Freedom Socialist • Vol. 19, No. 1 • April-June 1998
Gay family values: a lesbian rebuttal by Su Docekal Lesbian and gay couples should have the right to wed. As far as I'm concerned, it's a fundamental civil right.
But, while queer people deserve access to the benefits and protections that marriage bestows in this society, this decrepit institution is a lousy model for liberation.
Queer Promise Keepers. Gay conservatives have filled the editorial pages of both the queer and straight press with preposterous, pseudo-scientific theories about how wedding rings will cure AIDS, end promiscuity, and turn us all into happy homogenized homosexuals. Puh-leeze! Stripped of three-tiered cakes, champagne, and over-the-top costumes, weddings are nothing more than a ritual invented to mark the transfer of private property (the woman) from father to husband.
It's time for queer feminists (male and female) to launch an ideological counteroffensive. Orwellian drivel promoting "new" homo family values is nothing but a rehash of the "old" patriarchal family values of sexism, original sin, and the double standard. In fact, the word "family" derives from the Roman familia, meaning "the number of domestic slaves belonging to one man." Now that concept might make a great theme for an S&M dungeon party, but it's hardly one to base a gay lib slogan on!
The myth of the model monogamous minority. It's bad enough that these lavender Rush Limbaughs are re-packaging the gay sexual liberation movement as an Ozzie & Ozzie or Harriet & Harriet family decency campaign. But I really cannot forgive how they try to prop up their archaic platitudes by holding up lesbians as models of monogamous domesticity!
Historically, an unenlightened sector of male queers have resisted the infusion of feminism into the gay movement by slamming dykes as cold, dogmatic, humorless politicos. Now, voilà, we're warm and fuzzy mommy material, tranquil and "well-adjusted." Both of these Jekyll and Hyde interpretations strip lesbians of any sensuality or intelligence.
Gabriel Rotello, author of a book called Sexual Ecology featured on the cover of the left-leaning Nation, is a main purveyor of the idea that libidoless lesbians should lead gay men away from the "evils" of promiscuity. And why have we been assigned this thankless task? Because, says Rotello, "Feminist contradictions aside, those who argue that men innately are more interested in sexual variety than women do seem to have an increasing body of literature and theory on their side... [L]esbians are dealing with a very different set of biological urges [than gay men]."
He concludes that what's needed to curb gay men's genetically oversexed appetites are marital vows, because "The core institution that encourages sexual restraint and monogamy is marriage."
Karl Marx sliced that baloney 150 years ago in the Communist Manifesto. He sarcastically answered his critics: "Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
"... Nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois[ie] ... [who], not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, ... take the greatest pleasure in seducing each others' wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system ... of prostitution both public and private." Tell it!
Rotello's scientific jargon and progressive credentials do not make his biology-as-destiny argument any less reactionary or more believable. Not surprisingly, the fidelity fetishists also subscribe to the notion that homosexuality is genetically determined and the political corollary to this: be nice to us because "we can't help it." Arguing for civil rights by using a foundation that is basically sociobiology - a false science once discredited, now resurgent - leads down a slippery slope. It winds toward the theoretical camp that produced the infamous 1994 book The Bell Curve, whose authors explain why Blacks "can't help" being second-class citizens; it's hereditary.
It should be obvious that as long as boys are encouraged to make conquests, while girls are warned not to give it up, we cannot know exactly what human sexuality might look like healthy and free. In the meantime, it might surprise Rotello to learn that what many dykes find most appealing about the possibility of legalized marriage is the hope that our gender-bending habits and turkey-baster babies will fatally subvert that decaying institution - at long last!
For a feminist gay agenda. Would-be gay brides and grooms have the same legal and financial motives that have driven many of my straight friends to the altar: to prevent the INS from snatching their significant other; to establish joint custody of kids; to get a new set of teeth paid for under a partner's dental plan. These are good reasons to advocate for legalizing same-sex marriage. But let's not stop there, and let's not go it alone.
The hetero population is fleeing the traditional family in droves. Ergo, the right wing is desperate to hold the line and put some primitive punch back into the family by freezing queers out and locking non-gay women in. A unified defense by the lesbian/gay/bi/transgender and feminist movements against nationally coordinated attacks on no-fault divorce, domestic partnership and gay marriage could stop these bullies.
Ultimately, though, I know we will go for the whole enchilada: replacing this property-based family system with a society in which all human relationships can evolve naturally according to preference, desire and compatibility - not economic coercion.
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