Getting Beyond Gay Marriage

Imagining a future for myself was one of the hardest things to do when I was first coming out of the closet. Before admitting I was gay, I thought I knew exactly what my ideal future would look like: a large family, a nice house, a good job, and, of course, a loving wife. It was this powerful notion that kept me so fearfully in the closet for so many years. If being gay meant giving up those things, those traditional markers of success and respect, then I wanted nothing to do with being gay. But as my sexuality became something I had to deal with, the conscious and unconscious standards which I held for my idyllic future started to come crashing down around me—and I was devastated.

I remember all the questions that flooded my thoughts. What will my family look like? Will I be able to have children? Where will I be able to live? Do I even want any of those things as they are normatively conceived? But I came to realize more and more that these questions are hardly unique to LGBT people. In fact, many of us—whatever our sexual orientation—leave college disillusioned at the hollowness of traditional expectations for our lives, while simultaneously emboldened by the ability to recognize that we want something different and better for ourselves. Many of us commit to not making the mistakes of our parents, or not to falling for the same illusory goals and norms. In many ways, the power of being queer is being forced to recognize and act on these realizations. LGBT people don’t have a choice.

While non-LGBT people may find marriage disillusioning, coupledom limiting, and heterosexual sexual mores stagnating, they are nevertheless given social capital, societal respect, and communal adulation when they choose to conform. While queer people may lose social capital, economic incentives, and religious honors by being honest about our sexuality, we are forced to deal squarely with traditional practices and go through the arduously authentic process of re-conceptualizing them—a process that often leads to the formation of more individualistic and satisfying relationships and sexual paradigms.

Gay marriage is one of the many re-conceptualized relationships which has come out of this unique LGBT experience. If one of the hardest parts of coming out as gay was imagining a future for myself, a logical goal would seemingly be to expand traditional paradigms like marriage to include LGBT people. And a quick peek into the mainstream gay rights movement would certainly depict this as one of the ultimate goals of LGBT liberation.

Embracing marriage as an LGBT communal goal requires some serious consideration of what marriage both is and does, as LGBT people know all too well the damage and pain resulting from exclusionary hierarchies. Marriage is a system that purposefully doles out honors and admiration for some at the expense of others. It is taken to be a marker of “seriousness” and maturity—while adolescents date, people in serious relationships get married. A married man is a man with responsibility and honor. At its core, marriage superimposes heterosexist social, sexual, and gender paradigms onto its participants. And for playing its game, its participants get showered with social benefits—not the least of which are economic—and this impacts people of all sexual expressions, especially the growing number of us who choose more satisfying non-traditional paths, from living with our boyfriends full-time to experiencing an open relationship. Many Western European countries such as France have led the way in creating non-hierarchical legal relationship paradigms to give rights and responsibilities to a person’s chosen partner(s)—from lover to best friend.

Some claim that same-sex people getting married helps transform a socially constructed institution by expanding its definitions and altering its deeply-rooted heterosexual foundations. As well-meaning as this argument is, it is willfully ignorant of the intense underpinnings of marriage and its deep historical basis. Just because marriage is socially constructed doesn’t mean it will be easily socially reconstructed. LGBT people marrying will be less likely to change the institution of marriage than to be changed by it. Gay marriage advocates are quite right in saying that same-sex marriage in no way threatens the institution of marriage, but actually strengthens and emboldens it.

While the gay rights movement has been quick to adopt marriage as a sign of its own maturation and its own desire to “be just like everyone else,” doing so severely undermines the very things which make being LGBT so powerful. Queerness has meant the ability to create refreshingly new paradigms for some of the most oppressive and narrow of social and sexual expressions. LGBT people have unique moral authority to bring new conceptualizations of gender and sexual expression to everyone, especially straight people. This doesn’t mean that LGBT people can’t or don’t want to engage in traditional paradigms, but rather that we should celebrate our unique ability to explore and create a diversity of options, including traditional ones.

Practically speaking, marriage in America isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. LGBT people should fight for our deserved full and comprehensive marriage rights. But our communal focus should be our unique ability to expand a narrow spectrum and fight for the most oppressed and disadvantaged among us. A focus on marriage runs the risk of overlooking the long list of other issues facing our community, from gentrification of our neighborhoods to our homeless youth. It’s time for all of us to get out of the marriage business and re-engage society with the exceptional, revitalizing new possibilities which queer people bring to the table.