THE CULTURE WARS : Of Gay Marriage and the Heartbreak Kid: Learning to Live With Normalization

We live in a time when revolution has been discredited. We are more comfortable now with an evolutionary model, believing that rapid transformation may lead to terrible, costly mistakes--an idea not without merit. There is certainly an ecology of social construction, an infinite complexity to which revolutionary moments cannot help but do violence.

We are, however, easily blinded to the great attrition slowness exacts as its price; and to the threat of real regression--as we have witnessed in these reactionary times. If the homosexual liberation movement commits itself--to the extent a polyphonous, hydra-headed movement can be spoken of in such singular terms--to the principle of securing the right to wed legally, the movement’s character and its dreams will be changed in the process. For those who envision the work ahead as slow, painstaking transformation from within, gentling society into improving itself, marriage is the most important step in the normalization of lesbians and gay men. There are those of us who feel an abiding disappointment at such ambitions, who feel that becoming “normal” is a process akin to becoming “digestible.”

Maybe I’m just grumpy because, marriage-schmarriage, I’m enjoying dating these days, and I don’t wanna husband-shop. God knows I’m gay enough, but the gay-marriage monogamy model has never fit me well, and, yes, I’m colossally leery of marching behind a banner: “Better Wed Than Dead!” I’m a little suspicious, in a cranky sort of way, when I hear lesbians and gay men mooning on about couples--as if being a member of a queer marriage indicated special distinction rather than choice. In the gay male world, there are already too many irksome aristocracies: of looks, of talent, of race, of gender. A Relational Aristocracy, such as single heterosexuals complain of, doesn’t seem the sort of thing we need to valorize.

In a 1993 decision, the state Supreme Court of Hawaii opened the door to a constitutional rethinking about same-sex marriage by conceding that denying millions of citizens the freedom to legally marry their partners of choice might be a violation of guaranteed rights. The case in question was returned to the lower courts for further adjudication; and the pending trial could blow down the barricades against the inarguably just, democratic option of letting homosexual partners wed. Again, this is unarguable, unless you are crazy and stupid (in which case you have probably stopped reading this)--or you are President Bill Clinton.

I voted for the guy, I even danced at the White House with my best girlfriend, Michael Mayer. I’ll be voting for him again. I have to--though he really pushed it last week when his press secretary, Mike McCurry, let it be known that Clinton opposes same-sex marriages because he thinks “we need to do things to strengthen the American family.” To which one can only respond: “Huh?” Or, as Larry Kramer once said to Ronald Reagan: “Boooooooooooo!!!!!!”

The Hawaii case focused media attention on same-sex marriages, and this gave the GOP congressional leadership a bright idea. Poll after poll told these Machiavels that, although the American people were generally ill-disposed toward the out-and-out fag-bashing engaged in by Patrick J. Buchanan and others at the ’92 Republican coven, I mean convention, the public is ostensibly equally disinclined (about 70%) to allow homosexuals to marry.

We all know what happened when Clinton took a bumbling but initially principled stand on another manifestly just proposition--that homosexual soldiers shouldn’t be thrown out of the army because their fellow warriors are afraid to shower with them. Handled by the White House with maximum ineptitude, it was a public-relations meltdown. Bob Dole, the GOP’s presidential dark horse, is running less impressive poll results these days than even queer marriages, so again the GOP has decided to try to beat Clinton by transforming him into a champion of lesbian and gay rights. Oh, if only he were.

If their cynical stratagem works, Clinton will lose to Dole, because the Republicans’ homophobia pandering riles up the loony right and gets them out to vote in numbers; but it could also work because Clinton’s Slick-Willying on this issue will thoroughly disgust what’s left of his support in the homosexual community and other progressive communities--look for more Democratic waffling on affirmative action and taxation. Then all anyone will remember is that Clinton was successfully linked to pro-queer politics and lost. The possibility that the president might say, “Let the homos marry, folks. It’s the sane, intelligent and just plain decent thing to do,” is considered a science-fiction scenario by pundits and politicians alike--people so used to holding their noses against the noisome smell of moral turpitude that their brains shriveled from oxygen deprivation.

I don’t know if Clinton would hurt his chances for reelection if he took the moral high ground. He might. But the moral high ground has proved appealing (surprise!) on other issues--such as not depriving the old and sick of Social Security and health care. It all depends on how entrenched is this lazy popular distress at the prospect of same-sex married couples. Virtually the same percentages of poll respondents oppose discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation. So the opposition is not as deeply rooted as the right anticipates. Only a pitched battle, led by real leaders, will tell.

In the lesbian and gay community, the appetite for this particular pitched battle is variously held to be strong and weak. The conservative, or neo-conservative, or crypto-neo-moderate-liberal (or whatever it now calls itself) homosexual opinion, emphatically favoring a push for same-sex marriage, is expressed thoughtfully by Andrew Sullivan, in his book “Virtually Normal,” and by William Eskridge Jr., in the more recent “The Case For Same Sex Marriage.” The argument goes something like this: Legally sanctioned marriage, in addition to being constitutionally mandated, is both an all-important and practically the only achievable beachhead against homophobia, and critically necessary in the process of “civilizing” both promiscuous queers and their bigoted adversaries. Neo-whatnot enthusiasm is endorsed by writers such as homosexual ideological gadfly (I use this term with respect) Michelangelo Signorelli, who wants to see a widespread, militant response to the demand for same-sex marriages. But such militancy is unlikely: There is a profound ambivalence toward the whole concept of marriage in the queer community.

This ambivalence has been articulated by progressive writers ranging from Frank Browning in the New York Times, to Katha Pollitt (heterosexual, cool with queers) in the Nation, to Urvashi Vaid in her book “Virtual Equality.” There is a multifaceted reluctance to embrace monogamy and coupledom as the aims of a movement born out of a moment of radical disruption and revolutionary energy. The liberation of homosexuals has, as part of its tradition and history, a utopian expectation of its vast socially transformative potential--to make queers free, or anyone free, the argument goes, the world must be changed. The repression and perversion of human sexuality can only be undone by radical experimentation with all forms into which sexuality is forced, including, of course, marriage.

This experimentation is naturally going to be inconclusive, controversial, fraught with risk. Not every experiment will be endorsable; nor will a simple sexual libertarianism answer every question--legal, psychological and ethical--such experimentation is bound to raise. There is literally no aspect of human experience that remains untouched and unexamined by a sexual revolution; revolutions are frightening--and perhaps necessary for the advancement of the species.

It’s too early to close the book on the radical potential of human sexuality, or on the intriguing thought that the project undertaken by all participants in the sexual revolution to discover new relational models--hopefully less colonized by commodity production, less dedicated to the reproduction of the world as it is currently constituted--that this project is worth the risks and ought not be preempted in a rush to respectability. Perhaps there is a collectivity sexuality can help us discover; perhaps there is a fundamental connection between individualism and monogamy; perhaps all this is too romantic; but I think the experiments are worthwhile.

But one can’t always choose one’s struggles, and in the meantime there’s the political--which is about straddling contradictions for the sake of not letting progress die. Which means fighting for our right to wed--or rather fighting against the anti-democratic ugliness of denying us this right. I engage in this as a struggle for democracy and pluralism, against majoritarian tyranny, against religious fundamentalism, against cynical pandering politicians--about which things I feel no ambivalence whatsoever.

And the times are changing. The papers on Thursday brought the news that, by sticking to the high ground, Bishop Walter Righter has brought the Episcopalian Church around to the position that gay priests can be ordained. We’re going to win. Clinton should know that he’s siding with the dinosaurs, and that giant sucking sound he hears is the tar pit of the past, pulling him under.

In 1992, progressive, sane and intelligent people got together and decided, after 12 years of Reaganite/Bush-League craziness, “enough is enough,” and so we inaugurated what we thought was a New Era--but which proved to be merely a New Nanosecond. We elected Clinton, the Heartbreak Kid, president. And for about a week, in between the election and his first day in office, he seemed prepared to lead the country back to that uphill-climbing road toward progress, democracy, justice, all so deeply out-of-fashion nowadays.

Politics means, I suppose, clamping my fingers around my nostrils and sticking by the Heartbreak Kid, in the desperate hope that he might once again be the man we almost once imagined he could grow into. Hoping for Nothing is a nasty business, but in politics, in evolutionary rather than revolutionary times, Hoping for Nothing may be the only alternative to utter despair. Not voting is an act of despair. Dole is the candidate of despair. We can’t say Clinton’s the Man from Hope anymore. I suppose we have to vote for him, in numbers, although we call him the Man from Hope for Nothing. And maybe, through our desperate hoping, that Nothing will transform. God, I sound like an abused spouse in deep denial, don’t I? Ah, the blessings of marriage. No really, I can’t wait!*