Across the country, many gays are smarting after a hefty slab of
California's voters took the opportunity last month to say "no, absolutely
not" to the notion of gay marriage. But the dismay is tempered by other gays
asking, "Why did we ever want the sacred institution in the first place?"
Still militantly campaigning for gay marriage is Eric Rofes, who teaches in
the department of education at Humboldt State. Rofes says it's now time to
take the gloves off. "Some of us have grown impatient, and are no longer
satisfied with strategies which fail to directly confront mainstream
resistance to same-sex marriage. We may take up the tactics most necessary
for social change but largely absent from a contemporary queer movement
comprised almost entirely of suit-and-skirt lobbyists, splashy television
advertisements and upscale, black-tie dinner banquets."
So, what is item one on Rofes' new revolutionary agenda? He says gays
should boycott mixed-sex weddings. "These days, when I receive an invitation
to the marriage of heterosexual friends, family members or students, I am
filled with outrage. What nerve! Sending an invitation to me (and often, my
lover) with no reference to the fact that I am being asked to participate as
an observer in an event in which I legally am not permitted to be a central
participant! No note acknowledging the disparity and injustice, no sheepish
apology for participating in an institution of segregation, no phone call
checking in about the politics of it all."
We should put Rofes together with the Hallmark company or with Miss
Manners, and together, they can amend the old-fashioned wedding invite in
the direction desired by Rofes, with similar apologetic language about
possible offense caused to other groups. Rofes says gays should start
picketing weddings, holding demonstrations outside newspapers that run
marriage columns, and disrupting television shows such as "Who Wants to
Marry a Multimillionaire?" or "The Newlywed Game," "which are conceptualized
around an institution currently founded on exclusivity and bigotry."
Rofes hopes for coordinated days of action when same-sex couples attempt to
register at the local county clerk's office. He also urges gays to go to
big-time, glitzy weddings of politicos or celebs "silently holding up signs
stating 'Participation in Marriage is Participation in Injustice' or 'Saying
I Do when We Can't Equals Bigotry,' or crashing local wedding ceremonies at
the moment where the officiator asks for any objections, and standing up and
reciting a speech about the shameful inequity of access to marriage." He add
that straights should burn their marriage licenses as a sign of solidarity
and protest.
What's so sad about Rofes' "call to action" is the conventionality of his
world view. It's like the gay fashion, some years ago, for wearing shirts or
jackets with the insignia of a sheriff's deputy. The rationale used to be
that gays were thus undermining heterosexism by snugging their antinomian
bodies into the vestments of the oppressor, but mostly, it seemed to me more
of a yearning to be a cop rather than an outlaw, armed with all the
authority and sanction of the state.
As Jim Eigo, a writer and activist whose thinking was very influential in
the early days of ACT UP put it, "What's the use of being queer if you can't
be different? Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike
a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than
others? Under its terms, gays who are willing to mimic heterosexual
relations, and enter into a legally enforced lifetime sexual bond with one
other person will be granted special benefits and status to be withheld from
those who refuse such domestication. Marriage has no more place in efforts
to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this
juncture in history, wouldn't it make more sense for us to try to figure out
how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"
So, there could be twin gay demonstrations at weddings, with one lot
calling on the about-to-be-weds to desist until gays can themselves tie the
legal knot, and the other lot urging the straights to hold back from this
pact with oppression and enslavement.
The high rate of divorce may have something to do with the eagerness of
gays for legal marriage. As Eigo points out, "Maybe the promise of gay
divorce accounts for the fact that gay lawyers constitute the front line of
the campaign to install gay marriage." He favors a do-it-yourself approach
to knot-tying, calling for ceremonies by private, social or religious groups
to make public expression of those commitments, "enhancing the meaning and
pleasure of our lives: a panoply of dyke and fag pageants."
Eigo also makes the sound point that in this society, access to health care
still depends largely on whom you work for or who your spouse is. Should
gays really want to reinforce this inequality by introducing state-enforced
gay marriage? In the age of AIDS, should gays further institutionalize
health care's dependence on marriage, abandoning many gay people, including
those with HIV -- without health care and without spouse -- to hopelessness?
I like the outlook of Bill Dobbs, an attorney and gay activist in New York:
"Marriage works by shaming those who do not partake. Listen to the rhetoric
of the proponents of marriage -- or the opponents of gay marriage.
Mirror-image madness. Of course, the straight, liberal thing these days is
to endorse marriage for the gays -- so much for the feminist analysis of
that institution. Boyd McDonald said that if gays ran the world, it would be
just as sordid as it is with straights in charge. What I call freedom from
marriage is a very precious thing. We need to continue to craft ways that
people who wish to consider themselves kin can do so -- but not at the
expense of single people."
To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other
columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com.
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