First appeared August 29, 1996, in the Windy City Times.
IN THE SEPTEMBER 1996 issue of the slick, self-consciously "hip," youth magazine Details, gay comic writer John Weir published a humorous piece disapproving of gay marriage, explaining that the whole point of being gay is to be critical of such bourgeois convention. Oh.
Now it is always risky to disagree with humor, since the author can always say he was just joking and you failed to get the joke or catch the irony.
But the notions Weir advances have some currency within the self-avowed "queer" community -- which constitutes about 2 percent of the gay population and gets about 70 percent of the media attention. And Weir is writing for a primarily heterosexual audience who, knowing little better, may take him at his word. Those facts make it worthwhile disagreeing with Weir whether he means what he says or not. Weir starts from the fact that Congress is considering a "Defense of Marriage Act," which would limit the federal definition of marriage to "one man and one woman as husband and wife."
"In other words," Weir explains, "husband and husband, or wife and wife, are out, which is fine with me. These words sound too much like master and slave." And Weir hastily segues to a description of a gay leather wedding he says he once attended.
But the segue does not work as an argument. Most gay marriages are not and would not be leather or master/slave marriages. And why should "husband and husband" sound like "master and slave"? After all, who would be master and who would be slave -- the husband or the husband? (Would they flip a coin? Choose alternate weeks? Arm wrestle for bottom?) In fact, just the opposite is true. Husband and husband sounds exactly like a joining of two parties who are equals so far as legal entitlements and gender role expectations are concerned.
(It is worth while pointing out that master/slave relationships in the context of modern sexual practice usually involve a contract voluntarily entered into: If the stated mutual obligations are not honored, the contract is void. This hardly sounds like "slavery" as we traditionally think of it. Weir probably knows this, but he would not have much of an article if he acknowledged it.)
Weir's claim is really an illogical application of the lesbian-feminist line that heterosexual marriage is a "patriarchal" institution and that gays and lesbians should eschew it to avoid supporting the "patriarchy."
That argument claimed that women were once treated as chattel slaves and were regarded as the property of their husbands. Even in modern times, the argument continued, the disproportionate legal advantages and economic power of men combine with the strong traditional gender role expectations to make women the subsidiary partner in any male/female marriage.
Alas, the argument is not historically well grounded (contrast, for example, Chaucer's Wife of Bath); and in an era of nearly equal legal rights and growing economic power for women it looks particularly unpersuasive. But even if the argument had merit, one would expect that gay or lesbian marriages, since they are between equal partners, would be free of precisely those feminist objections to marriage.
Weir's disapproval of marriage turns out not to be based on reason, but to be simply a part of his hostile view toward everything bourgeois.
"I thought the whole point of being homosexual was to poke fun at heterosexual convention," Weir says. "When you commit yourself to being gay you're supposed to take a lifelong vow of otherness. You're supposed to live on the outside, to glory in being different."
"Why be gay if . . . -- -- but stop right there. Weir writes as if being gay, or not being gay were, after all, a choice, an option, merely a "commitment." Now it may be that avowing oneself "queer" involves playing at being different and sneering at others. But being gay is simply coming to the realization that you are erotically attracted primarily to men.
There is no "whole point" of being gay any more than there is a "whole point" of being heterosexual, unless it is the effort to live a full, rich, rewarding life as far as one's talents and capacities allow. If "poking fun at heterosexual convention" and "glory[ing] in being different" is sufficient to make life full, rich, and rewarding for someone, well and good. But most of us are going to find that pretty thin gruel to live on.
Notice, however, that poking fun at heterosexuals is not what Weir is doing. Just the opposite. Weir spends most of his space making fun of gays -- the leather wedding, apolitical gays planning a party, gays who think Jeffrey Dahmer is "cute," and the like. Now Weir is welcome to make fun of and sneer at his fellow gays for the amusement and edification of the mostly heterosexual readership of Details, but let us not call that courageous, or cutting edge, or "living on the outside." Let us call it what it is.
Being different from others is hardly much of an effort or an achievement to "glory in." Most of us already have varying perceptions, tastes and values. This writer, for instance, values and enjoys Shostakovich and Carl Nielsen, Rembrandt, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Yvor Winters, Ludwig von Mises, and Leo Strauss. Few of these are widely shared tastes; they certainly provide little material for the customary cocktail party or bar chat. But far from "glorying in" these uncommon tastes, I wish more people shared them. Frankly, the world would be a better place if they did.
Weir's piece by contrast contains numerous references to what apparently are familiar elements in popular mass culture: movie stars and the like. Weir clearly expects his readers to recognize and enjoy these references. So Weir's mind turns out to be not very different from the minds of the mass-circulation readership he is writing for. Perhaps the only people who think it is nifty to "glory in being different" are the people who are really, at the most fundamental level, not very different at all.
It would be entirely possible, of course, for someone to start with the fact of a gay sexual orientation and generate an interesting sort of social criticism of any society that is unable to accommodate it. But Weir does not do that. The "queer" posture he assumes can only make fun of convention and propose an unmotivated and unspecified "otherness." It produces no insights, generates no understanding. Like the rest of popularized "queer theory," it is epistemologically barren and ontologically vacuous.