Gays: not all galloping down the aisle

Just when I was beginning to worry that the gay community had gone all square on us:

The New York Times’ article on gays who married in Massachusetts started off peddling the soothing line that gays are no threat to conventional marriage. (They’re just like us! They get divorced. They can’t get their boyfriends to commit. They dream about their wedding outfits.) I began getting depressed.

They saved the good stuff for after the jump. There we get Eric Erbelding and Michael Peck, whose “rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.” Most married gay couples Erbelding knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.” Phew.

And after I was embarrassed by the statistic that two-thirds of same-sex weddings in Massachusetts have been lesbian marriages—see, every woman’s life goal really is that white wedding dress—I read of Joyce Kauffman, who aims at a more creative definition of family and considers marriage a patriarchal institution that “politically makes me kind of queasy.” Thank you, sister.

Weddings tend to make me kind of queasy, too—so smug, they are—and I always felt the air lightened by knowing gay folks looked at them askance too. The gay subculture provided alternative models for living that expanded the sense of the possible in intimate life. Much as I agreed that it was a matter of human rights that if straights had the right to marry, gays should too, the world felt narrowed when gays began clamoring for marriage.

But this conversation isn’t over, not among gays and not among straights.