First published on May 17, 2004, in The New York Times.
Today is the day that gay citizens in this country cross a milestone of equality. Gay couples will be married in Massachusetts - their love and commitment and responsibility fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to. It is also, amazingly enough, the day of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that ended racial segregation in schools across America. We should be wary of facile comparisons. The long march of African-Americans to civil equality was and is deeply different from the experience and legacy of gay Americans. But in one respect, the date is fitting, for both Brown and this new day revolve around a single, simple and yet deeply elusive idea: integration.
It is, first, a human integration. Marriage, after all, is perhaps the chief mechanism for integrating new families into old ones. The ceremony is a unifying ritual, one in which peers and grandparents meet, best friends and distant relatives chatter. It's hard for heterosexuals to imagine being denied this moment. It is, after all, regarded in our civil religion as the "happiest day of your life." And that is why the denial of such a moment to gay family members is so jarring and cruel. It rends people from their own families; it builds an invisible but unscalable wall between them and the people they love and need.
You might think from some of the discussion of marriage rights for same-sex couples that homosexuals emerge fully grown from under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco. But we don't. We are born into families across the country in every shape and form imaginable. Allowing gay people to marry is therefore less like admitting a group of citizens into an institution from which they have been banned than it is simply allowing them to stay in the very families in which they grew up.
I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it: the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.
You recover, of course, and move on. But even when your family and friends embrace you, there is still the sense of being "separate but equal." And this is why the images from Massachusetts today will strike such a chord. For by insisting on nothing more nor less than marriage, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has abolished that invisible wall that divides families within themselves. This is an integration of the deepest kind.
It is, second, a civil integration. That is why the term gay marriage is a misnomer. Today is not the day "gay marriage" arrives in America. Today is the first time that civil marriage has stopped excluding homosexual members of our own families. These are not "gay marriages." They are marriages. What these couples are affirming is not something new; it is as old as humanity itself. What has ended - in one state, at least - is separatism. We have taken a step toward making homosexuality a non-issue; toward making gay citizens merely and supremely citizens.
This is why I am so surprised by the resistance of many conservatives to this reform. It is the most pro-family measure imaginable - keeping families together, building new ones, strengthening the ties between generations. And it is a profound rebuke to identity politics of a reductionist kind, to the separatism that divides our society into categories of gender and color and faith. This is why some elements of the old left once opposed such a measure, after all. How much more striking, then, that the left has been able to shed its prejudices more successfully than the right.
I cannot think of another minority whom conservatives would seek to exclude from family life and personal responsibility. But here is a minority actually begging for a chance to contribute on equal terms, to live up to exactly the same responsibilities as everyone else, to refuse to accept what President Bush calls the "soft bigotry of low expectations." And, so far, with some exceptions, gay citizens have been told no. Conservatives, with the president chief among them, have said to these people that they are beneath the dignity of equality and the promises of American life. They alone are beneath the fold of family.
But this time, these couples have said yes - and all the president can do (today, at least) is watch. It is a private moment and a public one. And it represents, just as Brown did in a different way, the hope of a humanity that doesn't separate one soul from another and a polity that doesn't divide one citizen from another. It is integration made real, a love finally come home: after centuries of pain and stigma, the "happiest day of our lives."