First published on June 3, 2004, in the Chicago Free Press.
In his book The Broken Hearth, conservative polemicist William J. Bennett remarks that it is
"important to say publicly what most of us believe privately, namely that marriage between a man and a woman is in every way to be preferred to the marriage of two men or two women."
To which author and columnist Jonathan Rauch, who quotes Bennett's observation in his excellent new book Gay Marriage, responds:
"I have to say, if the reader will permit me a moment of exasperation, that we homosexuals get a bit tired of being assured by heterosexuals that their loves and lives and unions are 'in every way' better than ours."
Indeed. Take love, for instance. One wonders how a person loudly proclaiming his own heterosexuality could possibly know that heterosexual love is better "in every way" than love between a gay or lesbian couple. Gay love might even be better - "in every way to be preferred." But unless someone had experienced both fully he could hardly have grounds for comparison.
But psychologists and theologians have "in every way" sought to elevate heterosexual love and debase, demean, pathologize, vilify or deny love between people of the same sex-reduce it to lust, claim it is fleeting, view it as somehow incomplete, or treat it as strictly self-regarding or "narcissistic." Since these claims are seldom argued, and when "argued" usually start with the desired conclusion built into the assumptions, they smack of a desperate defense of a weak position.
If qualities of love were to be ranked, someone might offer the counter claim that same-sex love is superior to opposite sex love because the different ways that men and women experience the world through their very different bodies and hormonally influenced outlooks means they can hardly reach a degree of sympathetic understanding necessary for love.
No doubt if heterosexuals were a long-stigmatized minority, a homosexual majority would think of heterosexual "love" as based primarily on lust or a depraved desire for exotically produced orgasms ("You do what?"), as shallow and doomed to failure because the partners are "just too different to feel enduring love," as incomplete and lacking empathy, as rooted in a subconscious self-hatred or desire to identify with or become the other sex, etc., etc.
But in the end it is hard to think of any very persuasive reason why love - the emotional and erotic experience of feeling bonded to someone else - between people of the same sex should be different in nature or quality from love between people of the opposite sex. Love after all seems to be a natural human capacity and could hardly be said to differ in nature according to the sex of its object or the person who experiences it.
At its core, love seems to involve not exactly a "bonding to" another person, but a partial breakdown of the barriers between them so that each takes on the elements, concerns, the well-being of the other person and makes them part of the person's own being. Thus the empty feeling when couples separate or a long-term partner dies: part of oneself no longer exists and the person feels suddenly incomplete.
It might seem, and may be true, that gays and lesbians have an initial advantage of interpersonal empathy because of their similar bodies and social conditioning. But even for gays and lesbians it seems safe to say that love, like sex, usually requires a greater or lesser degree of difference between the two people that makes them interesting, stimulating to each other.
What is involved in attraction, and ultimately love, is a desire to incorporate or associate with or "import" the desired qualities in the other person. Those need not be qualities a person himself lacks; they may be ones he already has but admires and desires more of.
Heterosexuals and their apologists used to make two opposite (and mutually contradictory) errors about gay relationships. Mapping gay relationships onto heterosexual ones, they assumed there would be a masculine and a feminine partner. But in fact it is more logical that gay men, most of them reasonably masculine, would be attracted to other masculine gay men. Having eroticized masculinity in the first place, they would reasonably look for it in a partner.
But - and this was the opposite error - that did not mean that gay men were looking for someone exactly like themselves. Masculinity has numerous modalities or "flavors," intensities, and styles, and no man can embody more than a few. So a man may be attracted to someone who embodies other modalities, or ones close to his own but with a different personality or presentation.
As psychologist C.A. Tripp put it in his book The Homosexual Matrix,:
"In less obvious examples, the contrast between partners may appear slight to an outside observer, but it is always there and constitutes the basis of the attraction. Notions to the effect that the homosexual is looking for some 'narcissistic' reflection of his own image are as mythical as was Narcissus himself."