Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage

The rise of gay marriage as a civil rights issue and the emerging cultural prominence of a variety of ceremonial forms aimed at solemnizing gay relationships in public and religious contexts pose vexing questions for the project of constituting gay existence as a phenomenon bearing distinct cultural or national insignia . Marriage is uncomfortably familiar gay men from our experience in the mainstream our failure to marry is for many of us the very thing that has marked our difference from our heterosexual contemporaries . Many of us recall weddings as

excruciating exercises in invisibility , events that required us to listen politely as heterosexual relationships were glorified while we knew that our own commitments would never be recognized as worthy of such celebration . So gay marriage can be perplexing both for the gay individual and for the scholar of gender and sexuality . Does it constitute courageous repudiation of the notion that only persons of different sexes may marry , and as such can it be construed as outright resistance to heterosexism ? Or does it represent instead simple accommodation to the norms of the straight world , a calculated effort to win acceptance by somehow fitting in

Not all gays see same-sex marriage as a welcome development . In fact the debate over the legal status of relationships has in some ways galvanized a wider debate over the embrace or repudiation of difference that has been raised with regularity since the start of the gay liberation movement . In the conservative argument for gay marriage there is an implicit and often explicit denigration of radical attempts to challenge marriage and the family . During the early days of both the women 's movement and the gay movement , a critique of the family and marriage was integral to a critique of patriarchy and heterosexism . The Gay Liberation Front made a statement in 1969 , right after Stonewall that was crystal clear in its denunciation of marriage : `We expose the institution of marriage as one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system (Eskridge 53 . But for many others , these are glorious statements of which we are proud . They indicate a thoughtful and thoroughgoing critique of social institutions that have played a serious role in the subjugation of women and the enforcement of heterosexuality . To be liberated from these institutions - and then perhaps to create new and sturdier ones - seems a worthy and ethical goal . For if marriage itself reinforces structural inequalities within families , it also `privileges ' stateregulated long-term pairing over other forms of intimacy and connectedness . Many in the gay movement have been critical of marriage not only for its gender inequity and history of violence , but for the ways it devalues other ways of being sexual loving and nurturing

If gays succeed in sanctifying the couple as the primary social unit the one that gets financial and legal benefits , does that set up a hierarchy of intimacy that replicates the heterosexual one , rather than challenging or altering it ? Gay marriage might grant visibility and `acceptance...