There’s a true story about the UUA staff. The denomination is halfway through its General Assembly and I’m sure they are all atwirl about coinciding with the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of same-sex marriage and universal health insurance support. They feel that their yellow t-shirts turned the tide. For quite some time the denomination has publicly supported the progressive side of these issues. In fact, back in the Eighties -- and let’s be cynical for a while -- they needed members. Still do. Welcoming gays and African Americans and whoever wants in is just smart.
At a brain-storming meeting at 25 Beacon Street, officials said, “We need to hire more gays.” Along the lines of “we need to hire more Blacks.” The dignified older “bachelor” who ran the bookstore said quietly, “No need. I AM gay.” No one had suspected. They had accepted the right-wing definition of gay: flamboyant, reckless, defiant young men who couldn’t seem to keep their clothes on.
Among my high school teachers at Jefferson High in Portland, OR, one of them the national president of the NEA, were maybe half-a-dozen lesbian couples quietly living together. They were among the most dedicated and brilliant people. One of them, Jean Hill, triggered my interest in physiology and CSI -- dissecting cow eyes, bubbling oxygen through blood to make it change color. No one said anything about her being gay. The gray-haired, focused, women were “passing” in the sense of a person with African genes passing for white. They were also contributing mightily. Mostly born just before WWI, they had managed their lives in female partnership because so many men died in war -- now historians are telling us that many did not die in combat, but in crammed flu wards, maybe in numbers rivaling those of AIDS victims. But we couldn't imagine these teachers having sex any more than we could imagine them cooking dinner or taking a bath.
When I look at the photos of same sex couples marrying en masse, my eye seeks those who have lived together amicably for twenty-five years, for fifty years. I think the record is in the sixties. People look at a photo of old men kissing and try to imagine their sex lives. They are STUCK on the idea that marriage, that partnership, that love itself, is about SEX.
If you want to load a pig into a place it doesn’t want to go, you put a bucket over its head and back it into the place. That’s what I read when I was composing the Multnomah County training manual for animal control officers. I put it in the course. I never put a bucket over a pig’s head. Some of them are the size of a baby elephant. It’s clear that lot of stubborn Republicans have had buckets over their heads and never realized that the country was backing them into the future, since they were unwilling to go there.
Cass Sunstein says that the Supreme Court watches the country to see what they are ready for. Once a tipping point arrives, they will put that into the law. Clearly, as someone else remarked, when it comes to children we need as many good teachers and parents as we can find and no one cares -- nor is it relevant -- whether they are good in bed or who with, because that is not the purpose or function of teaching or parenting.
Maybe we have let love become a subcategory of sex instead of the other way around because you can sell sex but you can’t sell love. On the other hand, we have scientifically proven that “pair-bonding” (which is love that not only includes sex but also is the emotional glue of “faithful” couples) has a genetic component. One gene makes the difference between a devoted prairie vole and a free-spirit mountain vole. Who knew?
Voles are not vulnerable to the culture. If a prairie vole pair-bonds with a same sex partner, no one remarks on it, no one stigmatizes them, no one will refuse to bake their wedding cake. A percentage of almost all mammals will same-sex pair-bond.
In the case of humans, faithfulness is often an illusion. That valentine about how geese pair off for life turns out to be false: DNA reveals that maybe ten percent wander. The same is true of humans, or at least DNA has revealed that about ten percent of babies don’t match the purported father’s DNA. You get a government-issued birth certificate, marriage license, death certificate. But as Ernest Hemingway tried to prove, a certificate is just a piece of paper.
In spite of everything, DNA included, people fall in love different ways and styles, probably in some way related to their own specific DNA and history. It’s a physiological, measurable, molecular phenomenon that can be seen and measured on instruments. BUT that’s only the first step. It needs to be translated by the culture into practical arrangements that are supported because they fit, because everyone approves, because the economics are there and the workload is equitable. If the emotional pair-bonding (a function that is deep in the brain and autonomic nervous system) is supported by whatever rational pre-frontal cortex assumptions and choice of culture can negotiate and consciously choose, then they can think about a formal, public declaration like marriage.
Marriage is presented as some kind of divine and immutable thing, but it never has been and never will be. Marriage is a legal contract having to do with economics and procreation. It is not even the same from state to state, esp. at the back end when the contract is broken and severance arrangements must be made. It is not the same on Native American reservations as it is off. Circles of jurisdiction cause overlapping and gapping in the particulars of age, alimony, abuse, and allowances.
By now marriage is so confused that a lot of people just don’t bother. It costs too much, people play too many games with it, it interferes with jobs and friendships, religions have all kinds of opinions about it. If one or both of the partners operates outside the law, they will discover that prisons also have very different opinions about it. In a review of the “Tom of Finland” exhibit by Jason Farago, published in the Guardian, he concludes, “Marriage makes you a citizen; desire makes you free.” There’s enough truth in this epigram to “ring,” but it’s also true that desire can put you in chains and marriage or being denied marriage can make you a rebel, a heretic, and a legal cripple.
I’ve already pointed out that Thomas Jefferson, who dearly loved his wife, promised her he would never remarry. He had a unique solution: he bought his wife’s slave half-sister, who is said to have looked much like his wife since they shared the same father and grew up together. Sally continued on to have children who were slaves. There’s no written record of how she felt about it, but the descendants have long since found and supported each other. The relationship itself poses the uncomfortable question: are legal slavery and legal marriage that different? Can love dwell in either or both or neither?
It’s conventional now for this sort of essay to end with testimony about one’s own experience. My slavery has been economic, but aren’t all slaveries? My marriage didn’t kill love, but it was an uncomfortable and finally impossible match. Our bodies interfered: we simply became so miserable that the only way we could cure depression was with rage. Marriage and sex are both dangerous, but love is not safe either. I don’t even consider the first two anymore. They’re a nuisance and distraction, belonging to society -- not me. And yet I still love.
Love is physical, its shapes are kaleidoscopic -- both gorgeous and shifting. Marriage is a chalice. Love is neither wine nor fire -- maybe it’s wine aflame.
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