A man photographs a sign proclaiming U.S. President Barack Obama’s position at the L.A. Pride parade in West Hollywood, Calif., on June 10, 2012.Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters
The evening I told my parents about my wedding plans, the television in the restaurant where we ate was tuned to the news. Word came that Barack Obama had come out for gay marriage, too. For the President, it was the leaving of a closet – the lurking-place of straights who value gay rights, yet hide. I was happy for him. Even more, I was happy for myself. My gay wedding will happen in Canada, not the United States. Yet the more gay equality is accepted in the U.S., the easier we can rest. Call it trickle-down.
This weekend, one of the largest gay pride festivals in the world will reach its peak in Toronto. Other Pride Days will take place throughout the summer, in cities across Canada. Many will mark Mr. Obama's emergence as a great breakthrough. Others, who scorn marriage as hetero-imitative, will not. They will fete their principled shunning.
Ideally, those two constituencies will also celebrate one another. But this is easier said than done.
The concept of "hetero-imitation" is inspired in part by Malcolm X's black nationalism. In the sixties, he claimed that blacks had a separate destiny. Picking up where he left off, some radicals thought in the seventies that gays were called to a unique life. Many lesbians and gay men formed communities devoted to a multifaceted concept of free love, with ethical and sexual rules different from those of "normal," marriage-minded straights. Some of that tradition has endured. Throughout the gay community, lifelong monogamy continues to be rare.
The many gays who reject marriage make a very important point: Traditional marriage was trouble. Its rules diminished female choice, such that many women felt one of their primary social purposes to be pregnancy. Shame attached to deviation. The response to married and unmarried people's complex desire for sex outside marriage was a simplistic hypocrisy. (Oscar Wilde said: "Deceiving others. That is what the world calls romance.") Gays should not want that segregated pool.
Nonetheless, when my now-fiancé said yes to my proposal, near a flowering dogwood, my tears were happy. I was happy that he was mine. But I also felt happy shock. Until that moment, I had not quite realized that I had expected to be adrift forever. Yet there it was: sudden knowledge of a lonely anticipation – just as that feeling died. I had grown up in the nineties with the sound of gay rights. I had thought I was "past" pessimism about gay life. But when life suddenly offered love, with stability, I was startled.
Implicit in my wedding vows will be a resolve to do things differently than bad married people have done. Part of that will be a pledge of respect for those who reject marriage. It will also require vigilance against ever letting either person in the marriage be treated like a put-upon wife, expected to sacrifice his flourishing. I do not think that this is hetero-imitation.
For those of us in the first generation of gays to get engaged, there is some fear that we are betraying the grander visions of a movement. But the deepest truths of queer rights, remembered by all people of good faith at Pride, are not "gay-particular." They are shared with many revolutions, and some religions: equality, fraternity, love. To recall those is to see that gay marriage is not actually about marriage, or gays. It is about celebrating the ability of many kinds of lives to reflect beauty.
Aidan Johnson is a lawyer.