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OPPRESSION, LIBERATION . . . MARRIAGE? A Look-forward from the 1970s Peter Norman ––
WHEN I was talking to the organiser of this Conference on the phone a couple of months ago, and she told me its dates, I realized that I’d be here in Kalamazoo for what’s something of a personal anniversary for me. Yesterday was my 46th birthday, and O.K., I know 46 isn’t exactly a magic number, but this birthday has a certain extra significance for me, because it represents the 30th anniversary of my 16th birthday, and of my coming out. I suppose, if I wanted to borrow the symbolism of Victorian wedding anniversaries, I could call this my “Pearl” Coming Out; I gather I have to survive another ten years to qualify for my Ruby Slippers.I don’t remember so many of my birthdays down the years, maybe because I celebrated them not wisely but too well, but I certainly remember my 16th – I guess every gay or lesbian person remembers their coming out. And preparing for this conference reminded me that it was on that birthday that I received as a gift Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, which had been released the previous year. Anyone here remember that record? It’s the one on which Joni sings about her “Old Man”1: “He’s a singer in the park, He’s a walker in the rain, He’s a dancer in the dark,” and proclaims, with pride and love: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, Keeping us tied and true.” You don’t get to hear me sing that until you’ve bought me a couple of birthday drinks, but I did sing along with Joni on April 18, 1972, not so much in defiance, as with a kind of thankful triumphalism: not for us the messy business of courtship, engagement, excruciating rituals amid barely-known cousins and aunts, a government stamp of approval on our love, joint tax returns, divorce, division of marital property; we were gay and free, and the future belonged to us. Because despite the restrictions on our lives, and they were many at that time – it would be another five years before I reached the age when I could legally have sex in England, and all sex between men was to remain illegal in neighbouring Scotland and Ireland for another decade and a half; there were many parts of our towns and cities where it was physically dangerous for gay men and lesbians (qua lesbians, not to mention simply as women) to walk on the street – despite the restrictions, I did feel freer than my heterosexual contemporaries whose lives were mapped out and whose relationships were supposed to fit into predetermined, socially-approved moulds. Though of course, as Joni Mitchell’s song exemplifies, many heterosexuals, especially heterosexual women, were themselves enthusiastically breaking out of those moulds. So, on my 16th birthday, I looked forward with anticipation and excitement to the gay life that my sisters and brothers and I would create for ourselves. Women’s Liberation — Gay Liberation I thought, and I still think now, that I had good grounds for my optimism. The preceding three or four years had seen a veritable explosion of writing from the Women’s Liberation Movement, mostly in America, some on our side of the Atlantic: Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Elizabeth Gould Davis’s The First Sex (1971), Mary Daly, Rita Mae Brown and others writing in Robin Morgan’s collection Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), to name just a few. I was to read these books and many more such over the coming years. At that time I had read just two, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969), and they turned my life upside down. Although they spoke from and were addressed to women’s experience, they seemed to me also to make sense of my experience as a young gay male growing up in patriarchal society, and to offer explanations of who I was and what I could be in this world. Just as exciting – probably even more exciting, if I’m honest – was the discovery that other gay men’s lives had been transformed by Women’s Liberation, and not too far from home. In October 1970, 15 months after the founding of the original GLF in New York, the London Gay Liberation Front had been set up. In August 1971 the first Gay March (later to become an annual event as Gay Pride, now Mardi Gras) was held in London, and that same year London GLF produced its Manifesto2, which was certainly on my bookshelf, or more likely in my hands or on my so-called coffee table (actually a painted orange-crate) on my birthday in April 1972. It’s hard to convey, 30 years on, just how – to employ a modern, overused word – empowering it was simply to name ourselves a “Liberation Front” rather than a “Campaign against Discrimination”, and to produce a tract called a “Manifesto” as opposed to “Proposals for Reform”. I’m a linguist by training and by trade, and a firm believer in the transformative power of words. That’s one reason why I’m so deeply troubled by the idea that we can be even contemplating using words like “marriage”, “wife”, “husband”, to describe our relationships. Of course, I had no hand in the writing of the GLF Manifesto. I was 14 going on 15 at the time it was being written, and although 14-year-old dykes and faggots did on occasion turn up at GLF gatherings (and were not turned away), I was not so lucky. It was not until 1973, aged 17, that I made it from provincial Bournemouth to the metropolis, and by then GLF was, organizationally, on its last legs. What remained of it was essentially a collection of gay men’s groups, the Front having split on the predictable grounds that women’s voices were not being adequately heard in and from a mixed organization. Nothing terribly new there: here in America, the Daughters of Bilitis had split away from the Mattachine Society on precisely the same grounds in 1955. Nothing new, but a little bit more shaming for the GLF men, who after all drew their inspiration precisely from the Women’s Movement. Nonetheless, a relatively amicable parting of the ways, so I’m told – much more like a good lesbian or gay split-up than a heterosexual divorce.
Although GLF ceased to exist as an entity, it left behind a number
of spin-off organizations, such as the Gay Sweatshop theatre company
and the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, which exists to this
day, and its ideas persisted through the 70s. What was fundamentally
new about those ideas, compared with those of earlier homosexual
rights groups like the Campaign for Homosexual Equality or its
predecessor the Albany Society, was, I think, the naming of our
treatment by the various institutions of society – the family,
the education system, religious bodies, the media, the medical
profession, the legal establishment – as oppression, rather than
simply discrimination or inequality, and the consequent appropriateness
of reacting with angry demands for freedom, as opposed to pleas
for tolerance or compassion. One central notion was that of
The concept of self-oppression was later explored in greater detail
in a pamphlet published by two GLF members, Andrew Hodges and
David Hutter, With Downcast Gays (1974), which looked at the ways
we put ourselves down by tolerating anti-gay “humour”, adopting
butch-femme gender roles based on heterosexuality, seeking to
model our intimate lives on the ideology of heterosexual marriage
or coupledom, hiding our homosexuality or being “discreet”, and
a host of other ways. Although it might at first sight seem dispiriting
to assert that we are, to some extent, the agents of our own oppression,
GLF held that acknowledging this was, in reality, the first step
toward our liberation. Mere legal reform, it noted, would not
of itself undo the destructive indoctrination to which we were
subject from our earliest childhood onward. It was also necessary
for us, in the jargon of the time, to “free our heads”, to consciously
develop a sense of gay pride as an antidote to the gay shame that
heteropatriarchy had worked so hard to instill in us. As Hodges
and Hutter wrote : “Oppression is as much the creature of self-oppression
as the converse. External oppression we can only fight against;
self-oppression we can tear out and destroy.”3
I guess these days the more usual term for homosexual self-oppression
would be “internalized homophobia”, but the word “homophobia”
did not exist in 1974. It was first coined sometime in the 1980s,
and interestingly, its original meaning was rather different.
It referred to heterosexual men’s recoil from emotional intimacy
and non-violent physical contact with each other (possibly out
of fear of homosexuality in themselves), in contrast to the behaviour
not just of homosexual men and women, but also of heterosexual
women. In that usage, I found it an interesting and potentially
useful concept: it encapsulated a direct critique of an aspect
of straight men’s behaviour, and invited theorizing as to what
function that behaviour might serve in patriarchy. In its modern,
more general meaning – any form of discrimination or dislike of
homosexuals – I think it’s an unfortunate word, inasmuch as it
pathologizes hostility to lesbians and gays as an irrational phobia,
comparable to a fear of mice or a superstitious disinclination
to walk on the cracks in the pavement.
I dislike this because it contradicts one of Gay Liberation’s
other major insights, namely that there is a reason for our oppression.
Liberal gay-rights campaigners then, like their neo-liberal counterparts
now, tended to speak of anti-gay discrimination as an obsolete,
no longer motivated hangover from an earlier time, rather like
those old laws that everybody knows are silly but nobody has ever
bothered to remove from the statute book, such as the one in Atlanta,
Georgia, that makes it an offence to tie a giraffe to a telephone
pole. GLF argued, to the contrary, that hostility to us was well
motivated, because, however conservative our individual politics
might be, our very existence constituted a threat to heteropatriarchy:
in the case of lesbians, very obviously, because they dared to
live independently of men, and in the case of gay males, because
we were deserters from the male army of occupation, traitors to
patriarchy. Rosemary Auchmuty puts it clearly: “The Women’s Movement
always recognized that the forms our sexual expression takes are
socially constructed and that those who deviate from society’s
gender norms present a threat to dominant values and structures.
Prejudice against lesbians and gays is therefore not irrational,
no matter how difficult tolerant people find this to accept; it
is a perfectly rational response to a well-founded fear.”4 Auchmuty
wrote that in 1997, which is encouraging, because it shows that
at least some lesbians have not forgotten this. What is discouraging
is that apparently most gay men have either forgotten or, indeed,
explicitly repudiated it.
Certainly, most gay men and many lesbians working in mainstream
“gayandlesbian” organizations now vigorously deny Auchmuty’s premise,
that “the forms our sexual expression takes are socially constructed”.
“We were born that way,” they insist. “ It’s not a choice.”
I don’t intend to address here the question of what part, if any,
genetics may play in favouring a disposition toward homosexuality
in men. (Even the most ardent advocates of the genetic theory,
like Simon LeVay and his associates, acknowledge that there is
not shred of evidence to support the idea of genetic inheritance
of lesbianism.) What interests me more is why biological determinism
has become so attractive to gay men and some lesbians over the
past two decades, why “choice” is no longer perceived as a positive
assertion of our right to determine our own sexuality, but rather
as an accusation levelled against us by our enemies.
This viewpoint seems to have become prevalent in North America
before it did so in Europe, and may in part have its origins in
the strategies of lawyers anxious to obtain “protected class”
status for homosexuals. One of the requirements for protected
class status is that the class in question must be defined by
some “immutable” characteristic. As a legal concept, “immutable”
does not, as a matter of fact, mean “literally incapable of change”:
protected class legislation guarantees rights against discrimination
on the basis of religious belief, for example, and guarantees
those rights just as firmly for converts as for those born into
a particular religion. But it is easy to see why the biological
determination of homosexuality, if true, might be regarded as
a convenient and strong argument in that context.
This argument was taken up in the UK in the 1980s during the campaign
against Section 28, a law forbidding local authorities to “promote
homosexuality”. This campaign brought together homosexuals from
the whole of the political spectrum. In particular, it was the
first occasion in a decade or more on which lesbians and gay men
worked together on a large scale for a common cause. As on other
occasions, lesbians drew the short straw, as the orthodox line
rapidly emerged that neither local government nor anyone else
could “promote” homosexuality anyway: homosexuality was inborn.
If this were really true, one might wonder why it was necessary
to have the campaign at all: who would bother to campaign against
the law once passed by the Arkansas legislature stating that the
Arkansas River may rise no higher than the Main Street bridge
in Little Rock? But the orthodox line was a breathtaking betrayal
of lesbian feminists, many of whom did indeed choose lesbianism
in pursuit of the feminist goal of equality in intimate relationships,
and who did indeed seek to “promote homosexuality” on coherent
and well-articulated political grounds. They were simply written
out of the story.
However, the strategies of US lawyers and campaigners against
a particular UK law cannot fully account for the enthusiasm with
which biological determinism has been embraced by gay men and
some lesbians, including in jurisdictions where the concept of
“immutability” has historically played little part in rights discourse.
This keenness to deny responsibility for our sexuality seems
to me to have altogether more disturbing roots. For me, the statement
“We were born that way” sounds all too close to “We can’t help
it. So please don’t be horrid to us.” Conservative gay marriage
advocate Andrew Sullivan goes so far as to speak of “involuntarily
homosexual persons”,5 making our sexuality sound like a case
of Tourette’s syndrome or urinary incontinence. The “we can’t
help it” argument invites liberal heterosexuals to congratulate
themselves on their non-discriminatory stance while retaining
a comforting sense of their own superiority, or good fortune.
Sullivan issues this invitation in a starkly direct and offensive
manner: “...as the disabled person reveals to us in negative form
the beauty of the fully functioning human body; so the homosexual
person might be seen as a natural foil to the heterosexual norm . . .“.6
(Offensive in equal measure, I think, to homosexuals and
to people with disabilities.) In other words, we have here a
startling return to the acceptance of our own subordination, to
the pleas for tolerance and compassion which we turned our backs
on in the 70s – as we imagined – for ever: a striking contrast
to our demands then for the right of every person to determine
their own sexuality, to our sisters’ uncompromising assertion
“Every woman can be a lesbian”, outdoing in both snappiness and
ambition their brothers’ somewhat lamer “Every man has homosexual
tendencies. Why persecute yourself?”
Time travellers
If we could send a time machine back to the mid 70s and bring
some gay liberationists of the time to our time on a visit, let’s
say the young Peter Norman and the only slightly older authors
of With Downcast Gays, I think they would find much in our present
lesbian and/or gay politics confusing, contradictory, even paradoxical.
They could not fail to be impressed by the sheer numbers of people
attending our Lesbian and Gay Parades, Mardi Gras, whatever: to
be counted in tens, even hundreds of thousands; in the 70s, the
London Gay Pride March rarely numbered more than 1,500. They
would be impressed by the diversity of the participants, too,
though they might be disturbed by the nature of some of that diversity,
and require considerable reassurance that some of the men they
saw there had not come to attack us, but were themselves gay paraders.
We would have to explain to them that, quite shortly after their
own time, some gay men had decided to “reclaim their masculinity”,
and that this was now widely regarded as perfectly legitimate
by people who saw themselves as gay activists, even gay liberationists.
The people who subscribed to the proposition that “Butch really
is bad – the oppression of others is an essential part of the
masculine gender role”7 might take some convincing of this.
They would probably be cautiously pleased to note that some of
GLF’s eight “immediate demands” had, at least in some measure,
been achieved in many countries of Europe: demands 1 and 6, calling
for an end to discrimination in law and in employment, demand
7 for the equalization of ages of consent, demand 4, that homosexuality
cease to be regarded as a psychiatric illness. Others would be
harder to assess: demand 3, that sex education in schools stop
being exclusively heterosexual, has been met to some extent in
some countries, but the related demand 2, that “all people who
feel attracted to a member of their own sex be taught that such
feelings are perfectly valid”, has clearly not been implemented,
as evidenced by the disproportionately high rate of teenage suicide
among gays and lesbians. The seemingly modest demand8, that
gay people be free to hold hands and kiss in public, is curiously
problematic. Many of us are still cautious of doing so, and when
we do, it is often perceived by ourselves as well as by others
more as a political gesture than a spontaneous expression of affection.
Public space is still overwhelmingly heterosexual space, mostly
male heterosexual space.
Although our time-travellers would have to applaud the professionalism
of the modern gay and lesbian organizations in their approach
to law reform, they might find that those organizations’ pursuit
of reform in a purely civil rights framework, in the absence of
GLF’s wider goal of challenging patriarchy at a more fundamental
level, had had unexpected consequences. Arguing for the “right”
of lesbian and gay people to join the military could be said to
follow logically from the demand for an end to discrimination
in employment, but 70s liberationists might well think it a more
pressing matter to encourage and assist lesbians and gays to leave
or avoid that most phallocratic of institutions (don’t forget
that many European countries still have compulsory military service),
just as they might regard assistance to male and female prostitutes
to get out of prostitution as more appropriate than campaigning
for the rights of so-called “sex workers” in a way that appears
to legitimize prostitution as “just another job”. I think they
would have been unenthusiastic, to say the least, about asserting
the “right” of sadomasochists to inflict violent injury on each
other.
It’s important to remember that GLF’s immediate demands were just
that, immediate demands. GLF’s long-term goal, as stated in the
Manifesto, was to “rid society of the gender-role system which
is at the root of our oppression. This can only be achieved by
the abolition of the family as the unit in which children are
brought up. We intend to work for the replacement of the family
unit, with its rigid gender-role pattern, by new organic units
such as the commune, where the development of children becomes
the shared responsibility of a larger group of people who live
together. Children must be liberated from the present condition
of having their role in life defined by biological accident; the
commune will ultimately provide a variety of gender-free models.”
The Manifesto goes on to speak of the need for a “strategic alliance
with the women’s liberation movement”, and avers, with touching
optimism, that “[t]o achieve our long-term goal will take many
years, perhaps decades.”
The Web
Leaving aside GLF’s particular ideas about how this would be achieved,
what progress, if any, have we made toward “rid[ding] society
of the gender-role system”, or, for that matter, toward “freeing
our heads” and “ tear[ing] out and destroy[ing] ... self-oppression”?
The one GLF immediate demand I haven’t mentioned so far is No
5, “that gay people be as ... free to contact other gay people,
through newspaper ads, on the streets and by any other means they
may want as are heterosexuals”. It is perhaps the one in regard
to which we have achieved the greatest concrete success. One
of the “other means” the writers of the demands could not have
foreseen is the Internet, and this must surely now be one of the
primary means by which homosexuals of both sexes make contact
with lesbian or gay groups or individuals. So perhaps that’s
where we should begin to look for an answer to our question.
Of course, the very existence of the Internet would be totally
thrilling for our 70s visitors. When I was at high school, even
xerox machines were pretty much new technology in the lives of
ordinary Europeans, and in the larger half of Europe, access to
them was to remain severely restricted until the late 80s. Computers
we saw only in James Bond movies or TV shows, gigantic contraptions
covered with dials and tapes, occupying a whole wall of the Bat
Cave or U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters.
Our guests could not complain of a lack of gay or lesbian visibility
in this medium. If they typed the words “gay men” under AltaVista
search engine on March 30 this year, they would be excited to
find 627,432 entries. They would be even more delighted, on their
sisters’ behalf, to find that the word “lesbians” gave them nearly
three times as many results – 1,744,118. Sadly, their delight
would be short-lived, as they would quickly discover that at least
70% of those “hits” led them to pornographic sites intended for
heterosexual men. If they were interested, they could find out
from the Internet itself that of the estimated $830 billion generated
by the Internet economy in 2001, over 13% was accounted for by
what is coyly termed the “adult industry”.8 I have no idea what
proportion of that is homosexual pornography, but I think it’s
a fairly safe bet that this is an area in which gay men are not
underrepresented. In any case, even if only 1% of that 13% consisted
of gay male pornography, that would amount to over a billion pink
dollars in a single year. 70s liberationists were already critical
of the “commercial gay scene”; commercialization of our sexuality
on this scale would surely have been beyond their powers of imagination.
And of course, the images used in all that gay pornography rely
just as much on the dynamic of dominance and submission as its
heterosexual equivalent, even when it is not explicitly sadomasochistic,
as it all too often is. As Sheila Jeffreys notes: “In gay male
culture we see the phenomenon of a sexuality of self-mutilation
and slavery, of tattooing, piercing, and sadomasochism, turned
into the very symbol of what gayness is.”9
More self-oppression
The language of dominance and submission is there in abundance
in the personal ads too, whether on the Internet or in the printed
media, to a much greater extent than I remember from the 70s.
To check my memory, I looked out some early editions of the UK
newspaper Gay News, not at the time regarded as especially radical.
There are a smattering of fetishist and SM advertizers, but the
words “butch” and “femme” are rare, and I could not find a single
occurrence of the particularly ugly “top” and “bottom”. I was
only ever twice asked in those days whether I was “active or passive”,
once by a doctor and once by a judge; both received a very frosty
answer. For us, these were words that straight people used to
categorize us, not ways we thought it appropriate for gay men
or lesbians to describe themselves.
One thing that would be familiar to our time-travellers would
be the countless ads from men describing themselves as “straight-acting”.
It’s hard to think of any form of words that’s more self-oppressive,
isn’t it? And yet they deny it. A couple of decades ago, you
could say what you liked about “straight-acting” gay men, because
they were all too closeted to answer you back. In these days
of the Web, they do answer back, albeit from the anonymity of
their website www.straightacting.com . Yes, there really is a
website called that. The authors of this site defend “straight
acting” as simply a matter of choice, of preference. Of course,
we know that here “choice” means “I choose to ignore you when
I pass you in the street” and preference means “I would prefer
you didn’t embarrass me in front of my colleagues.” Their facile
use of “preference” to justify their behaviour reflects the superficiality
of argument that characterizes the neo-liberal gay movement on
a whole range of issues. Any practice can be justified as “choice”
or “preference”, constrained only by “consent”, without any thought
being given to how our preferences are constructed, in whose interest
it really is for us to make the choices we do, or to the complexity
and ambiguity of “consent” where there is inequality.
I hope you can see why I described the modern gay movement as
confusing, contradictory, paradoxical from a 70s viewpoint. The
gains we have made in legal reform, in visibility, and in making
our voices publicly heard, are genuinely impressive. But we appear
to have turned our backs entirely on GLF’s goal of “rid[ding]
society of the gender-role system”, and large parts of our community
seem as much in the grip of self-oppression as ever; worse, practices
and attitudes which we would not have doubted were self-oppressive
and oppressive of others in 1972 are now declared to be radically
liberating. Sado-masochism and pornography on the one hand, and
on the other, just as absurdly, marriage.
Joining the sinking ship
“Who is to blame for the many ruined, unhappy marriages of
our time? As a rule, not the husband, nor the wife: marriage
itself is to blame.”
Those are not my words, nor were they written
in the 1970s. They are those of the German feminist Hedwig Dohm,
and she wrote them in 1909.10 Feminists from at least a generation
before Dohm down to the present have argued forcefully and with
a wealth of scholarship that the marriage institution is profoundly
inimical to women’s autonomy and freedom. This fact alone should
make us stop and think long and hard before contemplating seeking
entry into that institution.
Gay liberationists in the 70s could hardly have envisaged that
homosexuals would, 20 or 30 years on, literally seek access to
legal marriage, but they were vigorously critical of what they
called “compulsive monogamy”. This term was not meant as a criticism
of couples who happened to live happily together on a long-term
basis. It was, rather, directed against an ideology that promoted
an imitation of heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate lifestyle
for homosexual people. The authors of With Downcast Gays wrote:
“our homophile spokesmen ... are busily pushing us into the prison
from which intelligent heterosexuals are trying to escape. We
foresee future anthropologists turning to the pair-bonding of
discreet homosexuals as the only means left available of examining
the long-defunct institution of marriage.”
They were right to draw attention to the fact that heterosexuals
were abandoning the institution of marriage in their droves.
This trend had begun in the 60s, and continues to this day. The
phenomenon can be roughly quantified by reference to the statistics
on children born to unmarried women. In England and Wales in
1970, around 8% of children were born outside marriage; by 2001,
that figure had risen to 40%. The statistics for France are almost
identical. In Sweden, 70% of children are now born to unmarried
women, and the other Scandinavian countries do not lag far behind.11
These are, of course, precisely the countries which have passed
legislation for lesbian and gay partnership which most closely
emulates marriage. Interesting, isn’t it?
Right-wing proponents of gay and lesbian marriage in our time
are indeed, like the “homophile spokesmen” criticized by Hodges
and Hutter, “busily pushing us into th[is] prison.” They seek
to promote marriage not just as an option, but as a norm, practically
an obligation. Jonathan Rauch writes : “If gay marriage is recognized,
single gay people over a certain age should not be surprised when
they are disapproved of or pitied. That is a vital part of what
makes marriage work. It’s stigma as social policy.”12 Andrew
Sullivan’s outpourings are rivalled only by the Vatican and by
the fundamentalist “family values” lobby as effusive paeons of
praise for the marital state.
Rights or robbery?
Of course, it’s possible to be in favour of lesbian and gay marriage
without sharing Rauch’s and Sullivan’s reactionary views. Pro-marriage
advocates in Europe have tended to concentrate much more on the
practical advantages, financial, legal and social, enjoyed by
heterosexual married couples which are not available to homosexuals.
How are we to gain those rights, they might reasonably ask, without
getting married? Before trying to answer that, I think it’s important
to take a close look at the advantages in question, and ask which
of them are legitimate rights at all, which are, on the contrary,
unjustified privileges, and which bring with them disadvantages
which outweigh their value as rights. There will be some overlap
between these categories.
Some advantages which clearly seem to fall into the category of
legitimate rights are “next-of-kin” rights in a healthcare context
(hospital visiting rights, the right to take vital healthcare
decisions on a patient’s behalf when s/he is too incapacitated
to do so, etc) and inheritance rights (in which can be included,
for example, the right to take over the tenancy of a deceased
cohabitor’s apartment, as well as property inheritance as such).
I agree that these are important rights. Like anyone else, I
want the other person living in my apartment to be able to continue
doing so after my death, I want the primary beneficiary of my
will to be able to inherit my property without paying crippling
legacy tax, I want to determine who shall have the right to turn
off my life-support machine, should it become necessary, I want
those I love to be able to visit me in hospital without my blood
relatives having the power to veto this. The problem is, I see
no a priori reason why I should wish all of those rights (or duties)
to be invested in a single person. Yet this would be the inevitable
result of regulating these matters by means of a marriage contract,
or even registered partnership.
In her paper13 given at a conference entitled “Legal Recognition
of Same-Sex Partnerships” held in London in July 1999, Janet Halley
(Professor of Law at Harvard Law School) makes the point that
“[t]o seek recognition is to concede the authority of those whose
regard is sought”. A further point that needs to be made, and
which I think is implicit in Halley’s argument in that paper,
is that to promote marriage as a form of recognition of our relationships
(as opposed, say, to a transformation or a restructuring of them)
is to imply that those relationships are pretty much like marriages
to begin with: all that is required is that this be “recognized”.
But are they? Heterosexual opponents of homosexual marriage
almost universally assert that they are not, and it was the explicit
intention of 70s lesbian feminists and gay liberationists that
they should not be.
In our real lives, I think both the external and internal dynamics
of our relationships differ very considerably from those presupposed
in “classical” marriage. Although I imagine that few of us now
live in the kind of communes envisaged (and practised) by GLF,
I think it is equally true that few of us live in the kind of
closed, inward-looking couple-relationships, with a sharp distinction
between family and friends, that characterize heterosexual marriage.
As Frank Browning notes: “We gay folk tend to organize our lives
more like extended families than nuclear ones. We may love our
mates one at a time, but our ‘primary families’ are often our
ex-lovers and our ex-lovers’ ex-lovers. ... Modern marriage, by
comparison, tends to isolate couples from their larger families
and sometimes from friends – especially if they are ex-lovers.”14
Although sex outside of an established relationship may give
rise to pain and jealousy, the words “cheating” and “infidelity”
applied to such sex seem to me to belong exclusively to heterosexual
vocabulary. Our relationships can be faithful without necessarily
being exclusive. A phenomenon so familiar as to be banal is that
of two gay men who continue to live together as a couple, but,
from a certain point onward, primarily seek sexual contact outside
of the relationship, either singly, or indeed together. The words
“my ‘ex’” spoken by a homosexual and a heterosexual person respectively
carry quite different emotional connotations.
The complex network of relationships which consitute our “families
of choice”, which Edmund White dubbed the “banyan tree” phenomenon,
has practical implications for the implementation of our rights
in the areas I have mentioned. In some jurisdictions, it is possible
to regulate many of these issues through the civil law: a document
designating a person to be responsible for health-care decisions,
a notarized will etc. Where this is not possible, we should surely
be campaigning for changes in the law which would benefit not
just gay and lesbian couples, but also single people and people
of any sexuality in non-traditional relationships. In many countries
there are injustices in the law of inheritance, for example, which
would not be challenged at all by the simple assimilation of lesbian
and gay couples to heterosexual spouses. In Belgium, where I
live, there is a hierarchy of tax rates to be paid by an inheritor
according to his or her degree of relationship to the testator,
starting at 3% for spouses, children and parents, 30% for siblings
and 45% for unrelated heritors. In 1998, Flanders, the northern
part of the country, introduced a law establishing a new category
of “cohabitors”, which includes both homosexual and unmarried
heterosexual couples, with a starting tax rate of 10% (thus between
spouses and siblings). Belgian gay-and-lesbian organizations are
campaigning for the inclusion of homosexual couples in the “spouse”
category. But such inclusion would simply give those couples
a more privileged place in the hierarchy, without challenging
its fundamental injustice. I have not mentioned parenting so
far, but it points up the problem in a particularly acute form.
To quote Frank Browning again: “The marriage model could prove
especially problematic for rearing children. In a gay family,
there are often three parents – a lesbian couple, say, and the
biological father. Sometimes, four or five adults are committed
to nurturing the children. In such cases, a marriage between
two might bring second-class status to the rest of the extended
family and diminish their parental roles.”
The wide range of financial advantages enjoyed by married couples
(in the form of favourable tax and insurance rates, work-related
benefits, pension provisions etc) all seem to me to fall into
the category of unjustified privileges. Large sums of money are
involved. In her essay “Lesbians’ and Gays’ Craving for Normality”,15
German lesbian writer Constance Ohms notes that taxing married
couples jointly rather than individually costs the German state
DM 40 billion (around $18 billion) per year. But who actually
pays for that $18 billion hand-out ? Unmarried people, of course.
As a single person, I object strongly to subsidizing the husbands
and wives of my heterosexual colleagues through my tax and insurance
contributions, and frankly, I’m no keener to subsidize my lesbian
and gay colleagues’ lovers. Lesbian and gay marriage would financially
disadvantage the majority of homosexual people by increasing their
overall tax and insurance subsidy to married couples, straight
and gay.
Dependency – heterosexualising our relationships
The other problem with such arrangements, on which Ohms focuses
more particularly in her essay, is that they foster structures
of dependency within couple relationships. Historically, this
has of course meant the dependency of wives upon their husbands.
Indeed, that was, at their origin, the very purpose of such tax
schemes, which used to be called “married man’s allowance” or
“head of family rebate” and suchlike, and facilitated a lifestyle
in which a man “provided for” his wife, who worked unpaid in the
home. Of course, the relevant laws have been reformed many times
and – on paper – the position of husband and wife has been equalized.
But given that women’s average wage is still considerably less
than that of men, and that women still in practice bear most of
the responsibility for work in the home, the system continues
to operate in favour of women’s dependency. Some, like gay German
parliamentarian Volker Beck, dismiss this out of hand by saying
that this problem simply can’t arise for homosexual couples.16
Even if this were true, it is nothing less than shocking for
a gay man to give his support to a form of social organization
which he acknowledges operates to the disadvantage of women.
But of course, it’s not true anyway. It’s a fact of life that
there are inequalities between partners in any couple, including
inequalities of wealth and income. What are the implications
of building those inequalities, by law, into the very structure
of our relationships? Of perhaps being tied to our partners no
longer just by love or friendship, but by dependence on them for
our healthcare insurance, our access to basic services?
Constance Ohms addresses the question of immigration in this context.
Paragraph 19 of the German Aliens Law, she writes, obliges an
immigrant from a non-EU country to remain with her or his German
spouse for a certain period, on average five years, before acquiring
an independent right of residence. This period can be reduced
in certain circumstances, and in the case of an abusive husband
it is reduced to two years. So a woman is obliged to remain with
her abuser for two years before gaining independent residency
rights. This extreme form of dependency is all the more alarming
in the context of the growing phenomenon whereby Western men more
or less openly purchase brides from poor Asian and Eastern European
countries. If you think there are no gay men who would also be
keen to acquire a “husband” or “male wife” in this manner, then
take another look at some of those “adult sites” on the Internet.
I have spoken in rather general terms about marriage, as I think
it more appropriate to leave detailed discussion to tomorrow’s
speakers: unlike them, I am neither a lawyer, nor an historian,
nor a sociologist. It must be clear by now that my own position
– like that of the overwhelming majority of 70s lesbian feminists
and gay liberationists – is that gay and lesbian marriage is a
bad idea because marriage itself is a bad idea, and our campaigning
energies would be more worthily devoted to its abolition than
to its extension.
NOTES
1. Mitchell, Joni (1971), Track 3
2. London GLF Manifesto Group (1971)
3. Hodges, Andrew, and Hutter, David (1974)
4. Auchmuty, Rosemary (1997)
5. Sullivan, Andrew (1997), p. 147
6. Sullivan (1994)
7. London GLF Manifesto Group (1971)
8. http://tinawebcam.com/911/index.htm
9. Jeffreys, Sheila (1996)
10. Quoted in Tost, Gita, “Lesbische L(i)ebensweisen” [”Lesbian
ways of life/love”] in Bubeck, Ilona (ed.) (2000). My translation.
11. See Eurostat for further details.
12. Rauch, Jonathan, “For Better or Worse?” Originally in The New
Republic, May 6, 1996. Reproduced in Sullivan (1997), p. 180.
13. “Rhetorics of Justification in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate”,
in Wintemute & Andenaes (2001).
14. Browning, Frank, “Why Marry?”, originally in The New York Times,
April 17, 1996, reproduced in Sullivan, Andrew (1997)
15. Ohms, Constance, “Die Sehnsucht der Lesben und Schwulen nach
Normalität”, in Bubeck, Ilona (ed.) (2000)
16. As quoted in Stedefeldt, Eike, “Triumph der Dummheit” [Triumph
of Stupidity] in Bubeck, Ilona (2000)
REFERENCES
Auchmuty, Rosemary, “Last in, first out: Lesbian and Gay Legal Studies – Two recent books and their relevance for Feminist Legal Studies”, in Feminist Legal Studies, Vol. V no. 2 (1997)
Bubeck, Ilona, Unser Stück vom Kuchen? Zehn Positionen gegen die Homo?Ehe [Our Piece of the Cake? Ten Positions against Gay/Lesbian Marriage] (Querverlag, Berlin, 2000)
Davis, Elizabeth Gould, The First Sex (London, Putnam, 1971)
Firestone, Shulamith, The Dialectic of Sex (New York, William Morrow, 1970)
Greer, Germaine, The Female Eunuch (London, Flamingo, 1970)
Hodges, Andrew, and Hutter, David, With Downcast Gays – Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression (London, Pomegranate Press, 1974)
Jeffreys, Sheila, “How Orgasm Politics Has Hijacked the Women’s Movement”, in On The Issues, Spring 1996 (NY)
London GLF Manifesto Group, Gay Liberation Front Manifesto (London, 1971)
Millet, Kate, Sexual Politics (1969)
Mitchell, Joni, Blue, (U.S.A., Warner Bros. Records Inc.)
Morgan, Robin (ed.), Sisterhood is Powerful (New York, Random House, 1970)
Sullivan, Andrew, “Alone Again, Naturally”, in The New Republic, November 28, 1994
Sullivan, Andrew, Same-Sex Marrage: pro and con – a reader (New York, Vintage, 1997)
———
Along with Peter Norman and Professor Elman, other speakers at the conference were Malka
Marcovich, historian and President of the Paris-based Movement Against Prostitution
and Pornography, Carl Stychin, Head of the School of Law at the University of Reading,
and Suzy Byrne, sociologist and activist in Irish and international campaigns for the rights
of lesbians and gay men. Unfortunately, the full proceedings of the conference were never
published, but if anyone is interested, the author would be happy to do his best to provide copies of the
other contributors’ speeches if you contact him at
petrenorman@yahoo.com,
where your comments on his piece would also be most welcome.
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