Blood, Marriage, Wine, & Glitter by S. Bear Bergman

Author:S. Bear Bergman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2013-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Gay Married

It’s the comedian Wanda Sykes who quips, “I recently got gay married or, as I like to call it, married. I don’t have gay lunch, I have lunch. I park my car, I don’t gay-park it.” The bit usually gets a big laugh from straight supporters of the marriage equality movement, and sometimes from married gays and lesbians. Indeed, they are getting Married, and they want everything that comes with that, I think—not just the opportunity to kit out their friends in funny colours and register for a coordinated set of Le Creuset cookware (oh, and the inheritance and hospital visitation rights), but the sense of fixed-ness. The odour of respectability that comes with it seems just as satisfying as the tax breaks; where heterosexuals can afford to casually disdain marriage even while they cohabitate and spawn, queers are not assumed to be especially serious about one another these days if we don’t get ourselves hitched.

For the record, I am hitched. Or, to be specific, I am gay hitched. Not just in the sense of general-duty fabulousness in evidence at our wedding, which was not inconsiderable, but also because I do, really, believe that I have gotten gay married, and that this is a different and queerer thing than the other kind.

My gay marriage is not, for example, sexually monogamous, a condition which seems to be the default of straight relationships and wasn’t of queer ones for quite some time (though, certainly, some people always chose it and no one really blamed them; it’s a harmless perversion). If it seems odd that I write that in a book about family, if you find it jarring to read sexually explicit work in this and other books of mine right alongside tender, meditative paeans to making or parenting my small son, I would encourage you to ask yourself: why? Do you imagine that parents don’t have sex? The worldwide preponderance of younger siblings seems to betray the lie in that thinking (though I will admit it takes a little doing during that first infant year). I think it’s something else—I think it’s the way that the heterosexualized marriage imperative has made us think differently about grown-up relationships, even between two queers, especially if they have children.

Children, I am here to tell you, are not the end of sex (and only sometimes are they the result of it). And marriage is not the end of sex, either, and neither is monogamy, for that matter (or so I hear). But we’re so conditioned to hide and erase our sexual desire as somehow damaging—to The Cause if we’re queer or trans, to The Children if we’re parents—that we get silenced into acting like it is. We fear punishment of various kinds, from social tsk-ing to the very real and utterly terrifying interest of the state in our children’s welfare if we don’t comply with the sexual silence mandate.

(To be clear—I believe sex and sexual exploration are profoundly human activities that should be pursued with our enthusiastic consent and with people we choose, who choose us back, in age-appropriate ways.

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