By Kelly Cogswell
I don't know the exact
figure, but approximately a gazillion queers are getting gay married every week
in New York. I was at the marriage bureau a couple months ago to watch two
friends get hitched, and the usually echoing hall was packed, not with wealthy
gay white men cementing their fortunes, but with queers of all colors and ages
and genders claiming their new rights.
It sometimes took a minute to
spot the happy couples. Like others getting married, they were often surrounded
by their biological families, so hets generally outnumbered attending queers. Part
of me thought it was cool to see parents and siblings evolved enough to come, but
it was also a little creepy to see how easy it was to diminish the presence of queers,
even at our own weddings. Which is when I realized that this gay marrying thing
wasn't very gay after all.
I'm not sure what I expected.
Not rainbow flags, certainly, but not this deep wrenching, either, from the signing of the official documents to the chubby Latino guy named
Angel whispering the magic words.
Maybe it was because I'd
never seen my dyke friends that way before. Surrounded by family, they were
daughters and sisters and cousins, all the female roles defined by a still
traditional society in which the family tree is everything, and most
relationships are some vertical simulacrum. Until I came to New York from
Kentucky, I felt governed by my older sisters. My parents above them. Then
preachers and teachers and bosses. And all the rest.
I'd only been here a couple
years when I joined the Lesbian Avengers, and discovered a more horizontal
world. Age and inexperience were on equal footing as long as you dared to wear
a tee-shirt, "I was a lesbian child" or if you ate fire, or spoke out.
Almost all of the dykes I know now, I met during those years of meetings and
marches and demos. And in my most vivid memories, they are surrounded by their
own girl gang, rejoicing and fierce as creatures sprung from the head of Zeus,
and equal to anybody from a President to a prostitute.
Now there they are, in the
midst of their families. And the State is not the enemy but a party to the
event. I imagine that's partly why our straight relatives find it so
comforting, and are often the ones pushing for big weddings. Parents are excited
to see their daughters anchored and safe. Kids want to see their two parents take
their place, just like anybody else. The marriage contract is less as a link
between two people than between that pair and society at large, binding them and
dividing them at the same time.
You might get immigration
rights, and tax write-offs, but when the State joins you for better or worse,
richer or poorer, it also means you've had all the benefits you're going to get,
and are mostly on your own. If one gets sick, the other foots the bill while society
stands by until your last thin dime has been spent. Without a pre-nup, debts
are inherited more often than lotto winnings. Vultures circle when your
partner's at death's door.
In this respect, I like the services
that at least invoke a larger sense of the world. Back in the day, I remember a
pastor at a commitment ceremony talking about how we were gathered there as
community to help and support the couple. She laid a charge on us, as witnesses,
which I guess we failed: the couple broke up a couple years later. The only
blessing was that there was no need of lawyers to divide up the spoils.
I'm not arguing that same-sex
marriage is bad. I'm glad we have it, now. It has a symbolic meaning, and it's
useful. Equality always is. I'm just not
sure it's progress in a more essential way. It ropes us back into a world we
escaped at great cost. And for what? Most of the straight people I know aren't
happy in the land of matrimony. With rare exceptions, marriage seems like a
musty room with all the windows glued shut by responsibilities and routine. And often
acrimony. More than once I've gotten the impression that they are envious of my
exile. No rights. No obligations except moral ones.
It seems straight people,
too, long for some better way to organize their lives than this genealogy chart
mentality, and careful division into two's.
