Paradoxes

The Harper govt is reopening the conversation on same sex marriage. Sigh. Another round of bombast and heightened, hair-splitting rhetoric that creates us/them. More bullying in the guise of "I'm not opposed to GAYS, just to the changing of MARRIAGE, why can't they be satisfied with common law rights," blah blah blah blah blah. The same familiar, wearying strange loop of legitimacy extended and then questioned as soon as it's cautiously trusted.

In an earlier round on this topic, during the US marriage revolution in San Francisco a couple of years ago, Alison Bechdel made one of the cleverest comments on the complexity of the marriage project, having Sydney sink to her knee with a bouquet of flowers and propose to Mo: Will you do me the honour of paradoxically reinscribing and destabilizing hegemonic discourse with me?"

This is the core paradox -- the re-shaping of the idea of marriage while simultaneously taking it on as "the" expected frame, shaping queer families and life to look like the normative societal pairing. Yes, it's a basic right, to be treated the same as any other unit -- but the social effects are also clear, and not the ones that the conservatives imagine. Married queer couples become the "norm" and thus those outside the norm become a bit more queer, a bit more suspect -- I've heard comments like "when are you going to make an honest woman of her?" now that marriage is a possibility. The laws also create language to discuss what was once off limits -- when I was doing my little research project on marriage, several people noted that their relationships were now more available for public scrutiny -- parents who'd never acknowledged their kids' lovers in concrete terms suddenly started asking about wedding bells.

The inverse is also true -- I certainly notice that my relationship with F is more "in the public sphere" than any I've been in before -- people feel much more free to pass commentary on whether it's unfolding according to some predictable pattern or not (will you get married, do you think? (how ridiculous a question is that at not-quite-6 months?) You're not spending christmas together? REALLY. etc.) and to show more... interest than I noticed with other relationships. Of course there is the novelty factor of his being a guy, but the questions flow faster and more practiced than they ever did with women for me. One more conscious friend actually apologized later, noting that she'd done this and acknowledging an inadvertent dimunition of my queer relationships.

The bruising tumult of the debate that will surely unfold over the next few weeks will be too familiar -- people committing what feel like unspeakable acts of unthinking bias without apparently having a clue what they're doing...like the anti-gay-marriage parade I came across one day a few years ago, mostly filled with the usual suspects, but to my astonishment, including a large group of Christian Chinese Canadians. A minority group oppressing another minority, shockingly ignorant of a history that had once denied their own group marriage rights. Spotting one of the young women -- university age -- later cooing with delight over a tshirt with a stick figure formula marriage=1 man + 1 woman -- "OHHHH, so cuuuuute!"

Among all of this will be the usual wielding of the civil rights language (ads from a couple of years ago about drinking fountains and race evoking marriage), which then leads to the claims about biology and queerness "not being a choice," which of course then invokes the squiggly among us as Suspect... and misses the point, as far as I'm concerned, which is that in a just society, choice should count as much as pre-determination.

There will be people who mean well but still miss the point and hurt (like my online gang who got into a "I am glad my kids aren't gay because it would be hard on them" conversation last year and who couldn't hear those of us who said we were HAPPY to have gone through the experience of coming out, self-definition that comes with queerness). There will also be people queers have thought of as friends and allies saying astonishingly hurtful things, like "not if this costs me one penny."

In the middle of that, there will be the usual tentative attempts of the majority to signal that they are on-side, that they think the whole conversation is ridiculous. Like my mail carrier who
conspiratorily whispered to me one day a few years ago that he'd seen a New Yorker cartoon that he thought was very funny -- why would gays want to marry, "haven't they suffered enough?".

The discourse is shifting over time, and the whole thing is a deeply obvious example of the social construction of reality right in front of our eyes, how even having a public conversation creates space to make new meaning for people, to see connections ("why shouldn't queers marry -- it doesn't seem to have changed anything for me"), to change what we take for granted. Simultaneously reinforcing and destabilizing. But as wearying as once again reopening the Quebec question.