Entry tags:

marriage, queer, quotations

"One of the things we are forced to re-examine is relationships. Unlike straight people we do not have church weddings, we are not often enrolled in the PTA, we are not clear on who is the breadwinner and who is the homemaker. We don't have relatives clucking over us, urging us to be faithful and fertile and upstanding. Our relationships have little social or legal reality. As a result, we must invent love all over again. Gay lovers must work out contracts or agreements that suit them. Household chores, money matters, social obligations -- these things must be decided and assigned. Sex roles in bed, gender-linked behavior out of bed (who cooks, who mows the lawn, who pays the bills) -- these things must be arbitrated. And fidelity, the thorniest question of all, must be arranged.... The variations are endless. My point is that convention does not govern us; we create new conventions for ourselves.... Today more and more straight couples are deciding that traditional marriage doesn't work.... Straight people might well learn something from us, since we have already sorted out the issues, even if we haven't arrived at solutions that will suit everyone." -- Edmund White, "The Joys of Gay Life" (1977)