First Comes Love
It simply felt different, strolling through the Castro district the other night. Yes, boutique mannequins still sported black leather underwear. No, the neighborhood would not be easily confused with Anywhere, Kansas. What popped out, though, was tamer imagery: Store placards urging patrons to remember Father’s Day; children at play in Eureka Park; a bookstore’s counter display of Out magazine’s “June Wedding Issue,” the middle-aged men filing into the basement of the Most Holy Redeemer Church for bingo.
In short, the atmosphere was almost, well, familial--in striking contrast to a couple of decades ago, when the Castro emerged as the central province for this city’s gay population. At that rowdy, randy time a single theme dominated the district, and with all the subtlety of a Donna Summer backbeat: sex. Now in the Castro life seems more about housekeeping than bathhouses.
And indeed, here as elsewhere, the most prominent “gay issue” is same-sex marriage. A movement founded in a grab for sexual freedom now wants a try at the old ball ‘n’ chain. As one gay leader has put it: “For 20 years we fought for the right to be sexual. Now we are fighting for the right to love and create family.”
It does not take much imagination to grasp that this fight won’t be easy.
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President Clinton recently stated his opposition to legalized same-sex marriages. Bob Dole, for the record, doesn’t approve of them, either. Exhale, Libby. And lawmakers in dozens of statehouses, including Sacramento, have before them bills to declare null and void same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. This political flurry has been stirred by a court case in Hawaii that seems likely to produce--in a couple of years--a constitutional test. “A preemptive backlash” is how Evan Wolfson, a lawyer in the Hawaii case, characterizes the building ruckus.
While the particulars may be unique, the debate over same-sex marriages in a sense promises simply another version of what has become the solitary, overarching theme of American politics. Welfare, abortion, guns, drugs, affirmative action, taxation, motorcycle helmets--all these address the same, single question: What is the role of government anymore?
Oddly enough, the same politicians who roared that it’s un-American for government to force helmets on motorcycle riders assert that it’s perfectly American for Big Brother to bless marriages. Or not. To support this view, they tend to quote the Bible more than the Constitution.
They tend also to talk much about family values. Apparently, when these elected parsons preach family values, they aren’t referring to gays who would value families of their own. The purpose of marriage, after all, is to create children--forgetting, of course, that vasectomies are among the most popular elective surgeries in the land. Besides, same-sex marriages would dilute the insurance pool.
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Distinctions between religious and secular marriages always have been muddled. The history winds back through the American Puritans and Henry VIII and the early Romans and beyond. Today, Americans who partake in a traditional church wedding are married twice. Once by the pastor. Once by the government. And the two don’t necessarily honor each other’s decrees. For instance, what the God of the Catholic Church joins together, the state is empowered to put asunder--whether the pope likes it or not.
Proponents of same-sex marriages are fighting at present for secular marriages. Exhale, John Paul. They were buoyed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in May to void a Colorado measure denying gays protection from discrimination: “A state,” the court declared, “cannot deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.” What they say they want--beyond equal treatment--is access to the legal machinery of marriage, and also divorce. Gay partners who split now often must endure what one attorney called “a legal free-for-all” over houses and silverware and everything else.
This desire for a crack at what the country singer calls Big-D-and-I-don’t-mean-Dallas has raised for some love-scarred spectators a perplexing question: Why with so many marriages dying in misery would anybody fight to join the funeral procession? As Katha Pollitt observed last month in The Nation:
When gay friends argue in favor of same-sex marriage, I always agree and offer them the one my husband and I are leaving. Why should straights be the only ones to have their unenforceable promise to love, honor and cherish trap them like houseflies in the web of law? Marriage will not only open up to gay men and lesbians whole new vistas of guilt, frustration, claustrophobia, bewilderment, declining self-esteem, unfairness and sorrow, it will offer them the opportunity to prolong this misery by tormenting each other in court.
Yeah, well, sure, but....
