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Why the Rush to Same-Sex Marriage? and Who Stands to Benefit?

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Why the Rush to Same-Sex Marriage? and Who Stands to Benefit? Public Relations: Why the Rush to Same-Sex Marriage? And Who Stands to Benefit? Julie Abraham The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 8. (May, 2000), pp. 12-14. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0738-1433%28200005%2917%3A8%3C12%3APRWTRT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L The Women's Review of Books is currently published by Old City Publishing, Inc.. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ocp.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Thu Dec 6 12:10:50 2007 the constituency and vocabulary of the find in any gay publication he has the gay and lesbian public." Who is to be part courage to pick up. As Bawer's passage of this new constituency? And who rep- indicates, the child in question is invariably relations resents that constituency? Do we want male and equally invariably in pain. Public marriage? Who is the "we" who might The child in question must be a boy, b_y Julie Abraham want marriage? All of these questions are and must be in pain, because anti- and inextricably linked. pro-gay marriage advocates agree that the goal of marriage is to improve the lives Why the rush to same-sex marriage? lmost all of the contributors to of males, through the civilization-that And who stands to benefit? the national media discussion of is, the domestication-of men. As Asame-sex marriage have been Warner notes, the subtitle of legal schol- white, and almost all have been male. ar William Eskridge's 1996 book, The Case Their subject is clearly gq marriage rather for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Libe~ grew up in a world in whch grls and in his view ra&cal alternative, to be than same-sex marriage.- But if same-sex to Ciuili~edCommitment, perfectly captures were less valued than boys. found among the queers who prefer to marriage becomes a possibility, the land- this assumption. The misery of the gay I Educating girls was understood to identie themselves in terms of their hos- scape will change irrevocably for lesbians boy child, with nothing before him but be a wasteful proposition-after all, they tility to heterosexual norms. He identifies as well as gay men. As the gay marriage the sexually excessive, emotionally empty, would just get married. The only women himself with the more radical queers. In rhetoric reveals, you can't have marriage profoundly self-destructive universe gay who did not marry were nuns and dutiful practice, this queer label seems to cover a without women, even if the subject is men naturally inhabit, becomes itself an daughters who stayed at home to care for range of more specific identities: leather- marriage between men. argument for gay marriage. Marriage will their agng parents. The nuns were anoth- men, androgynes, clones, circuit boys, The advocacy of gay marriage is relieve his suffering. er species; the dutiful daughters were dildo dykes, the transgendered, and so framed by the two central arguments The gay marriage advocates find pitied. I was pretty sure I did not want to on. The difference he is actually identify advanced by those opposed to it: first, that themselves with something of a problem be a nun. The prospect of staying at ing is between those who understand the goal of marriage is the production of at ths point, however. Heterosexual con- home forever was frankly terrifving. But I themselves to be defined by sex and children; and second, that the goal of mar- servatives such as Hadley Xrkes argue knew by the time I was ten years old that those who resist such an understanding. riage is the civilization of men. Gay mar- that "it is not marriage that domesticates I did not want to marry. As an advocate for a politics of sex, riage advocates must of course disagree men; it is women." Gay marriage advo- It took almost another decade before I however, Warner denies that there can be with the proposition that children are the cates must stake their all on the institu- understood that women could make lives any real escape from definition by sex. purpose of marriage. But they can claim, tion of marriage as in and of itself together. (h'ews traveled sloa,ly to isolat- Marriage may be presented as a way for as they do, that gays have children--chil- domesticating: the institution of mar- ed children in lower-middle-class lesbians and gays to neutralize the shame dren who need married parents. They can riage itself becomes the necessary female Catholic circles in the colonies.) That was of sex, and so escape the stigma of homo- also retain a child as a touchstone of their figure in the narrative of gay marriage. tu7enty years ago. To come out then was sexuality, but all that WLU be achieved, he &scussion-the gay- child who needs the And in fact the gay marriage advocates' to escape the prospect of marriage as believes, is a sham dipty paid for by the prospect of marriage in his future. trump card, the one they invariably flour- definitively-and who knows, perhaps repression of desire. At the same time, I began with reference to my own ish at this point in their discussions, is with as much relief-as if one had "any politics," he claims, "that makes full childhood because so many gay marriage that there are already legions of homo- become a nun. social membershp conditional on the pro- arguments begm with the figure of a chdd. sexuals epitomizing the domestic future hip childhood is hardly ancient hsto- prieties of the marital form is ultimately a The opening scene of conservative gay of same-sex marriage-long-term loving ry. Different versions of the fate vivid to way to pave over the collective world that journalist Bruce Bawer's A Place at the Tabh monogamous couples, free of any taint my ten-year-old self remain in place for lesbians and gays have made." is, as Warner points out, hard to overlook: of out-of-control sexuality, and perhaps many young girls in this country, not to Social membership is what is crucially an innocent (white, blond, middle-class, of any sexuality at all: the lesbians down mention most of the rest of the world. It at issue, and of interest, in Warner's argu- protected) boy hovers anxiously before a the block. This invocation of lesbians- is impossible for me to think about mar- ment. "The campaign for gay marriage," Grand Central Station newsstand, poised in Love Undetectable, Andrew Sullivan riage apart from either second-class sta- he points out, "is not so much a cam- on the verge of shame at--or corruption describes "lesbian culture" as "a tus for women or constraint. And in fact, paign for marriage as a campaign about by-the sexually explicit images he udl monogamist's dream of political and both second-class status for women and social community"-can also be traced in constraint are integral to much of the the work of Bawer, Gabriel Rotello in rhetoric fueling the current campaign for Sexual Ecology, Michelangelo Signonle in same-sex marriage in the United States. Books cited The Life Outside and others. My memories were prompted by read- Not only do you need women for ing Wchael Warner's recently published marriage, you apparently also need gen- Mchael Warner. The TroubL mth 1C'ormal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics discussion of contemporary lesbian/ of der norms. Women are only present in gay/queer politics, The Trouble iuith Queer L;fe New York: The Free Press, 1999, 227 pp., $23.00 hardcover. the gay discussions of marriage when Aromal, in conjunction with the predor11- identified with marriage. Even E.J. Graff, Bruce Bawer. A Place at the Table: The Gg Indindual in American Sociep. inantly gay, largely conservative, literature one of the very few lesbians with a of the past decade that he engages. New York: Poseidon, 1993. speaking part in this drama, frames her Warner argues-not always persuasive- advocacy of same-sex marriage with mchael Bronski. The Pleasure Ptinl;;ple:.Yex, Backhsh, and the Stmgqlefor ly-that political differences within the descriptions of herself and her partner. gay community cannot be explained as a Gajl Freedom. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Graff concludes her book, What is matter of Left vs. Right, separatist vs. Marriage For?, by proposing the celebra- Samuel R. Delaney. Tinles Square Red Times Square Blue.
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