MAGGIE'S STUPID DIGRESSION

Oh, Jonathan I knew that would be a lightening rod. I also know that it is not remotely persuasive to anyone and that a more disciplined debater would just avoid the whole subject entirely, then and now. But it does happen to be true. I am not saying that gays should marry (which I think would be rather presumptious and more than I know), I am only observing that not only can they, but sometimes they do marry women even after coming out and without deceiving anyone. And that often these marriages appear to be successful for years. Of course often they are not, but half of all marriage do not "work out" these days. (Where is the Census Bureau when you really need them?)

I first ran across this fact (that gay men sometimes do choose to marry women) in reading the memoir First Comes Love, about a woman who marries and has two kids with a gay man with AIDS, he eventually wanders off, she comes back to him to help him die. Later I ran across a book Husbands Out of the Closet which asserts (I have not looked at the underlying literature) that up to half of all gay men will marry a woman at some point. Most of the wives thought their gay men made fine husbands btw and did not want the marriages to break up; in many cases both husband and wife reported enjoyable sex lives for many years until the husbands began to seek sexual fulfilment outside the marriage; What to make of stuff like this? I dunno. Some facts just do not fit in the boxes we make to contain reality. Next I ran across a gay Catholic man who is married with 9 kids. Hey, who knew? Then there is the recent "scandal" about film director Stephen "The Hours" Daldry, who after a very out life for many years, recently decided to marry and have a baby. Excerpts below from the March 18, 2003 Advocate, full story here.

An A-list theater director in the 1990s--his An Inspector Calls won him a Tony in 1994--Daldry did an interview in Out with his then partner, set designer Ian MacNeil. The two later split up, and Daldry married performance artist Lucy Sexton. . . .When asked about his own sexuality, Daldry seems happy to clear the air--perhaps because, now that he's married, mainstream journalists assume he has disavowed his gay past. "What's so funny is when people say, 'Oh, does that mean you’re not gay anymore?' " he says. "And you go, 'Oh, give me a break. What do you mean?' We wanted to have kids! We thought we'd get married and have kids. We're allowed to do anything. I refuse to be boxed in to the idea that, Oh, no, I can't have kids 'cause I'm gay. I can have kids if I'm gay. And I can also get married and have a fantastic life.

"Yes," he continues, speaking firmly. "To all questions [having to do] with my marriage, the answer to everything is yes. Do I have sex with my wife? Yes. Is it a real marriage? Yes. Am I gay? Yes."

No doubt these are minority preferences. But I am enough of a female chauvinist to find this credible: I think it is easier to sustain a home, family, and initmate life when at least one of you is a woman. Plus having a baby strikes me as a very powerful reason to marry, and most men I think would want their children to have a mother.

But I am not claiming this is an answer to your question Jonathan which is not about legal discrimination or equal protection analysis (the context in which this came up) but about how the state can promote the good life.

End of stupid digression, more on the main line of discussion, including your other question, to come.
posted by maggie at 7:29 AM | link

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