I DO--I THINK: Steve Wiecking

...I think of that kid every time gays and lesbians in this country take another history-making step forward into legislative acceptance. That kid, who never had a single positive conversation about the validity of becoming a man loving another man, would never have believed that one day the front page of The New York Times would read: "Hundreds of Same Sex Couples Wed in Massachusetts." My dreams were tied up in who I was told I could never become, so much so that there's no telling how different my life would be if I'd grown up in a world that held up gay marriage as an ideal. I don't know how great an ideal it is, but I think the only people who should be concerned about it are gay.

No one can tell me I shouldn't be allowed to marry. Now that I'm an adult capable of forging my own reality, I can't even believe it's an issue. I feel as removed yet somehow as integral a part of it as I did about gays in the military--won't be enlisting any time soon, but will bite your head off for suggesting I can't join the ranks. Listening to the endless media debate is like overhearing strangers discuss whether or not I'll be given permission to take in Shrek 2 over the weekend: I may never want to experience the big, cheesy thing, but I'll be damned if anyone is going to keep me out as long as I'm willing to pay the price of admission. Gay unions are fleeting? The divorce rate will skyrocket? So? Gays and lesbians have every human right to be as messy, ill-advised, unprepared, offensive, and just generally stupid as everybody else--and reap the same legal benefits for said stupid behavior. Children are adversely affected by having parents of the same gender? Our general sexual permissiveness will produce wanton libertines? What's your point, counselor? Homosexuals have the freedom to vex, derange, and otherwise permanently damage our children just as surely as our parents did. ...

...I like the families we've constructed whose bonds are just as strong without the benefit of blood or bureaucracy; they already feel official to me. What's so great about the way the rest of the world lives that we should need its approval?

I'm too much a child of the movies to not want to fall in love, and a world that recognizes gay love as a goal would be an im­measurably healthier place for us all to be. The self-hatred that makes boys and girls of so many gay men and women would, I think, start to recede into the past; gay kids could grow up making the same dumb romantic mistakes that straight people take for granted as part of adolescence. But it's OK with me that some of our desires are different, that they'll always be different--to say nothing of the aspirations of the transgendered community, whose dreams are always con­veniently scuttled to the side in favor of queers who more closely resemble Middle America. The more homosexuals step toward assimilation, and the more my heart leaps at the thought of gay relationships being considered "normal," the more I think of that flaming 9-year-old kid who just wanted to be Charlie’s angel, because I'll tell you, there's one of those kids born every minute, and no amount of I dos is going to make that kid's dreams conventional. I don't want gay marriage to go down as somehow completing us, as though we had something missing that heterosexuals are now so generous to bestow on us. Let this amazing, monumental, and, yes, inevitable change in American culture be not an end to the way we look at being gay but a beginning. Let's not think of gay marriage as a way for the rest of society to respect us--because, really, who cares?--but as simply one of many new ways for us to consider each other.

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posted by Eve at 10:24 AM | link

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