Uneasy Reactions at a Wedding

So I just got back from the wedding of a friend of mine.

I think I don't like weddings.

I realized, first off, that this is the first wedding I've gone to in about five years. That one, in turn, was the first I had attended since my sisters some five years before that. In both of those affairs I was either so involved that I wasn't really watching it (the former) or the wedding itself was fairly untraditional (the latter). This seemed like the first traditional-type wedding where I was truly only a spectator. I was struck, first off, by just how many traditional ritual elements there were to the event and about how everyone seemed clued into these except me: when to stand, when to sit, when to applaud, when the cake gets cut, when the garter comes off, and on and on.

What really surprised me, though, was how the wedding celebration itself inspired a bit of, frankly, resentment in me. I'm pretty lucky; it is rare for me to feel keenly any of the various injustices associated with my sexuality. I can't give blood, but then, I don't really like needles (though of course I would if I could). I can't join the military, but then, I don't really want to. My work environment is quite liberal and accepting. My family is unnaturally cool. I know mentally that being gay means being part of an oppressed class, but I typically don't experience that oppression in a visceral way.

I usually have trouble, then, subscribing to the frustration that many GLBT activists feel toward marriage as a heterosexual privilege. Yes, I realize that heterosexuals alone get to be married in most places in the US, and yes, I think that inequality is wrong--but I don't begrudge people's wish to get married or people's having weddings. Indeed, I've always half-joked that I want a wedding myself for my partner and me. "Attention plus presents," I quip, "who wouldn't want that?"

I gotta say, though, that when the bride walked in and everyone ooo-ed and aaaahed, couples grasping each others' hands, eyes glistening, whispered reminiscences of their own--I felt, well, a bit left out, even a little resentful. This was not of course the couple's fault. The bride was beautiful, crying all the way down the aisle in her voluminous white gown. The groom read his wedding vows in her family's native language--no easy feat--while a groomsman held up English translations. Such moments were sweet, and I was and am happy for the couple.

But the event itself reminded me of how far away I am from my own partner, how our relationship doesn't get presents and attention and applause and adoration and an event all its own. It's crazy, this feeling, since I know that my friends, family, and co-workers would be more than happy to celebrate with my partner and I were we to throw a commitment ceremony shindig. It's crazy, also, because my partner is ethically opposed to our having a marriage ceremony.

In his scholarly work, he traces how marriage as a goal of the GLBT movement is a relatively new thing. Many of the gay and lesbian activists emerging in the sixties (especially after the Stonewall Riots) were actually quite opposed to gay marriage--not because they believed marriage was for heterosexuals alone but because they saw marriage as oppressive and GLBT politics as aiming at more than just-like-heterosexuality normalcy. They had a larger agenda on their horizon, not just an us-too/also-ran liberalism but a radical vision of a transformed society in which fundamental rights (e.g., access to health care, fair determination of child custody, access to loved ones) don't depend on the state's recognition or non-recognition of one's sexuality.

Marriage just wasn't part of this dream. Indeed, it was seen as an impediment to it. The notion of love as the raison d’être for marriage is historically quite new. Throughout most of recent Western history, heterosexual marriage has been not (or not primarily) a sign of enduring love between a man and a woman but a way of acquiring property, fomenting a subsistence workforce, cultivating a political lineage, or stabilizing tribal-familial-national relations. Women in such relations were considered property to some degree or another, unpaid labor to cook, clean, bear and raise children. It's not too long ago, remember, that courts in the US seriously pondered whether a husband forcing his wife to have sex could even be considered a crime, let alone rape (see here).

Of course, this history has gotten subsumed by the current gay marriage debate--on both sides. Anti-gay-marriage advocates idolize heterosexual unions as the bedrock of all of society (ignoring the fact that polygamy, not monogamous heterosexuality, has been the more widespread form of familial organization over the course of human history). The present-day GLBT movement has largely endorsed this wholesale idealization, averring that the right to have lifetime commitments of love between two people is just as important as the conservatives say, but that it works just as well with two men or two women as it does between a man and a woman. Gone are previous activists' passion for reformatting society in ways that might even better or more freely allow humans to interrelate. Gone are questions about whether, given its legacy of injustices, marriage is really the best mechanism for extending rights to GLBT people (see this blog by Nancy Polikoff).

All this history and all these issues I've known for some time. Usually, however, I can just say, "Yeah, but I still want a marriage, with my partner and I exchanging vows and my father giving me away..." Presents, tears, attention, a party--remember?

I'm not so excited by the thought just now, especially after hearing this couple's well-meaning but deeply conservative-evangelical pastor wax ungrammatical about the superhuman miracle that is heterosexual love, the unique image of the Divine that exists solely in the joining of male and female in holy matrimony, the grand model for human existence that rests in the strong man protecting and loving his submissive help-meet.

(Actually, lots of people rolled their eyes at the ode to female submission, which the pastor quickly qualified as being "a Christian thing, not a woman thing." Yeah, right. Go back in time 100 years, or even 50 years, and see if pastors, husbands, and wives would subscribe to that bit of spin.)

Even without that piece, though, the whole happy, rambling homily to Glorious Heterosexual Marriage (about which the pastor had apparently written a book) was a bit much. It was hard not to hear the echoes of marriage's ugly history resonating.

I suppose the pastor got to me also because his theology, while not explicitly anti-gay, reminded me of the one area of my life where I do most often feel the sting of exclusion--the church. To hear that--worse, to be part of a party dedicated to celebrating that--heterosexual unions uniquely reflect the image of Christ is to hear that I can never truly participate in the Divine. Ditto single people, divorced people, etc. (I mean, if marriage was all that, why did Christ marry? And don't give me that "Christ married the church, his bridegroom"--that's a metaphor, not a literal reality. I mean, when was the wedding? Who was the best man? Who was the bridesmaid? Who caught the bouquet?).

Again--I don't begrudge my friends their wedding. I'm happy that two people have so chosen to perform vows of their eternal love for each other. And I'd like to think that everyone deserves presents, attention, and a party now and then.

But... well... I'm not so sure I'm comfortable asking people to give me presents, attention, and a party just to mimic an institution like marriage.

More tomorrow,

JF