on gay marriage (again)

Music: Suede: Head Music (1999)

Last night I was at a wonderful "Queeraoke" event and birthday party for a friend organized by the incomparable Katie Feyh. Shortly after the gay marriage bill passed in New York last night, I got to break the news to a queer bar full of tipsy people; they erupted in applause and hoots and hollers. Before I announced the news, I thought I might preface it with something like: "I know some of you are ambivalent about this, but very soon if you're queer you can . . . ."

I didn't add the preface, given the vibe at the moment. Folks wanted to celebrate, and another state recognizing same-sex unions is, in the end, perceived as a civil rights issue. And perhaps I didn't add the preface because a former student was at the bar, one of the brightest I've had at UT. I remember some years ago she came to my office very upset one day after lecture, and primarily because in class I had challenged the idea of gay marriage and suggested it was a "conservative" move. As a lesbian woman, she took umbrage to the fact that I claim to be an advocate for LGBT rights and recognition, and yet I waver on and question the issue of same sex marriage. It took me some time to explain my position (and even then she was not happy), as I suspect it does many folks who are ambivalent on the issue. In the wake of the historic decision by our friends in New York, I thought this might be a good time and place to reiterate the reason to be in favor of gay marriage, while nevertheless, also wary of the larger, ideological move a state-sanctioned recognition represents.

Here's the reason to support gay marriage: fairness, equality, protection, choice. I'm especially hung-up on the latter. If two people are in love and wish for the state to recognize their love in law, I believe they should have that right. As it stands, marriage is a discriminatory institution. By participating in marriage, I do not mean to suggest you are part of the problem---just that not everyone gets that right, and, well, that's not right. I will celebrate every state decision to make it legal. It is a civil rights issue, period.

That said, as I've written previously, same-sex marriage makes me uneasy because, at some level, it is a norming institution. That is to say, gay marriage is in some sense a kind of suburbanization of queerness, a "mainstream" sanction that may be dulling to the radical edge of queer politics. What do I mean?

Professor Katherine Franke had a plain- and well-spoken editorial a couple of days ago in the New York Times about the mixed blessing of legal same sex marriage. She does a great job explaining why same-sex marriage could become constraining (e.g., to get health care benefits, and so on): it forces loving relationships into a box. For decades, Franke explains, queer people have been defining their relationships outside of the watchful gaze of the state, relationships that challenge mainstream values and norms. Gay marriage threatens to "mainstream," and thereby constrain, these self-defined relationships.

I think Franke's slippery slope argument---that gay marriage may lead to requiring marriage for all couples---is a bit far-fetched. But I understand her point: there is an undercurrent of compulsion here, a yearning for normalcy that would trade in a radical potentiality for security.

Worse, as Judith Butler has argued, marriage discriminates against those for whom the plot of "the couple" chafes. Not all loving relationships are monogamous. Although I am personally, fiendishly monogamous (it's certainly a form of selfishness)---which is to say, I confess I don't "get it"---I have a number of friends who are "polyamorous" or are in "open relationships" and this, of course, is a plotline that deviates from the mental image of marriage proper. One of the vectors of queer politics concerns the plot of the couple, that the only route to happiness is to be paired up with someone until death do you part. This plot, of course, along with others (e.g., having children) comprise the very coordinates of American happiness (insofar is the couple is a plot that inheres in the symbolic itself, it is nigh impossible to disarticulate one's identity from this compulsory telos) for most people raised in U.S. culture. Gay marriage, in other words, reinscribes the cultural logic of the couple, a logic that has been used to oppress queer people since the nineteenth century (often in tandem with arguments to biological necessity).

These worries, however, are just worries. It's important to have worries, however. It's important that we think about our politics carefully so that we don't completely give into the conservative impulse that underwrites gay marriage. At the same time, I celebrate New York for aligning itself with the enlightened. Neither sexual orientation nor gender should be a barrier to someone's desire to have his or her love recognized and sanctioned by the state. Neither sexual orientation nor gender should be an impediment for legal protections and rights (e.g., visitation rights at the hospital). Neither sexual orientation nor gender should stand in the way of love, however you chose to define it.