Heir of Superiority?

My husband and I have just celebrated both of our anniversaries, which fall within a week of one another. On the one hand, we've been "married" for 23 years. But because it took 19 years for any state government to catch up to us, we've only been legally married for four years. And to date, Massachusetts remains alone in allowing for full and equitable marriage equality.

In the last four years, creatures from the Lake of Fire have utterly failed to rise up and devour Massachusetts whole; no meteors have struck the state capitol building on Beacon Hill; the four thousand or so gay and lesbian couples who have gotten married have not sprouted leathery wings or turned into pillars of salt. In short, God has not smitten us, and to be honest, I never expected He (She, It, Them) had any intention of doing so. In point of fact, I have always been utterly convinced that God brought my husband and I together in the first place.

And then, since the both of us are kinda dull about these things, it took a definite act of divine intervention to get us to hook up.

And there is no doubt about it: only the Creator of the Universe could have shepherded the two of us safely through these past 23 years to today, which finds us both healthy and in good spirits and still very much in love. Looking at the divorce rates of straights and gays alike, it seems like a miracle that our life together remains intact.

Now, some people look at us and see "Abomination." That is, they see two men married to one another and think to themselves, "Now, there's a threat to civilization as we know it!" And you know, perhaps they are right. The slave owners of the mid-1800s who looked at abolitionists and free states probably thought the same thing: getting rid of slavery was contrary to the Word of the Bible; it disregarded thousands of years of tradition; it threatened civilization as it had always existed.

But then slavery ended, and civilization did change... and it changed for the better. The world as it is today is troubled, yes, but it is freer, safer, and more secure than the world of the 1880s and before. Enslavement still takes place: sexual, economic, religious. But slavery as a social institution and part of civilization's fabric has ended, and now slavery is what it always should have been: reviled, condemned, and resisted as the grave and heinous crime that it is.

So I don't worry when retrograde attitudes lead to screams and mutterings that my family somehow constitutes an attack on the families of straight people, or on the natural sexual preference of heteros. It's obvious to me, if not to certian others, that straight men will always desire the sexual companionship of women; it's obvious to me that no matter how many gay men marry one another, straight men and straight women will always find themselves in love, and will always produce children. Gays and lesbians will never put a dent in heterosexual fertility.

But some others look at families like my husband and me, and they think that we're smug and superior. They reject marriage as an institution all around; or they wonder why any self-respecting gay man would want to shackle himself with a promise to follow the plainly unnatural practice of monogamy.

But are we gay marrieds really putting on airs? Or are we simply following our hearts and our true natures in asserting our human right to legally recognized family?

I have an African-American friend who was telling me about his need to speak from what he called two different scripts. One was the script (the vocabulary and delivery) that was expected in school; the other was the script demanded at home and on the streets. If you didn't mind which script you used, and where you were, he told me, you ended up being called names. You can imagine what he might be called at school, but things were no different at home; only the pejorative changed. The word they used at home to put him in his place and remind him which script to read from was, "White."

So I don't worry about it when old-school gay men look at married guys like my husband and me and mutter that we're essentially "straight." I worry about that less than I worry about some straight guy calling us "fags." The straight guy may be more dangerous to us, because he's speaking out of true brute animosity, and that sometimes leads to violence: physical, verbal, or legislative. The angry, bigoted straight guy poses a bigger risk to our family, our home, and our life together than the muttering queen who looks at us as traitors for adopting the custom of marriage as our own, but then again, the bigoted straight guy is a bigot. And he's straight besides; he has no idea what it is to be gay in this country, at this time. He's a dolt, but in some ways, he has to be forgiven for it because he doesn't know any better.

But the old-school queen dissing gay marrieds as not gay enough? That's a different matter. It's one thing to be ignorant, and not to know better; it's another thing to decide to ignore the things you know, and you know that you ought to know.

Moreover, if anyone taught gay guys to think of themselves as "superior" in any way, it was the old-school gays. They rightly regard themselves as the arbiters, creators, and custodians of culture, and they've passed that venerable torch to the rest of us.

This "gay marrieds are stuck up" notion also smacks of sour grapes. I mean, if old-school gays want to avoid adopting the ways of straights, let them think about their own manners. Griping about married people is just as much a straight single pursuit as it is a gay single pursuit. Straights, too, complain about the smugness of married couples, with their royal "we" in every sentence and their placid, irritating assumption that a man alone is a man incomplete.

But not worrying about whether someone else thinks we're a threat to civilization because we're married, or whether someone thinks we're snobs because we're married, does not answer the question that lay beneath those opinions.

Are we gay marrieds a threat to civilization?

Not at all. Civilization isn't founded on marriage. If it were, civilization would have ended when polygamy fell by the wayside (another dangerous and "unnatural" social innovation, at the time!). As it is, we have civilizations that include polygamy, and civilizations that include monogamy, and both models seem to work fine. Indeed, civilization is founded not on marriage of any sort, but on agriculture. You can have a perfectly functioning city full of bachelors, but you can't have a city without a food supply. I'd worry more about high fuel and food costs than about gay marriage, when it comes to longevity of our civilization.

Are we gay marrieds a threat to old-school gay customs?

As long as men are men, they will marry, divorce, remain bachelors, and play around. We know this. Straight guys don't all marry, and they include plenty of playboys, serial monogamists, and polyamorists... much like gays. For that matter, exactly like gays. No, we're not the ones who think we're better than everyone else. But we are the ones upon whom everyone casts a skeptical and judging look. We're the ones for whom it's not enough to be as good as everyone else, though that's all we have ever claimed; we're the ones who have to conduct ourselves better than everyone else.

Well, just as gays are not going to disappear from the Earth the day America turns into a theocracy, gays are also never going to do any better than straights when it comes to the scorecard of love. Some of us are lucky, that's all; and that luck has more to do with our inner peace than our marital status.

In a way, though, happy gay guys are the ultimate threat, be they married or single. And the happy gay guy truly is the heir to a superior way of life: the lifestyle that doesn't say, "I'm gay," or "I'm married," or address any other characteristic of the individual so much as say, "I am who I am, and that's who I am going to be... regardless of what you think."

Or, if you prefer a shorter way of saying it, "I am."

Some day we'll stop fighting over who has the right to decide who and what others will be. Then, perhaps, we'll all enjoy a birthright as heirs of superiority, because we'll drop the emotional and political baggage and test out our God-given wings--and take flight, not as angels, and not as straights or gays, but as men.