believe that during my lifetime miscegenation laws were still in the books, disallowing black people from marry white people.) Legal movement takes time and I fully support the efforts that are being made to change the laws. But I believe it’s possible to mount a parallel campaign, not in the courts or the ballot-box but in the hearts of Americans who currently do not think that gay relationships are important.
The campaign I propose is so simple that I’m sure people are doing it already: Say that you are married.
That’s it really. If you are in a committed relationship where you’d make it legal if you could, just say it out loud, live it, be it. Don’t wait for judges or legislators or voters to give you permission to do it. Take it. Here’s how you get married. I’m qualified to tell you because I’ve done it, twice:
1. Throw a party. (Don’t tell me you can’t do that.)
2. Invite everyone you know to the party.
3. Wear an outfit to the party that you will never wear again for the rest of your life.
4. Make your closest friends wear outfits that they will never wear again for the rest of their lives.
5. Have a friend or a minister or whoever run through a commitment ceremony of some kind. (If you want to get embarrassed about it later, make up your own vows.)
6. Exchange rings.
7. Drink and dance.
8. Most importantly, have someone photograph and videotape the entire thing.
But all that’s just the fun part and, if you’re tight on cash, can be skipped. Now that you’re married…
9. Put pictures of your wedding in your cubicle at work, if you can.
10. Show people your ring.
11. Complain about your in-laws and call them your “in-laws.”
11. Start referring to your husband or wife not as your “partner” but as your “husband” or “wife.” (And if you think that only sounds weird to you because you’re gay or lesbian, think again. It took me a year and a half of being married the second time before I stopped calling her my girlfriend.)
12. Finally, if your marriage falls apart, you can’t tell people you broke up. That sounds like you’re in high school. Tell people you got a divorce.
If you find this to be one of the stupidest and most condescending ideas you’ve ever heard of, keep in mind that George Bush and the New York Times started an entire war by repeatedly saying the words “Iraq” and “terror” in the same sentence until we just gave in and accepted the idea that terror was coming from Iraq, against all logic, all evidence and the advice of our allies. I believe that if every gay person in a committed relationship in this country started saying they were married, Americans would give in and, after going to war with Iraq again (because that’s never a bad idea), we would kindly accept the fact that gay relationships are important and good laws would follow.
But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not think of myself as tearing a page from the George Bush playbook and instead, with all humility, would rather say that I’m borrowing from the great Harvey Milk’s campaign to coax gay people out of the closet. His genius insight was that mainstream America could not hate gay people once they knew their faces. Similarly, I do not believe that mainstream America will deny marriage to gay people who already have husbands or wives.
When I was in corporate management, I promoted quite a few people over the years. In analyzing the pattern of who I promoted and who I didn’t, I noticed that I only promoted people who were already doing the job that I was interviewing them for. If a group leader was already doing most of the work of a supervisor, he or she would get the next supervisor position.
In the same way, you don’t need to interview for the marriage position: Gay men and women all over this country are already doing the job of being in strong committed relationships, raising children, taking care of elderly parents, doing everything that every family in this country does. Unfortunately, most of that family stuff is done out of the public eye. We obviously don’t see it well enough to understand that you deserve the promotion, so we need to hear about it.
I hope it doesn’t seem intolerably flippant for me (a man who is all but rubbing your face in it with the getting married and then divorced and then married again) to propose that you can solve a hurtful social injustice by a mere rhetorical strategy. I know that it’s easy for me to suggest it and a hundred, a thousand times harder for you to carry it off in your real life. I can only imagine the strength of character that it takes to be openly gay in this or probably any country.
I wouldn’t make the suggestion if I didn’t think that gay Americans had the kind of strength needed to pull this off. Why do I think that? Because you survived high school… as a gay person. I barely survived high school and I didn’t have the extra load of coming to terms with a not-universally-sanctioned sexual orientation. If you can survive high school as a gay person, what can you not do?
Thank you for reading.
Love and Happy Valentines Day!
Adrian Colesberry
Tags: Christianity > gay marriage > George Bush > Harvey Milk > marriage > Valentine's > weddings
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9 Responses to “Happy Valentine’s Day: Gay Marriage”
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February 11th, 2010 @ 10:57 am
I know that it’s easy for me to suggest it and a hundred, a thousand times harder for you to carry it off in your real life.
For what it’s worth, my wife and I are planning a party in which we’re declaring our undying devotion to our partner. We’re calling the party a wedding, exchanging rings, and calling her our wife.
If we can do it, gay folks certainly can, too.
February 11th, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
I love that you are a pro-gun polyamorist and I say that with no irony or sarcasm. Our political discourse creates this illusion that we’re bunkered into predictable demographics, when reality is much less predictable, comfortingly so.
February 17th, 2010 @ 6:19 am
I’m mainly just pro-let-people-make-their-own-damn-decisions.
February 17th, 2010 @ 7:02 am
You’ve written what gay and lesbian Americans can do. What I’ve always thought would help, too, is for more people to say they are gay or lesbian, whether they are only 5% or not at all. The sheer numbers would overwhelm the status quo. Exactly how gay do you have to be? At some point the labels become meaningless.
February 17th, 2010 @ 12:39 pm
“Exactly how gay do you have to be?”
Hilarious… and true. I totally agree that we’d be better off if people were more “out” in a lot of the areas of our lives. Bill Maher, in Religulous, points out that more Americans are agnostic/athiest than you’d imagine (16%) because most agnostics are closeted, or perhaps respectfully silent in deference to religious friends and neighbors. The idea that a mass coming out would overwhelm the status quo and provide critical support to the gay rights movement is Harvey Milk’s. It is an extraordinary concept. Milk was an extraordinary man. I cannot agree more that labels are meaningless. The whole gay vs. straight thing is less than 150 years old and I don’t think it has been a very helpful way for us to think about one another.
Thanks for your comment.
February 17th, 2010 @ 1:12 pm
Quite so. One of the strongest arguments against the Bill of Rights, as I remember it, was that any listing of rights would imply, wrongly, that the rights listed were the only rights we had. As opposed to what was already true: that the people have the right to do anything and everything that is NOT specifically abridged by law. But while our stated system of law is very let-people-make-their-own-damn-decisions, there’s something quite censorial about our social beingness that draws us towards restrictive norms. Don’t understand or like it.
February 17th, 2010 @ 5:20 pm
And the Ninth and Tenth Amendments explicitly state that we retain all powers not given to government, and government routinely ignores that.
I respect Hamilton’s _philosophy_ of avoiding the singling-out of rights that the BoR has to do, but I’m still glad he didn’t have his way. If we hadn’t gotten the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th in writing, I think we’d be in much worse shape than we are.
February 17th, 2010 @ 6:07 pm
I confess, I remember seeing the 1984 documentary about Harvey Milk, and have carried the idea since then, I’m sure. I’d forgotten where I got it.
Also what I try to do is remember my married gay friends’ anniversary. It’s real to me.
February 17th, 2010 @ 6:30 pm
Such a great documentary. A real American hero.