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."