Left Center Left

Last year, Gay Pride had me asking, “where have all the gay bars gone?” This year, the question, suggested by a friend’s comment last night, is: has gay marriage been a bad thing for Massachusetts?

Not bad in the way right wingers mean, of course, what, with the epidemic of divorce, self-mutilation, childsnatching and God know what else they imagined was going to happen upon legalization of gay matrimony. No, straight folks have gotten along fine since the Goodridge decision; it’s the gay people themselves that’s the issue. In Massachusetts, marriage seems to have exacerbated the rapid decline of the gay ghetto (the oldest extant drag bar in the country, Jacques, now has to shill for customers at hetero bridal fairs), has helped create a profusion of conservative gays, and has become a one-dimensional definer of the community and its political platform. Marriage can’t be blamed for every decline in local gay culture or for every dissociation of gay collectivity from any larger purpose of social justice, of course, but the historical correlation is no mere coincidence.

For these reasons, some are downright hostile to gay marriage. Alex at Queer Today offers a radical critique of marriage as a heteronormative, patriarchal institution, and further asserts that the marriage fixation has meant tangible harm to queer communities. Others might stop short of the radical refusal of marriage per se, but express misgivings; Jason, for instance, think the rhetoric of equality is a dead-end for the gay community. Both the radical and the leftist positions strike me as far more in the minority than they were even a decade ago, when gay marriage was an abstraction. Nonetheless, as the most progressive and leftish of straight people tend to militate for gay marriage, left-leaning gays themselves are far more likely to have misgivings with gay marriage.

I’m sympathetic to all the arguments above, and I’m not sure I’m happy with the cultural direction Boston’s gay community had taken post-marriage-rights. But, all told, gay marriage is a worthwhile goal politically - one that exceeds the drawbacks. Some reasons and thoughts:

• While I don’t fetishize assimilation or want to push for it prematurely, I do think that integration into the larger kinship networks and social structure of society - at least insurance that homophobic rejection, stigma and marginalization isn’t the cause of our segregation - should be the endgame of gay politics. In short, I don’t buy the radical critique or a political fetishization of the marginal and the oppositional.
• Gay marriage has the advantage of a certain “multiplier effect”… marriage’s multifaceted nature means that it will make visible a bunch of secondary and tertiary exclusions that gay people face in daily life and in their dealings with the state, exclusions that gays are often (not always) aware of but are sometimes hard to communicate to a broader public. I can’t imagine any other political move that would have paid such dividends, and if gay folks are going to spend resources (time and money and political energy) for political ends, as opposed to purely philanthropic ones, they’d be fools not to take advantage of an amazing dialectical window in History. They don’t come around too often.
• We shouldn’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Sure, it would be great if our society was less sex-phobic in the face of gay people and if moralistic forces didn’t treat as less than human people outside a narrow conception of coupledom. But in practice, our political choice isn’t between said society and a sex-phobic, moralistic one, it’s been a sex-phobic, moralistic society that extends its institutions and laws to gay people as gay people and one that excludes them but in which some might use the exclusion to eventually topple certain deep-set cultural institutions. Given the beleagured minority of folks who even know the radical, gay liberation position much less agree with it, to stick to the latter strategy seems to me irresponsible.
• Despite the explicit “just like them” mentality of assimilationists, assimilation doesn’t usually mean total absorption into the dominant culture. Just look at immigrant cultures. Even when people try to ape straight marriage, they create their own thing. That’s fine with me.

I suspect my friends see me as a Pollyanna on this issue. And I suspect straight readers of this blog see this hand wringing as some sort of gay Krimlinology.