Gay Marriage Blues
Have you ever seen a married couple?
Well I have. Married people are sort of like ghosts: we’ve all heard of them, but only some of us have seen one or two. In case you’re having a hard time imagining what married life is or, worse, what it looks like, let me paint a picture for you:
Marriage looks the spirit of generosity and admiration in the face and pokes out its eyes.
Picture a man and woman: now decades into their joint sentence, they go out to a restaurant trying to salvage some peace on earth and bide their time together over a hot meal. After thirty minutes of awkward conversation interrupted by bouts of noisy silence and hatred, our betrothed friends finally swallow what’s left of their food and begin their long walk back to their car. On the way out, the man reaches in his pocket for money, while his woman lurches toward the door, hoping something or someone might stop her in her horrible tracks.
I hope the image I have constructed for you is a thoroughly depressing one. Marriage is not the same as love; indeed, in its purest form, it constitutes an act of repeated violence perpetrated by one actor onto the other. When we say “I love you” to another person, we are expressing a feeling and offering up a certain amount of ourselves without guile and without any expectation of recompense.
Marriage looks the spirit of generosity and admiration in the face and pokes out its eyes. Marriage is a partner’s way of locking you up and wearing you out. It is a way of saying no to the ones you love and yes to the ones you hate. Marriage sucks our ability to have affections and self-confidence dry. It is a gamble on the future that is based on the gradual loss of love for anyone or anything in the world, let alone your dear spouse. It is familiarity and recognition in their most vile, depraved and boring forms.
How do I know all this is true? Why offer up the institution of marriage in such a cautionary, repellent manner? Because I have seen the truth about marriage. I’ve seen it enter the lives of ordinary people the way Death walks through a door: sickle in hand and eyes fixed on you. Up until now, only normal people have had to suffer the terrible consequences of marriage: they were the ones stumbling to the altar, blind with intention and dumb with love for their very own ball and chain.
But something has changed. It has recently been brought to my attention that American homosexuals have begun their descent into the underworld of marital bliss. They have begun making legal and cultural moves towards setting up their own keys to the marital kingdom.
But why would they want to do this? Clearly the term “gay marriage” is a joke, and a joke of the meanest kind. There is absolutely nothing funny about marriage–you will never see a married couple laughing or acting gay on account of one another. Since I seem to be the only person left in the world who can see what is right before my eyes, I can attest to the truly disgusting and shiftless lives that married people lead.
The problem with the contemporary homosexual is two-fold. First, like me, their narcissism provides them with a wild imagination, only every other so-called gay person living today also suffers from delusion. Like babies, homosexuals suffer from a terrible mixture of paranoid excitability and over-eager stupidity. It is simple enough to understand why homosexuals might, for a moment, imagine themselves taking part in familiar cultural institutions, of making them over into their own image. But this is, of course, a mistake. Political organization and discourse has taken an idea as silly as homosexual marriage and turned it into a cause.
Gay marriage is taking things way too far. The current movement towards affording homosexuals with political rights has been taken with the idea of marriage because, for whatever reason, it has helped them believe that they do, or perhaps one day will, matter.
But homosexuals don’t matter; or, at least, historically, we haven’t mattered enough to have been included in the practices of marriage. Up until now, we have been getting away with something else. We lived in the dark, we had no secrets to conceal. Unfortunately, the dauntless energy that the American gay rights struggle seems to have garnered over the last twenty or so years does not look like it will be dying down anytime soon.
Is this what we want? Or, worse, is marriage what we deserve? Followers of gay pride and avengers of equal rights seem to think so. If marriage and justice are what gay people want, marriage and justice they will get. Politics, like fate, is not a challenge that can be overcome in the end. Marriage will only ever offer you a way of devoting yourself to the one you hate and scorning the love that may be truly offered along the way.
For homosexuals, the arch of our political importance will sadly be given based on the victories of the gay marriage crusade. The arrow of time now points us all in the direction of common unhappiness and just desserts. When we bop up and down shouting at the world to give us our rights, we are only proving our devotion to this sick game. There is danger in numbers.
Try as we might, there is no way to stop the very insulting and angry winds of equality from covering us over completely. And make no mistakes: there is no queer way out of marriage: not no way, not no how. What we’ve never had we’ll never miss. Why can’t you understand that?
It is no use, at this point, debating whether or not the institution itself is evil or even discussing as a community whether we should collectively even be searching it out. It is already too late: homosexuals have begun accepting the rights that they have been begging for and marriage is on its way into our lives, while what we once knew of gay sex and pleasure slowly taking their leave.
Do what you must, homosexuals of the future, but don’t say Taylor Black never warned you.
