The Wedding March (Page 2)

Indeed, what ignites the religious right's wrath today is precisely the acceptability of these heartwarming scenes. As Massachusetts began issuing licenses to same-sex couples in May, 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. Some haven't been able to resist the universal theme of love themselves. Ray McNulty, a spokesperson for the antigay Massachusetts Family Institute, advised that opponents take their complaints to lawmakers, not to queer couples. "As far as I'm concerned," he was quoted saying on May 17, "give those people their happiness for the day."

Some liberals, of course, are more inclined to grant the happiness indefinitely--as romantic comedies always do--by ending with the wedding and making no mention of the marriage. Likewise, contemporary pop culture loves gay weddings but holds its peace when it comes to marriage. Mass media not only permit, but celebrate, queer nuptials in which two people declare their status as a couple. But they stop far short of insisting that this event confer status on the couple in the eyes of the state.

The trope of triumphing lovers is so powerful it trumps politics, bulldozing past the inconvenient facts of the law with the sheer force of its familiar imagery and narrative drive. Even the current, campy Off Broadway show My Big Gay Italian Wedding never mentions that queer couplings are not recognized by the state. It's parents and church that stand in the way of Anthony and Andrew's union in this slapdash sitcom (plus Andrew's reputation as "the biggest slut in Bensonhurst"). The fellows get their happy ending--rings, blessings, drunken guests and all--and the marriage's lack of legal standing simply doesn't come up. Similarly untroubled images of gay weddings abound. According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, major newspapers in all but two states in the United States now include gay and lesbian unions among their wedding announcements. The Commercial Closet, an organization that chronicles homo sightings in advertising, lists thirty-nine recent print and broadcast ads that feature gay wedding scenes. The matter of discrimination stays out of the picture, the great unmentionable that might spoil the happy day.

It seems paradoxical, then, that most Americans respond to the equal-rights claims of gay and lesbian couples by favoring civil unions for them but not marriages. It's the schmaltzy old trope, however, that softens them up and makes queers legible within a familiar romantic realm. Thus, when the issue of inequity is brought forward--as gay wedding protests did all year by making equality under the law the centerpiece of the revels--Americans' sense of fairness can't help but kick in. Love is love, after all. The sentiment goes only so far, though, before bumping into homophobia in the dominion of "sacred" marriage.

Moreover, plugging unreservedly into the wedding plot can close down queer options even as it opens straight hearts. In romantic comedies, cast-out and suspect lovers always have to prove that they merit comic closure--whether by answering riddles, retrieving some symbolic object, making it through an ordeal or by simply growing up--and the protest-spectacles for gay marriage have been no exception. In order to be embraced as ordinary couples, the heroes of these nuptials must tacitly renounce such practices as promiscuity or preferences for communal rather than nuclear household arrangements. Even if domestic normality is exactly what innumerable gay and lesbian couples want, the mass public display of this desire as the primary queer demand excludes those in the movement who don't share that dream. Worse, it accepts the meanspirited neoliberal principle that citizens must show that they are worthy of their rights. Like public assistance that is provided only to the so-called "deserving poor," the recognition that gay marriage bestows goes only to "deserving" queers.

Some thirty-three years ago, the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) took over New York's City Clerk's Office and declared "Gay Day" at the marriage bureau. When heterosexuals applied for licenses, the demonstrators gleefully turned them away.

How thrilling the cheekiness of that zap seems now--as does its openness to the possibility of abolishing marriage altogether. But the GAA--having split off from the Black Panther-supporting, Vietnam War-opposing Gay Liberation Front--helped pave the way down the aisle by narrowing the movement to a single-issue gay rights agenda.

Through spectacle and mass action, this year's protest weddings--and then, the first days of the real ones in Massachusetts--have reasserted the heady possibilities of a queer public sphere even as they have pressed for access to a privatized set of rights. Once married--secure in their protections and recognized as full citizens--will gay and lesbian couples step out into that public space and participate in the contentious work of democracy? Might their contentment renew their sense of solidarity and visions of liberation? Everyone is a sucker for a love story that ends with a wedding. What happens after that joyful finale is ours to invent.

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