Oh the gays, flaunting their perverted life-stylings in our faces. They just can’t help it, can they? The forced wedding pictures, the catalog kids (please, not the children!), the doggie-love! Oh God, the dogs. Cease and desist. This lifestyle choice (as well as your bad taste in art and couches) will bring down destruction upon us all. What a world. What a litany of errors. How the fuck did we get here? What about the traditions? The Old Rites and Rituals? These radicals turn their backs on their forefathers casting their lot with the Hetero-Imperium. Not a shot fired breaching our sturdy battlements. And for what? A slice of white cake. For shame.
No, but seriously, folks. Marriage, what a clever trap to set if one wanted to mislead a beleaguered lot. Today, tradgemony is presented as the sole goal of the “hetero-gay rights movement”, but it’s not just a sunny march toward political rights, nor a happy trod up the altar, it’s about a choice of a way of life that is privileged over others. Beneath the shallow political currents there are deeper cultural and existential tides that drive this movement. The stealthy religiosity of this cult of love and marriage is ignored, as the drunken ox (the ever foolish gays) tilts toward the altar of sacrifice, purification and elimination. (And no, we have nothing against cults per se: they’re a great way to make easy money and, hell, we’re in one ourselves, but this one icks us out.) It didn’t have to be this way, kids.
The roots of the Gay Marriage Cult are perfidious (and at the same time, humanly understandable). In the midst of the Plague in the early ’90s (see How To Survive A Plague, boys, it’ll fill you in on Daddy’s exciting and well-spent youth), Larry Kramer and Andrew Sullivan (1), self-cast in this Grand Guignol as Moses (with a dash of Lot) and Jesus, respectively, decided enough was enough: Sodom and Gomorrah must be destroyed—- the Bathhouses, tea rooms and dirty bars (where both of them had spent so much time researching) and the life-style practiced there, was, a very, very bad place: the rectum, in fact, did lead inexorably to the grave and it needed to be closed, for good. In some ways they had a point: there were occasional Dionysian excesses. In most ways they were wrong about that culture, but it didn’t much matter. It was a case of gay sex panic. The old gay ghetto was already in free-fall at the time and has now all but disappeared. A very effective ally to reaction was quietly looming in the background, HIV/AIDS; no one was about to argue with It at the time. (Yes, that’s right, kids, it WAS like Moby Dick and Ahab teaming up.)
These two former party boys and their ilk (Judas played by Michelangelo Signorile) decided that the gays must flee the burning cities of Sodom (the West Village, Marais and Castro) and seek the promised land: Heteroville! They would suffer on a long journey that in the end the survivors would be rewarded with homes and husbands and children (and 72 nubile youth?). A nice fairy story, just like they have in the Children’s Bible and Torah, but in the end, crazy talk. The mess and madness (read: gay life as lived by them) would stop and there would be a happily ever after for all. (See Virtually Normal by Sullivan, but take the antidote soon after, The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner, lest you turn a gaybot-zombie). Since everyone with any authority was tied up at the time (that is, dead, dying or tending the dead) this tired retreaded redemption story passed the rump parliament of Rainbowland. (Of course the Lesbian Assembly cheered.) We will be redeemed, etc. Much of what this unelected Triumvirate (cue Star Wars “Empire” theme) said at the time had more to do with their contending Messiah complexes, ageing male syndromes, sodden in pseudo-/religious guilt, but to be fair to those who listened, there was a sincere wish to start anew somewhere.
Gay men back then did their fair share of fantasising about better days: to be safe and sound, even in the suburbs, floating on an island of consumer goods with a cute hubby was an understandable daydream in the midst of an apocalyptic conflagration. It certainly beat the reality of tending friends who were dying horribly on gurneys in public hospitals. And the odd thing is, the “we just wanna be normal…just like you” thing worked. Ah, but answered prayers.
Cut to: us, holding tea roses at a wedding of people we don’t want to know thinking these thoughts above. (A Boston terrier as a bridesmaid, really, queens? Really?) And we want to spit this acid out or at the very least to leave, but these two porn stars on the altar look so dumb-happy and the drinks are free.
There’s just nothing to do. And yet.
One is stuck, you see? The evil genius of the tender trap. Queen to Queen, check and mate. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t…ok, too much champers. Talk about the Ring! Marriage is the keystone of so many other retrograde structures, but if you buy into it, you’re really IN. Alternatives? Glad you asked. What about no privileging one form of relationship over all the other ways of being together (or alone)? People won’t reproduce? Provide a baby-bounty and time off to raise them and they would anyway. (Like not enough children is the world’s biggest problem!) BUT, there IS hope, even for the gays: yes, here come the divorces, but that’s secondary. The (Bareback) Trojan Horse Thesis, yes if those crazy gays can get inside the walls of the Heteroville, even to their sanctum santorum, you can rely on them to fuck up the very DNA of straightness. A mainline into the Heart of Whiteness. It’s a slim, Fantastic Journey kind of hope, but in these Dark Times, you gotta have hope (or heroin). In the meantime, can we please start using our creativity in our lives and not just as art directors and handmaidens of capitalism. You know what we mean, already in fifth grade teacher your teacher, Mrs Myers said in her grade report, “he has such a flare…”, come into the chiaroscuro of the closet and light it up, men. Rise in darkness.
(1) O Homos: you are required to spit in an unison and hygienic manner when these names are uttered, so go on, let it rip).
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