by Cheryl Clarke
(10/13/04)
This piece is written from my perspective as a dyke (a perspective I've been writing from for 25 years). I do not name each of the communities who have broadened and contributed to the gay and lesbian movement for liberation; i.e., bisexual, trans, questioning, ambiguously/ambivalently sexed and gendered people; for gays and lesbians are in the vanguard of this movement for marriage equality. Regardless of how our partnerships have enriched, restored, and rehabilitated communities all across this country, gays and lesbians are the focus of this critique. And so, I won't hold back.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, a foundational black women's literary text written by Zora Neale Hurston in 1937, comes to my mind these days, especially the character Nannie. "Love is the very prong colored women gets hung on," Nannie tells her 16-year-old granddaughter, Janie, the novel's protagonist, whom she quickly marries off to a bachelor three times her age. Like "love" for black women, permanency for gays, lesbians, and other same-sex variants is the very prong we "gets hung on" when the arguments for marriage equality come up. We want that forever thing, or the thing forever. We use the law, land, and furniture to make it so, don't we? Long demonized by/in the West, lesbians and gays long for longevity. "Longevity has its place," said Martin Luther King prophetically and critically, shortly before his untimely murder at the age of 39. Admittedly, permanency has its place -- replacing "promiscuity," the other, sexier p-word still applied to our communities. But let's not turn our whole movement over to the locking-in of the same-sex dyad. Need we dedicate our pride marches to marriage, as was the case in this year's New York Pride March? "We decided we had to attend the parade this year. We had to let people know we're here," said one 20-30-something New Paltz-married lesbian and her partner. First of all, young sister-dyke, it's a "march," not a "parade." Secondly, we've had a movement for 35 years, letting people know we're here. Can't help it if your pride was just born yesterday. This dangerous and ahistorical speaking and thinking burns me in our march toward marriage -- or bust. This desire for permanency is driving us into state-sanctioned marriages. Same-sex folk want to be able to deploy marriage in as equivalent a way as opposite-sex folk do to bind each other to their relationships. Our pride marches could have been dedicated to ending the war in Iraq, or the homophobic torture of Iraqi prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib, or to getting homeless youth off the streets -- 50 percent of whom are queer, or lobbying against the cutting of funds to fight HIV/AIDS.
I am calling upon bulldaggers, dykes, faggots, feminist femmes, fierce sissies, and other outrageous progressive queers to have a major multicultural sexual liberation confabulation to take our movement back from liberals. Because marriage equality with its rhetoric of sameness is not why we came out of the closet in 1969 or before. We came out to dismantle marriage as an institution. (Yeah, like gays in the military; we shouldn't be prevented from joining because we're gay -- but our whole movement shouldn't be contravened nor the lives of those queer service people endangered because liberal queers want to make political hay.)
Yes, I want permanency as much as the next queer. Who wants to risk being left when we're old and ugly? But must we sabotage our liberation just so that a six-figure-salaried gay or lesbian elopes across the border to Massachusetts to lasso his/her six-figure-salaried lover into nuptial oblivion and tax shelters? And, yes, as I said above, lesbian and gay partnerships have changed the cultural, political, and material landscape of this country. But must we be married? And even if we are together 12, 17, 28, 32, 40 years, as the lesbian and gay couples suing for marriage equality in New Jersey are -- and I am full of admiration for them -- we still want to lasso our partners into that vain institution, where the church and state converge and congeal.
Marriage trivializes our partnerships.
Even though more than half of straight marriages in this country end in divorce, we still want leaving and taking up with the next same-sex lover with an SUV (or U-Haul) and a good dental plan to be just that much more difficult for our lovers. But according to the May-June issue of The Advocate, divorce attornies are gearing up to handle gay and lesbian divorces. I am almost ready to agree with Double-Ya: get a constitutional amendment to preserve marriage for heterosexuals. Let heterosexuals have it. Marriage is a bankrupt remnant of the bondage of women and children. Remember also, marriage was denied enslaved black people, and was even denied interracial couples in many Southern states until the 1970s.
Even heterosexuals, except those in Hollywood, think we're bonkers to invest in it.
Let us, the queers -- and anyone else who wants to constitute a domestic partner relationship or civil union with whomever you choose, if it be your next-door neighbor -- have those benefits that automatically accrue to married heterosexuals (and now married homosexuals in Massachusetts, for the time being, where institutions and corporations have rolled back domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples because we can get married now). And better yet, if we had universal health care, perhaps fewer of us would be so caught up in the marriage syndrome.
I tried out my premise of permanency on a dyke couple, I'll call Y. and B., who have been together for 19 years, are raising an 11-year-old daughter, own property together, and are both professionals with good insurance plans, and politically against marriage. They laughed in all the right places when I read this piece to them, but Y. disagreed with my premise:
"I'll tell you why we want marriage," Y. proffered.
"Yeah, why?" I asked.
"Self-hatred."
