IGF CultureWatch

I was at a bar the other day when someone I'd just met shouted at me across the table, asking me how long I've been writing my column.

"Oh, 10 years," I shouted back.

He was startled. "I thought you were in your early 20s."

He meant it as a compliment, of course, more a reflection on what I look like than on my intellectual maturity. My sister has commented on it, too. She just turned 23 and the last time I saw her, she looked me up and down and said, "You dress like my friends."

But I've been thinking lately about what it means that I and my mid-30s friends all look-and act-like our compatriots in our 20s.

Adam Sternbergh of New York magazine calls people like us "grups": grown-ups, condensed. Grown-ups who refuse to grow up. Grown-ups who aren't sure what, exactly, being grown-up means.

"This is an obituary for the generation gap," he wrote. "This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their 30s and 40s-and even 50s-clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up with none of the bad parts (dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree)."

We hang out in bars. We watch "Grey's Anatomy." We drink the newest drinks and watch the coolest movies and listen to the same music in the same iPods as the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train. Heck, we're probably dating the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train.

Adulthood is even more compressed for gay men and lesbians, I think, because there are fewer of us and we tend to clump together and we follow the general American trend of wanting to be younger than we are instead of older. So instead of young lesbians and gay men aspiring to be like their wise elders, the wise elders are getting tattoos.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not really. People should be able to wear and listen to what they want, right?

What struck me in the New York article was not the riffs on our grupster clothes-I thought those were funny and true. What struck me was this sentence: "For a grup, success isn't how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk or boogie-board away."

That sentence struck me because oh, that, that right there, is the problem for so many of us in our 30s and 40s. We define success as freedom. And freedom means no defined roles and an overabundance of choices.

So we wake up in the morning and our choices include not just what we're going to wear or make for dinner, but whether we're going to quit today, whether we should move across country and take up snowboarding, whether we should be single again or move in with our girlfriend and whether we should go back to school and try something completely new.

We grups are a people without a map. Especially we gay and lesbian grups, who don't have the traditional heterosexual plan to follow, who may not be asked by our families when we're going to have kids or get married or settle down.

Even if we are settled down-even if we have kids-we likely don't have a plan. Instead, we are literally unsettled, insecure in the knowledge that we can leave anything at any time.

We chose this shedding of obligations and requirements because it's how our generation defines freedom. We don't want to be the company men or women. We don't want to be trapped in gender or social roles. We don't want to be the person with a lifelong regret that we had never tried to make it as a rock musician or a novelist.

So we've immersed ourselves in youth culture-and not even our own youth culture but the culture of the millennials (whose music, admittedly, is very similar to the Gen X music that we played on our Walkmans growing up). We have immersed ourselves in a youth culture where, like in all youth cultures, the driving force is the individual pursuit of our own passions, whatever passions those happen to be at the moment.

This differentiates us, I suppose, from the "Greed-is-Good" corporate types of the 1980s. If that's what being grown-up is, we don't want it-and good for us.

But maybe it's time to define what being grown-up is for us grups. Because pursuing our own passions seems to make us happy in the short term but not content and secure in the long term. Many of us are still looking for purpose. We're still trying to find our way.

I suspect that this contentment will come when we start devoting ourselves to our community-our communities-instead of the latest band.

But until we solve the puzzle of who we're going to be when we grow up, we'll continue being grups-dressing and acting like we're in our 20s, as if seeming younger will give us more time to figure life out.

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, which opposes gay marriage, has just issued a new report finding that relatively few gay couples are getting married in jurisdictions where gay marriage is permitted. Is this correct? If it is, why are there so few gay marriages so far?

Here's a summary of the findings from the report:

The highest estimate to date of the proportion of gays and lesbians who have married in any jurisdiction where it is available is 16.7% (Massachusetts). More typically, our survey of marriage statistics from various countries that legally recognize same-sex unions suggests that today between 1% and 5% of gays and lesbians have entered into a same-sex marriage.

The report derives these numbers by comparing the total number of same-sex marriages in a jurisdiction to an estimate of the total number of adult homosexuals in the jurisdiction (based on survey data). While we could quibble over the estimates of the number of gays in a given jurisdiction, the report uses a range of reasonable assumptions.

Which way do these preliminary findings cut? On the one hand, the report gives some ammunition to opponents of gay marriage, who may argue that marriage will have little practical impact among gays. The legal benefits of marriage will remain unavailable to the many gays who don't marry.

On the other hand, even assuming that marriage rates among gays remain low, there will still be legal, social, and other practical benefits to those gay couples who do choose to marry. To them, marriage will be important regardless of whether others choose to marry.

Low marriage rates among gays make it even harder to see how this tiny fraction of the population will cause any practical harm to marriage as an institution (such as by the flaunting of non-monogamous behavior by some gay-male couples). Of course, if you believe that a "change in the definition of marriage" to include same-sex couples is itself harmful to marriage then marriage will be worse off even if no gay couple actually gets married-but you don't need studies to make this argument. To me, this definitional fear has always seemed far too abstract to count for much.

Assuming it's true that relatively few gay couples are getting married where it's allowed, why is that the case? Many reasons come to mind, especially the fact that even now a gay married couple in Massachusetts is not considered "married" by the federal government and 49 states. This complicates their legal status and precludes them from getting the full benefit of marriage.

Let me address four additional reasons for initially low gay-marriage rates.

1. The idea of marriage is still novel to gay people. As the report suggests, such "novelty" can produce excitement. But it can also produce fear, specifically fear of the unknown. Britney Spears aside, I doubt many people get married for the novelty of it. Marriage is a huge legal and social commitment. People who have never even imagined it would be a prospect in their lives are understandably hesitant.
   
   
2. Gay couples have no gay married role models to follow. Related to this, there is as yet for a gay person no peer or familial expectation that one will get married, as there is for heterosexuals.
   
   
3. Without the social encouragement and support that marriage provides for relationship formation, there are probably relatively fewer long-term and stable gay couples to begin with, and thus relatively fewer couples who would immediately demand marriages. As new relationships are formed under a regime of marriage, more gay couples will eventually reach the point where someone pops the question, "Will you marry me?"
   
   
4. Reinforcing the fear of the unknown is the fact that many gay people have actually constructed an oppositional identity for themselves partly based on the unavailability of marriage. Excluded from marriage, they have made a virtue of this necessity.

This oppositional identity takes many forms in the writings of queer theorists and in the things even ordinary gay people can be heard to say when the subject of marriage arises. One hears expressions like: "We don't need marriage with all its patriarchal and heterosexist trappings." Or: "I don't want to mimic straight people." Or: "Marriage is such a mess, with 50% divorce rates, why would we want to join it?" Or: "Just give us the benefits of marriage and you can keep the word."

Some people will retain this oppositional identity no matter how much time passes. But for others, primarily those younger people whose identities are formed in an environment where marriage is an option, oppositional identity of this sort should fade.

All of this suggests there will be an adjustment period of some duration while more marriage-inclined gay couples form and while marriage becomes a comfortable and normatively appealing option to them.

I doubt that marriage rates among gays will ever equal marriage rates among heterosexuals, primarily because gay couples will be less likely to raise children. Even after marriage culture settles in, straight couples will be most likely to get married, followed by lesbian couples (who are more likely to raise children than gay males), followed by gay-male couples. But a disparity in marriage rates among heterosexual and homosexual couples is not an argument in itself against recognizing same-sex marriages.

Whatever our views of gay marriage, we should not be surprised to find gay couples and communities taking things slowly.

The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, a boutique anti-gay marriage operation headed by conservative polemicist Maggie Gallagher, recently released a report which purported to estimate the number of gays and lesbians who would marry if same-sex marriage were legal.

To do this, the authors looked at the number of same-sex couples who had married where same-sex marriage was legal-specifically the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the state of Massachusetts. They then calculated the percentage of gays that number represented depending on estimates of the size of the gay population from 1.1 to 5 percent.

They concluded that 1.9 to 4.7 percent of Belgium's gay population had married, 5.9 to 16.7 percent of Massachusetts' gay population and 2.6 to 6.3 percent of Dutch gays had married. Canadian data vary widely from province to province because marriage was legalized at different times.

But as usual with any right-wing "study" about homosexuals, there are problems with both the data and the analyses.

First of all, any report that seriously offers the possibility that only 1 or 2 percent of the population is gay or lesbian is intellectually frivolous.

Second, gay marriage has been legal for only a short time--barely five years in the Netherlands, barely three in Belgium, exactly two years in Massachusetts, and one to thre years in different parts of Canada. That is hardly enough time to give a sense of how many gays would marry once they find the man or woman they want to formally bind their lives with.

Some gays may not have even looked very hard for such a person because the possibility of legally solidifying a relationship was not available. With the availability of gay marriage the whole mental set about dating and developing a relationship changes but it takes time for that change to be absorbed and acted on.

Some couples who have been together for a long time may decide that they do not want to change things, that they are comfortable with how they have arranged their lives up to now and do not feel the need to "make as statement" as they would put it.

Better evidence of the desire for marriage among gays will be the behavior over the next 15-20 years of the generation of gays and lesbians just now coming into adulthood with the possibility of marriage available to them from the beginning.

Third, in both Europe and America, marriage for gays and lesbians offers much less than it does for heterosexuals. For instance, in the U.S. some of the main inducements of marriage are the vast array of federal legal and economic benefits--inheritable Social Security, veterans benefits, partner immigration rights, joint income tax filing, etc.

Those are not available for gay couples in Massachusetts, so pretending that gay and heterosexual marriage offer similar incentives is dishonest.

In European countries that allow gay marriage, most have not allowed gay couples to adopt children or have done so only recently. Yet the joint creation or adoption of children constitutes one of the strongest incentives for marriage. The raising of children as a joint project seems to solidify a relationship as nothing else does and increases the desirability of marriage. Yet that opportunity or incentive has been denied to European gays.

As evidence, there are data from Scandinavia suggesting that among heterosexuals a majority of first children are born to unmarried couples, but that many of those couples did eventually go on to marry after their children were born.

Fourth, although it seems almost too obvious to mention, one of the reasons for heterosexual marriage is the pressure from parents and relatives to "make it legal," or "tie the knot." Unmarried heterosexual couples hear a good deal of that urging. But how many parents or relatives of gays push them to marry their same-sex partner in the same way? Many religious and socially conservative parents and relatives can barely tolerate homosexuality, so they are hardly going to encourage their son or daughter to enter a same-sex marriage. Many gays would be marrying despite their families wishes, not because of them.

Fifth, most heterosexuals are openly heterosexual. But many gays and lesbians are not "out of the closet" in any general sense. Far fewer than half, perhaps barely a quarter are openly gay to all and sundry, so the majority of gays are not in a position to do anything as public as have a state certified marriage.

Finally, keep in mind that some gays are not allowed to marry at all. Gays and lesbians in the U.S. military are not allowed to marry. In most Protestant denominations gay and lesbian clergy may not marry and keep their jobs. Yet heterosexuals in those same positions marry in high numbers.

Are the gay marriage/heterosexual marriage comparisons valid? Of course not.

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Author's note: This version refines language and corrects a few small errors in the print version.

My Grandma Rose stood at just under 5 feet--in recent years, even less than that, as osteoporosis took its toll on her small frame. But she will always be a towering figure in my mind.

She was born on May 8, 1921, in the town of Licodia Eubea, in the Sicilian province of Catania. A few years later her father immigrated to the United States, and he would not see her again until she was twelve, when he finally sent for her and the rest of the family. I often wonder what it must have been like for her, to meet this virtual stranger who was her father. He was a harsh man, even violent, but she loved him nevertheless.

Her family embodied the "American dream," coming to the new world, trying to take advantage of a land of opportunity. When she was nineteen her parents introduced her to my grandfather, Joseph, in what today would be called an arranged marriage. Joseph was born in the same town as Rose, and like her he immigrated as a child. Eventually he became a successful carpenter. Their marriage lasted for sixty-five years, "till death do us part" indeed.

Together Rose and Joseph had two children, my Uncle Tom and my mother Annette. (Their real names: Gaitano and Antoinette. Don't ask me how "Gaitano" became "Tom": somehow it makes sense to our Italian-American ears.) But they also presided over a large extended family. While the terms "matriarch" and "patriarch" seem old-fashioned, my grandparents epitomized the best aspects of those roles: commitment, dependability, generosity, dignity.

To them, family was paramount. It shaped their identity, it guided their choices, it gave them their purpose. The result was that those of us who were part of their family had a strong sense of place: we belonged and we mattered. "Nobody's better than you," my grandmother would tell us grandchildren, and when she said it, she meant it, and we felt it. She didn't mean that other people were bad--indeed, despite her provincial background, she had a deep respect for other cultures--she meant that we were good. And in that way she taught us not only to respect, but also to be respected, and to carry ourselves with dignity.

That strong sense of family could be comforting--indeed, invaluably so--but it could also be intimidating. To screw up was not merely to disgrace yourself, it was to disgrace the Family. Capital F. Whenever my grandmother would talk about her family, she would punctuate her sentences with "Right or wrong?" You knew that it wasn't really a multiple-choice question.

It was against that background that, when I was about 25 years old, I decided to come out to my grandparents. I had been building a wall between us for years, trying to hide an important aspect of myself, and that felt wrong. (I can hear my grandmother now saying, "If you don't trust your family, who can you trust? You gotta trust your family. Right or wrong?")

So I went to their house and…I couldn't do it. I hemmed and hawed and skated around the issue and finally went home. Discouraged but not deterred, I went back the next day. Finally I looked at my grandmother (my conversations were always primarily with her; my grandfather taking a largely silent but crucial background role) and I said, trembling, "Grandma, I'm gay."

"Yes, we know," she replied, with a loving look that I'll never forget. "You're our grandson, and we love you, and we're proud of you." Then she hit my taciturn grandfather in the arm and said, "Joe, say something," and he repeated the same sentiment. And that was that.

When people ask me how my family took my coming out, I often quip that they handled it the way Italian-Americans handle anything perceived to be a crisis: we yell, we scream, we cry--and then we all sit down and eat. At the end of the day, we're family. In the case of my grandparents, there was no yelling, screaming and crying. There was just the powerful sense that I was family, and that was all that mattered. That sense eventually extended to my partner, whom they immediately embraced as one of their own.

Grandma Rose died peacefully on April 23, 2006. I was at her side, along with my parents, my uncle, my grandfather, and some cousins.

In a world of so-called "culture wars," there are those who talk about family values and there are those who live them. Grandma Rose lived them, and for that, I will forever be grateful. Rest in peace, Grandma.

Former neuroscientist Simon LeVay made a brief splash 15 years ago with research purporting to show that a part of gay men's brains he claimed was associated with sexual attraction in animals was slightly more like the brains of women than were the brains of ostensibly heterosexual men.

The study had a number of problems. The gay men all died of AIDS but the effect of the disease and antiviral drugs on the brain was left unexplored. The orientation of the supposedly non-gay men was actually unknown. The role of the studied brain segment in humans is uncertain. And some gay men's brain segments were more "male" than some of the heterosexual men's. The study has not been replicated and LeVay soon retired from neuroscience research.

Now LeVay is back with a long, meandering and confusing think piece once again arguing that there is something female about gay men. But then he seems to back off his claim as if aware that this outdated stereotype just won't sell any more. It is an odd performance.

Writing in the British magazine New Scientist, LeVay starts with the claim that gay men have difficulty falling in love and forming lasting relationships. Heterosexual partners, he says, are drawn to each other primarily because of their differences as male and female. But same-sex partners, "may sometimes be too similar to each other for their relationships to be stable."

They lack the complementarity that can solidify a relationship, he says, so "it may be difficult for a person to see their partner as sufficiently 'other' or 'exotic' for romantic passion to persist." In other words, gays do not fit LeVay's procrustean, heterosexual model of sexual bonding.

One successful gay relationship, LeVay says, "was portrayed by Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in the 1996 movie 'The Birdcage.' Although grossly stereotyped for humorous effect, it may have been more culturally authentic than the relationship between two similar, conventionally masculine men that was the focus of last year's Brokeback Mountain."

Well, hardly! In one sense LeVay is only stating the familiar point that differences can be attractive because they are mysterious. But he gets the rest all wrong. There are certainly differences between same-sex partners. As psychologist C. A. Tripp pointed out in "The Homosexual Matrix," the basis of erotic attraction is that each partner wishes to experience or take "symbolic possession" of some desirable quality present in the other partner.

But as Tripp makes clear, "Homosexuality in all its variations always means that same-sex attributes ... have taken on erotic significance." So it is the most simple-minded stereotype to think of partner differences as significantly related to the expression of gender polarity.

For one thing, as LeVay belatedly acknowledges in his final three paragraphs, there can be many differences between same-sex partners not related to gender polarity. The best known are age-differentiated relationships as in ancient Greece where--contrary to LeVay--it was the masculinity and prowess not the femininity of the younger partner that was valued.

Other familiar differences between partners can and do include things such as ethnicity, social level, race, body type, temperament, experiential background or personality type.

It is also important to realize that there is a variety of different ways of expressing or embodying masculinity that have nothing to do with femininity--although people who believe the stereotype usually try to represent them that way. Men who embody different modes of masculinity can readily be attracted to each other because none of us can embody them all fully--an emphasis on some involves a de-emphasis of others.

Tripp points out that the differences between partners are often small, almost invisible to outsiders, but exist nevertheless. LeVay, for instance misses the differences between the two "conventionally masculine" men in "Brokeback Mountain" because his procrustean gender dichotomy model of sexual attraction prevents him from seeing them.

As Virginia blogger Tim Hulsey writes, "The film's central point in depicting the relationship of Jack and Ennis is that their various masculine traits are different and complementary. To oversimplify, Jack Twist has the social skills, self-assertiveness and personal ambition that Ennis Del Mar lacks. Ennis has the internal moral fiber, survival instinct, and sense of personal responsibility to others that Jack lacks. Jack knows how to act like a man; Ennis knows how to be a man. Each needs the other to complete his masculinity."

Finally, even men who seem similarly masculine can be attracted to each other because, however masculine each partner may be, since he has eroticized same-sex attributes--the definition of being gay--each may be seeking yet more of an attribute he already has in abundance. We have all seen well-built men and bodybuilders attracted to each other as partners.

LeVay should read more about the psychology of sexual atraction before he writes about it again.