It's All in the Family

What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution. E. J. Graff. Boston: Beacon, 1999. xv + 303 pp. $25.00 cloth, $15.00 paper

The Lesbian Family Life Cycle. Suzanne Slater. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 265 pp. $25.00 cloth, $14.95 paper

Lesbians and Lesbian Families: Reflections on Theory and Practice. Joan Laird, ed.. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ix + 363 pp. $52.00 cloth, $23.00 paper

The explosion of same-sex marriage as one of the most heated political controversies of the new millennium was not something most of us would have predicted even a few years ago. As gay and lesbian sensibilities began to shift toward a queer paradigm in the 1990s, difference--in the sense of resistance and subversion--was the element of identity that seemed headed for elaboration. Sexuality was situated firmly at the center of notions of queerness, and this understanding resonated comfortably with popular ideas that defined homosexuality as a specific constellation of sexual habits and preferences. "What do gay people do during the day?" was the question some lesbians and gay men playfully asked to undermine assumptions about sexuality, but such assumptions were difficult to displace both within our communities and outside them. Accordingly, queer political issues at the end of the century tended to take off from questions of sexuality. HIV and AIDS, of course, were foremost among these, but even discussions about gays in the military turned on anxieties and expectations about sexual conduct. Commentary within gay and lesbian circles began to focus on differing accounts of how sexual behavior--and the freedom to exhibit it--figured in the formation of identity, community, and, ultimately, something that might be understood to constitute culture.

While some of these debates are reflected in the discussion about marriage, the controversy over lesbian and gay marriage and family has its roots elsewhere. Not dictated by political leaders and the gay and lesbian civil rights establishment, marriage was an issue that welled up out of ordinary people's desires, no less a reflection of the growing sense of legitimacy and citizenship that lesbians and gay men have gained in the last few decades, it seems, than a tool for achieving those goals. At the same time, one could argue that because "marriage" advertises (deviant) sexual preference--insofar as marriage is, arguably, about selecting a sexual partner--proponents and opponents alike have tended to view the issue in terms of the claims that couples make to "normality." While organizations and leaders have struggled to keep up, lesbians and gay men have simply claimed the right to declare their relationships "marriage," using a variety of symbolic, rhetorical, and political strategies. The result has been a struggle to understand the sorts of self-consciousness that underlie these demands, both for the outside world and, more important, for lesbians and gay men themselves. The three books reviewed here represent various locations in the vastly diverse literature spawned or informed by these debates. An examination of their preoccupations and especially their rhetorical attributes offers a guided tour of a prominent segment of the terrain that the marriage debate has shaped. The first book deals with marriage directly, while the second and third approach it obliquely, focusing on lesbians and their families.

What Is Marriage For? is in many ways a disingenuous title. E. J. Graff has subtitled her book The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, but, as we soon learn, our is a relative term indeed. A variety of arguments have been used in recent years to defend the notion that marriage is the natural territory of heterosexuals, and Graff's objective is to dismantle them one by one and thereby demonstrate that marriage is--or can be--as much "ours" as "theirs." The venture rests on a concept of fairness that, one could argue, is hardly going to overturn bigotry...