Abstract

The Wedding March

Three same-sex couples solemnized their commitments on the steps of New York City Hall to protest the state's refusal to grant them marriage licenses and express support for the mayor of New Paltz, Jason West, and two Unitarian ministers, who had been charged with misdemeanors in the Hudson Valley town for pronouncing dozens of couples wife-and-wife or husband-and-husband. Mayor Michael Bloomberg told the press that the demonstrators should have taken their rites to Albany, since state laws were their target. Effective mass protest has always employed histrionics, of course, but there are other important--and even radical--ways in which Bloomberg was essentially right. No matter what you think about marriage as a political goal, there is no denying that these "wedding marches" produced a stirring display of queer desire and defiance. What is more, pointing at the gap between the symbolic ritual of a wedding and the legal, contractual fact of marriage, the protests exposed the tenuousness of the tie between rites and rights--and the vigorous social and cultural forces called out to defend it. Meanwhile, the city officials who rebelled against laws and practices they regard as discriminatory revived a dramatic form of direct-action civil disobedience. Marriage demonstrators seek public equality in the traditionally private realm of family. As Massachusetts began issuing licenses to same-sex couples in May 2004, some backers of a state constitutional amendment restricting marriage to a man and a woman told the press they feared that the very sight of gay weddings would make the public more tolerant of homosexuality.