I'd solidified my convictions about marriage and kids way before I came out as queer. My early philosophy was influenced by the countercultural mores of the 1960s as well as the abysmal example of Mom and Dad. I pretty much had these sentiments down by the age of 12, and mind you, I hadn't even heard of Emma Goldman yet: I was going to fuck anyone I pleased when I grew up; I wasn't going to marry anybody; and bringing children into a postnuclear world was a karmic error that would follow the perpetrators past the grave. Nothing that's happened during the ensuing 35 years has done much to change my mind.

None of this means that I decry the solace and pleasure of family (I even recognize that a scant few of us came from nurturant and delightful families of origin). I appreciate the drive that draws so many of us together as partners. I even understand why you people want to pull pictures of your kids out of your wallets. See, look at these photos of my cats! Aren't they precious? Look, this is Teacup, walking through a carpet tube! She's so smart! And Bracelet holding a stuffed bear with her paws--did you ever see anything so cute?

Hey, I'd even send 'em to college, if they wanted to go. Fortunately, I've chosen a species to love that doesn't need a degree to succeed in life. But I digress.

From the time I began to go to slumber parties, where I invariably was the only girl present who didn't want to wait to have sex until she was married, I've looked askance at engagement rings and bridal showers, crudely decorated honeymoon cars and the sticky-sweet taste of wedding cake. (I used to feel the same way about bachelor parties, too, until I worked a couple of them. I never jumped out of a cake, though. That's so retro.)

Even when I came out as queer (I knew about Emma Goldman by then), I was in no hurry to plan my wedding. Ironically, the reason I came out to my dad had to do with a lesbian wedding, a lovely little outdoor ceremony planned by my college Gay Studies teacher during summer break. I had to get my dad's permission to go (in those days he paid for everything, including bus tickets to weddings), which involved me telling him what prompted the trip in the first place: When I had finally let loose that Jill was my Gay Studies teacher, and she was marrying a woman, my dad violently crumpled the newspaper he'd been reading and yelled, "Jesus Christ! I suppose that means you're a homosexual!"

"Bisexual, actually, Dad--but if you can only imagine things one way or the other, thinking of me as homosexual will be fine."

Jill and her lover had a nice little ceremony with tasty cake, which I figured presaged a higher quality of marital commitment than the typical heterosexual. I'm sure it was good while it lasted, but within a few years they had broken up.

(Let's spend another minute considering the question of cake, since I am so obviously fixated on it. They make that vile icing perfectly white and "sculptable," and damn the flavor. Doesn't that in itself telegraph a huge warning about marriage?)

I wondered what it must feel like to call someone "my wife" (or, for that matter, "my husband"--I couldn't really picture either). My mother's career as a wife effectively ended her autonomous dreams, and she wound up an unhappy alcoholic stuck in a tiny, uninteresting world. "Husbanding" didn't seem so great either, when it meant you had an unhappy alcoholic and two unhappy kids to shepherd around.

In the queer world, we called each other "lovers," an appellation I couldn't imagine my parents ever using. Straight people de-emphasized the connection between partnering and the erotic (well, the older ones did, anyway--the ones who got married; in those days there were scads of heterosexual lovers too, also under the philosophical influence of Emma Goldman). Queers re-emphasized the sexual, especially the boys, who had their own special bathhouses wherein they could do precisely that. The word "lover" had another kind of larger political significance, too, as in: "An army of lovers cannot fail." I firmly believed (Jill and her wife to the contrary) that we were redefining what it meant to be together, rejecting hetero ways in favor of erotic personal affiliations based on the value systems of people who saw and treated each other as equals. Such coupling (or triplings, for that matter) would not fall prey to the sex-role stereotyped problems to which straight marriages were heir.

Later we had to alter the slogan a little, to "An army of ex-lovers cannot fail." But I quickly adjusted, because I had figured out that queer lovers could in fact fail, and spectacularly; but if you stayed on good terms with your exes, after the obligatory and hopefully brief period of hating them for ruining your life, you could get back on footing perhaps even firmer than when you'd been together.

Granted, as we congratulated ourselves on avoiding the pitfalls of hetero gender-role sterotypes, three things were happening: Many hetero people worked very hard to discard those stereotypes and to remake marriage as an institution; queer people rediscovered how hot gender roles could be; and some queer people put their noses to the grindstone so they could step up to the altar and call each other "husband" and "wife."

Having come of age, and come out, in the heady years just after Stonewall, when more queer men I knew joined Faggots Against Fascism than wanted to join the army, I always viewed the assimilationist queer folk around me with bemusement. I respect pretty much any queer organizing, even the Log Cabin Republicans (if only because of the childish fun it is to point and laugh when their favored candidates mistreat them time and time again). It is clear to me, with 30 years of hindsight, that every kind of queer organizing has moved us out of the shadows, although I have not always personally appreciated the type of limelight some have chosen. But I could never have predicted that joining the army, getting ordained, and getting hitched would be the big issues they are as the new century dawns.

Certainly oppression in any context is wrong. Naturally queer folk are irritated when straight people get benefits denied to same-sex partners. There's nothing to like about being discriminated against--except, perhaps, the way that discrimination forces anger, creativity, shows the way to the road less traveled. As we have seen time and time again, pissed off (or even simply irritable) queers making a point can cause the culture to shift--sometimes not a lot, often not enough, but these shifts are no less significant for that. Queers who flounce off to live our own lives often find straight people eventually come tugging at our coattails, wondering what we're doing, how we're doing it, if they should do it too. Who doesn't have a wistful "straight but not narrow" friend who's confided, "I wish we had a parade"?

And don't even snap back, "Butcha do, Blanche; you have the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Rose Bowl, and every other fucking parade all fucking year." Because what Poor Wistful Straight Friend really means is: "I wish I could celebrate my sexuality like you do."

Yes, the correct Gay Studies answer is: We do this because we have to. We do it because the larger culture doesn't celebrate us at all (well, at least before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy it didn't). We do it to flaunt--for each other, mainly, but sure, you can watch from the sidewalk. We do it to create ourselves, celebrate ourselves, make ourselves visible as big and loud and proud and here. In the old days, pups, we did it for those reasons even when some of us wore paper bags over our heads. (Yes, I attended more than one demo in the '70s where paper-bagged queers shouted, "2-4-6-8, gay is just as good as straight"--proud enough, but also worried about keeping their jobs if they were to be caught on film by a TV crew. I always said we ought to all wear Groucho Marx noses, but no one ever took me up on it.)

But then the next question is, If heteronormativity is still so ubiquitous that it needs no Straight Pride parades, whom will we become if enough of us squeeze our asses onto the park bench of Normalcy? Because you know that's what the military/marriage nexus is all about.

I took my friend Arugula DeVoon, a female drag queen, to the 1994 March on Washington for LGBT Etc. Etc. Rights. She had come out in San Francisco and was, like me, an alumna of the Lusty Lady Theatre, a peep show that allowed women of all sexual identities a place to grow larger-than-life femme personae, even if they strode in wearing Doc Martens. Arugula had never been to a predominantly political queer march before, and she was excited to be there. She wore a 1950s foundation garment with the cups cut out so that her own very splendid breasts could serve as the garment's focal point, and she had personally sewn a couple of zillion strings of pearl Mardi Gras beads onto it. She didn't ride the Metro in this getup; she changed in the rest room beneath the Lincoln Memorial. There we encountered a lesbian from the Midwest, or perhaps the DC suburbs. She was wearing a sweatshirt with fuzzy protruding pussy willows on it (I do not think any irony was intended), and a mullet. She did not appreciate the excellent beauty of Arugula DeVoon; in fact, by the time Ms. Mullet was finished ranting, Arugula was in tears. The gist (I bet you can already guess): "I'm here to march for my civil rights! When they see you, it'll ruin everything!"

Sobbing as we trekked up to tell Abraham Lincoln what had just happened, Arugula managed to say, "I thought this was about letting people be themselves!"

If some of our elder philosphers--Harry Hay, Judy Grahn--are correct, queers are here to culturally diversify every society into which we emerge. We are here to expand the very notion of what "being ourselves" can mean. Many of us are also here to devote more of our life's energy to cultural production (art, teaching, and so forth) than to producing the next generation. Instead of raising it, we help birth the alternative ways of seeing that the next generation (or the one after that) will embrace.

Fortunately for Arugula, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were up on top of the Lincoln Memorial, and they welcomed her as a lost sister. As speaker after speaker trashed Bill Clinton for his absence from DC (the putatively progay president had flown the coop when the people who helped elect him started to arrive), queer after queer from all over the U.S. rushed up to Arugula and asked to have a photo taken with her. "I've got to send this to my mom!" gushed one guy. And of course when she, with her Mardi Gras bead accents, met up with the fags from New Orleans, it was homecoming all over again.

Note to Missy Mullet: Not only is Arugula better-dressed than you, she has more pride. Pride is supposedly what brings us to things like marches. And when this culture gets comfortable with Arugula (and all the men who are dressed like her), they won't even notice you--except perhaps to say, "Eccch! Pussy willows!" But I'll tell you what--when that happens, you'll have some civil rights you don't have now.

Civil rights, snivel rights. Again, I am not suggesting these goals are completely inappropriate. I don't want a world where fiercely independent people never fall in love, never create family (whatever that means to the people involved in creating it). I want every one of us to be able to care for our lovers, make the lives we want, in the way that works best for the kinds of people we are. I don't want us or our partnerships to be second-class.

However, any queer who has set her or his sights on traditional marriage hasn't been paying attention. Look, I know how much fun it is to go all Martha Stewart and impress your grandma--and I even know that some of your grandmas would dance at your weddings. But marriage is in crisis in this culture, just like Pat Robertson said--it's just that we're not the ones who put it there. A vote for gay marriage is a vote for gay divorce--don't ever forget it, nor how quickly legal supports can turn into legal bonds. Really, go talk to a bunch of divorced people before you decide hetero-style marriage is where it's at. Is there any chance you've been watching too many screwball comedies?

Even the touted "queer marriage" alternatives--domestic partnerships and civil unions--require us to assent to a less tightly corseted version of marriage. Now we may be getting somewhere. But, interestingly, in some places these alternatives are open only to same-sex couples. My partner Robert and I can register as domestic partners in San Francisco, for example--but we can't with the State of California, until we're senior citizens. (Huh?) To the extent that a domestic partner agenda is created as an alternative for those who cannot legally marry, it does nothing but shore up the notion of marriage. It isn't a real alternative at all.

"Why don't you get married, then?" Bi-identified queers with other-sex partners hear this all the time. Well, let me ask you this: If you had one lover who was white and one who was not, and the law only allowed you to wed the caucasian one, would you? (There were such laws in the U.S., and not so long ago.) Why would I want to sanctify one of my relationships (or potential relationships) when I can't get the same respect for the other one? For that matter, why would Robert and I want to take advantage of a cultural perk so many of our friends are disallowed? We don't. Not to mention the fact that we're more likely to want a third (maybe even a third and a fourth) person to join our life than to live monogamously. Not many people (including promarriage queers) are quick to say the state should allow us the same marital privilege if "us" equals more than two.

I recently read a long article from the conservative Weekly Standard arguing that the reason to oppose gay marriage had nothing really to do with gays, but rather because once gays could marry, how would we stop the polyamorists from wanting the same thing?

Emphasizing marriage rights in a queer community where many people have chosen alternative relationship configurations, including living single, cuts off or de-emphasizes all the other ways we can choose to relate to one another. Unless we mindfully make marriage one choice among many, many equal choices, we've elected to minimize diversity. We should have dozens of choices; for when the mainstream queer-rights movement clamors loudly for marriage, it masks all of us for whom that isn't a great goal; it does not honor our difference.

Oh, but you say you don't want to be different? Butcha are, Blanche, ya are. Not only that, lots of heterosexuals are as well. The queer movement was truly the key in the closet door, but what those of us worrying about being normal don't realize is that it wasn't just homos and genderqueers in the closet. Everybody was in there! Even heterosexuals did not want to live Leave It to Beaver lives. I find it deeply ironic that while the LGBT movement focuses its resources on the enormous battle that is gay marriage, straight people are busy signing up for polyamory workshops, renting Bend Over Boyfriend, and identifying as queer because they think we hold the key to living free Lives!

We all need more choices rather than fewer. I won't be the least bit disturbed, really, when one of those choices is gay marriage--unless our other choices have shrunk and not grown. There are as many ways to be wedded as couples (and triples, and more-ples) who want to commit to each other, even more reasons than insurance, inheritance, and love, and the bottom line is, we live in a culture that puts barriers in the way of even heterosexuals who want to create authentic, lasting, and equal partnerships.

One of those barriers is marriage--it does not facilitate, though sometimes it cages. It does not create what was not already there. If you have chosen someone, and you don't wake up every morning knowing your commitment is strong and your love real, your love as permanent as it will be, how will marriage help you? If you do have such a relationship with someone (or more than one), how could marriage make you cherish it more?

Our cultural rituals create. But they also exclude. And I find no joy in the Ms. Mullets of the community, who cling to the values of a rejecting culture and proceed to reject others in turn. That culture is in crisis anyway, and desiring to join it more or less on its own terms seems to me like swimming toward the Titanic. Write yourself a ritual, throw yourself a party, put on a tux, stand barefoot in the Pacific, invite all your friends. Hell, insist that your mother buy you a toaster. But don't get all romantic about Church and State. They don't feel the same way about you.

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"Always a Cultural Deconstructionist, Never a Bride"
from I Do/I Don't: Queers on Marriage © 2004 Carol Queen