Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States

2. Marrying for the Movement

20 Q When I asked Robert, a thirty-six-year-old physical therapist, what his marriage to Brian, his partner of eleven years, meant to him, he paused for a moment. He continued stroking their cat as it sat docilely in his lap, looked around the beautiful sunlit kitchen in the home he and Brian, a forty-year-old lawyer, shared, and offered this answer: “It’s interesting when you think about marriage. Certainly, for most people, the idea of being married has no connection whatsoever with making a political statement. But for us, obviously, it’s unavoidable, inescapable. You definitely are aware of that. It’s civil disobedience— you’re doing what society’s been telling you you can’t do.” In Robert’s nuanced comment, several themes emerge. Most prominent is his description of his marriage as a political act, despite contemporary understandings of marriage as a personal union based on love. Also embedded in Robert’s answer is an implicit collective identity. Robert draws a distinction between “most people” and “us,” where his “us” includes not only Brian and himself, but gay couples more broadly. And the different social position Robert’s “us” finds itself in is, to him, an obviously marginalized one. Robert was not alone in seeing these marriages as political acts. Two-thirds of the men and women I talked to cited a political meaning for their participation (N = 28; 67 percent), marking“the political” as an important place to start in thinking through the San Francisco weddings. Respondents characterized their marriages as acts of civil disobedience that challenged the assumption that marriage is reserved for different-sex couples. The marriages were an opportunity to c h a p t e r 2 MARRYING FOR THE MOVEMENT Marrying for the Movement 21 show solidarity with one another, make same-sex couples—especially “normal”-looking same-sex couples—visible, and build on the gains made by lesbian and gay activists who came before. Marrying, in other words, was an act that contested sexual identity–based inequality and discrimination; it was a challenge of heteronormativity. Since the middle of the last century,activists have opposed the marginalization of lesbians and gays on several fronts, in an increasingly coherent movement (Fetner 2008). The movement has protested laws prohibiting public expressions of homosexuality and openly gay and lesbian teachers and policies preventing gays and lesbians from serving in the military and has advocated for policies that would benefit lesbians and gays, including employment nondiscrimination protection for sexual identity and quicker access to drugs used to treat HIV/ AIDS (Epstein 1996). It has contested homophobic attitudes through events designed to make lesbian and gay people visible (for example, kiss-ins, marches, drag performances) (Ghaziani 2008; Rupp and Taylor 2003). Through challenges to law and culture, the lesbian and gay rights movement has actively sought to draw attention to and dismantle heterosexual privilege. Their claims have ranged from ambitious (undoing heteronormativity all together; Armstrong 2002) to modest (including gays and lesbians because they are similar to straights; Bernstein 1997), but all have sought to change this group’s social position. To a small degree, the movement has used marriage to contest heteronormativity . As detailed below, a handful of same-sex couples have protested their exclusion from legal marriage over the years, but these protests never caught on in the broader movement. This changed with the San Francisco weddings. They were bigger and more popular than any prior same-sex marriage event. Indeed, San Francisco had to turn people away. The San Francisco marriages earned their place in history for being at the right time, in the right place. These people, in this place, were ready to do something to contest heteronormativity and make same-sex couples visible. Campaigning for Same-Sex Marriage The first reported court challenge to the exclusion of same-sex couples from state-sanctioned marriage was Baker v. Nelson (191 N.W.2d 22 Queering Marriage 185 [Minn. 1971], appeal dismissed, 409 US 810 [1972]). In May 1970, Richard Baker and Michael McConnell attempted to obtain a marriage license from Gerald Nelson, a Minneapolis clerk. Nelson denied their request and Baker and McConnell filed a lawsuit, claiming the refusal violated their rights. The case was eventually appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which ruled against Baker in 1971. Lest the political motivations of Baker and McConnell be overlooked for a more romantic notion of marriage...