It's quotation-offloading time

[tim]

"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)

Comments

[lindseykuper]

In case you haven't seen it yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCFFxidhcy0

[tim]

Hadn't seen it. It made me sad, in the same way that most of the mainstream-gay-movement rhetoric about marriage does. I posted the quotation from White because it made me ask myself: are straight people still learning something from queer people about how to organize relationships? Or have gay people decided to just stop creating the "endless" variations that White talks about in favor of being just like straight people instead?

I can imagine some of my readers replying that nobody should be obligated to "create new conventions", in the way that White puts it, that it's important to make sure all people have the right to be traditional. And I guess it is. But I think there's a line between making sure straight people and the rest of us enjoy the same privileges, and venerating straight institutions so much that straight people lose the opportunity to learn from queer people and queer people lose the opportunity to be something different from a straight person in a way that goes beyond monogamous, lights-off closed-door partnering. And that line has been crossed.

[anemone.livejournal.com]

I think this issue of re-examining relationships is why conservative Christians get upset about same-sex marriage. Because if two guys manage to keep a house clean, how can husband have an excuse not to vacuum?