The signs are everywhere. Not only do little girls excel in preschools more quickly than little boys, but reams of data show that women’s mental agility persists seriously longer than men’s as everyone’s life expectancy grows longer. Those of us who carry XX chromosomes are more durable, more flexible, and, say geriatric specialists, more resilient than XY companions. The resilience of what used to be called the weaker sex, however, reveals only one small if important window on today’s radical reformulation of the gender dialogue. The roles, the perceptions, and the performances that signal the meanings of masculine and feminine are everywhere in flux. A quick survey of Midwestern high school athletic programs, a visit to the ever more ubiquitous home cooking schools, or even a scan of Presbyterian marriage registers should turn anybody weaned on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet or Father Knows Best topsy-turvy. Nothing in the raucous circus of gender revision, however, nearly matches the hyperbolic battles sweeping today’s college campuses (and many high schools). The upheavals prove distressing not simply to stuffy members of the Lions Club; aging feminists of Gloria Steinem’s generation frequently seem equally baffled by the gender battles among contemporary twentysomethings. Where Steinem sought to replace salutations of Miss or Mrs. by Ms. as a liberation for unmarried women, now Ms. as well is crumbling before fearful school administrations intimidated by younger people who refuse any gender labels.
The question of how teachers should address students in the classroom first surfaced, not surprisingly, in a handful of elite private colleges. It was in autumn 2013 that I received a note from my friend Neil, a young gay professor of literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota; he had just received a circular from his administration that left him temporarily dumbfounded. Henceforth, the memorandum instructed, professors were to refrain from using terms like Mr., Miss, or Ms. Instead, they were advised to ask each student to declare “their” PPC, otherwise known as Preferred Pronoun Choice (sometimes known as PPP, Preferred Personal Pronoun). The directive had come in response to a small but vocal number of undergraduates who felt that their preferred gender identity was not being respected in the classroom. More than a few Brendas had become Brads even though they appeared not to have Adam’s apples, while more than a few students who had registered as Brads were plainly developing upper-body curves and abandoning Brad for Brenda within their friendship circles.
At about the same time, Calliope Wong, a person born with both X and Y chromosomes but who had been living for several years as a female, applied to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was quickly rejected. “Smith is a women’s college, which means that undergraduate applicants to Smith must be female at the time of admission,” the rejection letter read. “Your FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] indicates your gender as male. Therefore Smith cannot process your application.” Calliope Wong’s high school grades were excellent, and all the other documents she submitted to Smith indicated she was female, but because she had not yet gone through the lengthy bureaucratic process of registering her federal ID as female, and because she had applied for federal aid, that single document identified her by her birth gender: male. To make the point still clearer Smith’s vice president in charge of admissions sent an e-mail to Calliope pointing out that the college was founded for the specific purpose of educating women. “We don’t define what constitutes a woman—we leave that to other entities or agencies to affirm [but] we do require that it BE affirmed, at the point of admission.”
Sex and gender have long been particularly sensitive terrains for Smith, once known as the sister school to Yale when Old Blue was all male. But by the last decades of the last century Smith was rumored to be a hotbed of lesbianism—so much so that Smith’s then-president Mary Maples Dunn felt compelled to issue a statement about the college and lesbianism in which she articulated “a doctrine of tolerance of all lifestyles,” aimed not least at more conservative alumnae upon whose bequests Smith, like other women’s colleges, highly depends. More succinctly, Dunn wanted to assure alumnae that they need not fear that the large but still minority lesbian student body would be intimidating to innocent heterosexual applicants. “When asked about the lesbian problem, the alums will deny it up, down and backward,” Sophie Godley, the political chair of Smith’s Lesbian-Bisexual Alliance, told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “It’s the image that they’re worried about, the packaging,” Godley, who went on to become a public health advisor and teacher in Boston, said. “They don’t want Smith to be known as a lesbian school.”
Other elite women’s colleges have taken dramatically different approaches. At Mount Holyoke, a new production of The Vagina Monologues was canceled after some students protested that “not all women have vaginas.” Further complicating the issue for these colleges founded in the nineteenth century to help women who were generally excluded from private male universities is that the federal Department of Education has ruled that all the protections granted under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 are now extended to transgender individuals. Or in short, when is a woman really a woman and how is she to prove her womanliness?
What first surfaced in the hothouse atmosphere of a handful of elite liberal arts colleges has spread like the morning dew to public universities everywhere—even in Mormon Utah where Campus Pride, the intercollegiate gay association, has ranked the University of Utah among America’s twenty-five friendliest LGBTQ campuses. The Preferred Pronoun Choice battles have permeated campuses nationwide (though it’s been slower to surface in Europe, where pronouns—such as he, she, they, it—more frequently agree with an object than a speaker). Once the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York, with 1,700 faculty and 4,600 students, joined the fray, the pronoun war had reached its apogee. “Allowing students to use their preferred name and eliminating the use of pronouns in official correspondence is a necessary step toward protecting the rights, privacy, and safety of students,” said Dominique Nisperos, cochair of the Doctoral Students’ Council at CUNY, which had been at the forefront of defending “gender non-conforming” students. Money was next on their gender liberation agenda, calling on the budget-strapped administration to construct gender-neutral bathrooms and dormitories. Now, more than one hundred campuses have established gender-inclusive residence halls. That was a tough and expensive issue at the University of Maryland outside Washington, D.C., said Amy Martin, a director in the school’s residence program: “Students told us that they felt they would be targeted [in gender neutral bathrooms]. We also have a number of Living and Learning programs where you live in residence halls based on which program you are a part of, so if we had only one location for gender neutral housing, students wouldn’t be able to be with their Living and Learning programs.”
Genny Beemyn, who directs the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, also says she’s seen a steady progression in sensitivity to transsexual students’ needs since her school became the first to offer gender-neutral housing in 1992. “Trans students and allies have been working now for a number of years at many schools to create gender-inclusive bathrooms and gender-inclusive housing options, because those are pretty basic—to have a place to sleep and a place to pee,” she said. More than seventy campuses now include hormonal and some transsexual surgical procedures in their college health plans. And even major schools like the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, Duke, and most of the University of California campuses now offer what they call gender-neutral or gender-inclusive student housing. Administrators at the University of North Carolina and the University of Texas prepared similar housing services only to have them rejected by their politically appointed boards of governors. But the trend toward making American campuses more trans friendly continues to advance—even in Texas, where hard-right politicians regularly denounce any policy that appears to promote the safety and equality of gay, lesbian, trans, or otherwise gender-independent identities—as they did in a nationally financed campaign to reverse a Houston ordinance that would have outlawed discrimination against LGBT people. Support for gender-inclusive policies and programs, not surprisingly, comes as much from faculty and student counseling services as from student activists themselves. “I am a firm believer in battering down the binary model of gender however we need to do it, despite the anxiety of people who prefer a black-and-white world,” said Nancy Daley, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Texas. “The world is not one-or-the-other, and neither is gender. People who don’t believe in change, or who can’t tolerate change, ought not to be on a college campus.”
Gender uncertainty, gender transition, gender dysphoria, and various suffixes attached to the word “trans” have captured more recent attention than any other gender issue since the peak of feminist activism in the 1970s, which itself was quickly followed by the Lavender Revolution that provoked nationwide gay “zaps” on those most hallowed of male residences, the football house. After a quarter century of dual feminist and LGBT activism, women are now a majority in most student bodies and make up 40 percent of college professorships. Both by law and by practice, discrimination on the basis of sexuality is illegal for institutions that receive federal funding, which is effectively all institutions of higher education; and being gay or lesbian is often an asset for a candidate under review by search committees seeking to expand gender studies programs. Yet trans continues to be among the most difficult of contemporary gender terrains (see Chapter 11) because unlike the more defined categories of gay and lesbian, transsexual cuts across physical (and physiological), social, and linguistic categories. Where gay and lesbian activists sought recognition for specific identities, trans covers multiple identities, not all of which are the same, have the same desires and behaviors, or want to be addressed by the same names. Many radical feminists denounce “transwomen” as false women out to use their male education to undermine feminist progress, while large numbers of gay males not infrequently dismiss transmen as “freaks of nature.” Indeed, while the glamorous 2015 Vanity Fair portrait of sixty-five-year-old athlete Bruce Jenner reborn and recarved as a slinky twenty-five-year-old woman named Caitlyn gave a great boost to the trans movement, many born-women over sixty found her stock idea of womanliness insulting and degrading. Confusion over the difference between transvestite—conventionally gay men dressing as women—and transsexual—people born with male or female genitalia who feel themselves placed in the wrong body—has provoked campaigns to withdraw the T from LGBT. None of these internecine LGBT battles at all addresses an apparently small but growing body of humans who declare themselves as “asexuals,” or “agender” people who feel neither male nor female and possess no desire for either.
Movements that find their launch on college campuses soon trickle down to earlier grades. The antiwar activism of the Vietnam era eventually spread to graduating high school seniors who found a double motivation to go to college in order to avoid the draft. The conflicts and anxieties surrounding gender have penetrated even more quickly into adolescence than the antiwar fever did among the Baby Boomers, accompanied by earlier and earlier onsets of puberty—eight to eleven years old for girls and nine or ten for boys—along with all the propulsions, compulsions, and obsessions that come with puberty. To note that crushes, attractions, and personal devotions are volatile in adolescence is far from original. However, the context for today’s pubescent adolescents, almost universally attached to their smartphone-based social networks, is radically new, saturating their waking hours with unedited images, propositions, promotions, and declarations that were all but unknown a quarter century ago. The sex-ed offerings of Gen-Xers, much less the Vietnam generation, compared to what any fourteen-year-old can find now on the Internet, is roughly equivalent to how a Crusader in the eleventh century might perceive the aerial attack on the Twin Towers.
Aside from parental concerns about their children’s safety, the conversation about adolescent sports has touched a number of deeper chords beyond the issue of transgender behavior. By addressing physiological issues like bone structure, musculature, and hormonal differences, conservatives opposed to the trans movement have found themselves entangled in the most elemental debates about sexuality, biology, and gender. Some states, like Kentucky and Alabama, have opened school sports to “transgender” students, but only if they have already initiated hormone and/or surgical treatment—procedures that doctors discourage before a child has reached at least age sixteen. Further, as mentioned, “transgender” and “transsexual” do not have the same meaning. Transgender refers generally to men who dress and “behave” like women, or women who comport themselves according to male styles and conventions. Transsexual refers to people who have or who are undergoing bio-hormonal-physiological changes. Beyond these “trans” questions, the whole discussion has steadily forced both children and parents to ask themselves what it is they mean when they speak of “boys” or “girls” and even further to question the way in which contemporary sex ed is taught in schools. In the not very distant past, the categories of sex and gender were simple. “Sissy boys” were still boys and “butch girls” were still girls. The omnipresence of boys or girls who are well on their way to reinventing themselves has not only challenged conventional categories, but it has equally upset the gay-versus-straight categorization that even homophobes rely upon to denigrate difference.
Uncertain sexual or gender display may well be one of the most destabilizing developments of the last half century, not only for cultural conservatives but for liberal-minded Americans and Europeans who have come to accept minority categories of sexuality. Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” taken as an anthem for biologically based difference, including a category for transsexuals, still suggests that we are all created with a clear gender identity and that each and every one of us fits into that neat identity category. A closer eye and a more attentive ear, however, may come to understand trans-identity, trans-promotion, trans-discussion as signaling an ongoing state of transition that has no fixed endpoint but that reveals a near universal state of fluidity that we all—either as individuals or as societies at large—may or could inhabit from time to time. In that light transition is the norm that we primates collectively share as we transition through time, through attachment, through desire, and through self-discovery.
Even as I was writing these English phrases, news spun through the smartphone atmosphere that Mexico City, the world’s fourth largest city—and the largest Catholic enclave on the planet—had just enacted a law enabling any person to declare herself different from the gender he or she was apparently born into. The cost: twelve pesos, no medical or judicial ruling required. And should that person’s sense of gender change yet again, it will only cost twelve more pesos to reregister officially to a new gender … endlessly and without limit.
When Lance Loves Michael aired on the E! television channel in midwinter 2015, it made history as the first televised documentary of a gala homosexual wedding—and as the Supreme Court was awaiting oral arguments on the constitutional right for gays and lesbians to marry, Lance Bass and Michael Turchin were also doing their part in the long march by gay activists to strike traditional gender roles from the marriage pact. The wedding—hardly the down-home knot-tying sort that is celebrated every day in churches and county courthouses—took place in the extravagant elegance of Los Angeles’s celebrity Park Plaza Hotel, three hundred of their closest Hollywood and Palm Springs friends in attendance. Bass, raised in a Mississippi teetotaling Baptist home, was a singer in the rock band *NSYNC. Turchin, raised Jewish, is a trendy pop art portrait painter. Both men were given away by their mothers. “We wanted it to have a royal vibe, and everything about the place is over the top and gorgeous. It was exactly the backdrop we needed,” said Bass, the more voluble of the not-quite-young-marrieds. “It was less about getting married and more about showcasing our marriage and showing that a same-sex couple can get married to the rest of the world—especially to kids who are gay—but who feel there aren’t any gay role models, or a life outside of what they’re living,” Turchin said, adding, “and, hopefully, to change other people’s minds who were just ignorant about gay people.”
The reruns and digital screenings of Lance and Michael’s wedding had hardly calmed down when three million Irish citizens turned out to vote overwhelmingly (62 percent) to make the Emerald Isle, once little more than a subsidiary of the Vatican, the world’s first nation to vote for same-sex marriage. The Irish vote, along with same-sex marriage’s legalization in most of Western Europe and in six South American mostly Catholic countries, stands for its proponents as the culmination of the four-decade battle that officially began in 1969 in New York City with the Stonewall Rebellion, with landmark events including the national march for gay and lesbian rights in 1993 in Washington, D.C., the repeal of gay exclusion from the American military in 2011, and of course the 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court that states may not deny same-sex couples the right to marry because to do so would violate their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection.
A significant minority, which in time may turn into a majority, have challenged the court’s reliance on the Fourteenth Amendment to endorse same-sex marriage. However, juridical argumentation aside, the court’s ruling in fact reflected a stunning reversal in popular attitudes toward homosexuality in general and the unfairness of same-sex couples’ exclusions from the benefits of marriage—benefits that some two thirds of the country saw as both emotionally and fiscally valuable. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, said as much in his text articulating four principal justifications for expanding marriage. “The first premise of this Court’s relevant precedents is that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept of individual autonomy. This abiding connection between marriage and liberty is why Loving [v. Virginia, a 1967 case] invalidated interracial marriage bans under the Due Process Clause … Decisions about marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make,” which, he noted are “true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation. A second principle in this Court’s jurisprudence is that the right to marry is fundamental because it supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals. The intimate association protected by this right was central to Griswold v. Connecticut, which held the Constitution protects the right of married couples to use contraception … Same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to enjoy intimate association, a right extending beyond mere freedom from laws making same-sex intimacy a criminal offense.” A third basis for the court’s ruling, Kennedy wrote, is for the protection of the children who live with same-sex parents and the probability that they would suffer ostracism and discrimination at school or on the playground if their parents could not marry. The fourth and essentially conservative principle cited in the ruling identified marriage as a keystone to the nation’s stability—no less for same-sex couples than for heterosexual couples. “There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle, yet same-sex couples are denied the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage and are consigned to an instability many opposite-sex couples would find intolerable. It is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s society, for they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage. The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest.”
In a word, Kennedy argued that because American society—and most of European societies as well—no longer regards the traditional gender roles as the only basis for marriage, then simple fairness, simple justice—to use an earlier court’s ruling concerning racial relations—cannot any longer allow the states to discriminate against and penalize same-sex couples.
Yet even if same-sex marriage seems to have swept the Western world (holdouts Germany and Italy notwithstanding), nothing better illustrates how deeply the battles over gender and justice have reached into contemporary life. Moreover, despite the decision by the New York Times to include same-sex unions intermixed with straight ones in its wedding announcement columns, the fervor is far from unanimous—even from within the ranks of gay and lesbian militants. No less a figure than Masha Gessen, the best-selling Russian-American author and longtime lesbian activist, dismisses the gay marriage campaign as built on outright lies. “Fighting for gay marriage,” she said in one widely reported speech, “generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there.” Gessen famously added in a radio interview that she looks forward to the day when conventional marriage will not exist. “It’s a no-brainer that [homosexual activists] should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist … I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally … I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three … And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.”
An Irish friend and his American mate of a decade wrote me triumphantly one day after the Irish referendum that “we (secretly) are going to transform or destroy marriage from within.” The object for Gessen and for my Irish friend is not merely a call for simple justice and equality but a drive to bring about the collapse of the marriage pact as we have known it for most of Judeo-Christian history, along the way unraveling the remnants of the traditional gender roles upon which conventional marriage has been built. That is almost exactly the argument made by Brian Brown, who led the famous 2008 Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage in California; Brown remained one of the key opponents to gay marriage in arguments before the Supreme Court. “The notion of the uniqueness of men and women is not some side thing in Scripture, it’s a key part of our view of humanity: that there are two halves of humanity, male and female, and that we complement each other, and that complementarity bears fruit in children,” he said in a highly publicized debate with gay columnist and marriage advocate Dan Savage in 2012.
Marriage, anthropologists and archaeologists tell us, is the oldest of human institutions, as present among our Stone Age ancestors as it was among the Roman emperors as it was between Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing or between Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Or Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi. When traditionalists worry about cracks in the foundation of marriage, their worries are little different from the worries expressed by critics of divorce in classical Rome. What is different—and what has varied across the centuries—is what “marriage” means, how it happens, for what reasons and with what consequences. When the classical historian John Boswell wrote a deeply researched—and deeply flawed—book about the roots of Christian marriage, he argued as a self-interested gay man that the earliest of Christian monks had exchanged marriage vows. Official Vatican scholars were scandalized. Later more prudent scholars criticized Boswell for confusing the ancient Greek vows of solidarity with vows of domestic fidelity. The same issue rests at the core of gay marriage campaigns today.
Radical feminists of the 1970s saw traditional marriage as a soft prison used by men to trap women into relentless servitude changing diapers, peeling carrots, and nursing the elderly. Traditional Protestants, Mormons and evangelicals, whose numbers are all growing, understand marriage as the ancient loving compact through which the muscular male defends and nourishes the tender womb that will bring forth his progeny. Neither reading of marriage addresses its origins or its historic function, writes marriage historian Stephanie Coontz; marriage prior to the late eighteenth-century doctrine of love and romance existed to transform strangers into relatives and relatives into stable cooperatives through which states and nations could prosper in peace. Individual attachment from the beginning has played but a minor role. “Marriage,” Coontz writes, “became a way through which elites could hoard or accumulate resources, shutting out unrelated individuals or even ‘legitimate’ family members. Propertied families consolidated wealth, merged resources, forged political alliances, and concluded peace treaties by strategically marrying off their sons and daughters,” a theme that pervades Thomas Hardy’s most successful novel, Far from the Madding Crowd. Among the wealthy, a wife brought a dowry with which her husband could pay off debts or expand investment. Among the poor, mostly marginal farmers, the question was similar but simpler: “Can I marry someone whose fields are next to mine? Will my prospective mate meet the approval of the neighbors and relatives on whom I depend?”
Generating successful progeny may be a marginal, if growing, motivation for Jack and Jerry to marry, but the mostly childless nature of same-sex unions has reopened underlying tensions about desire, what it means, how to use it, how to manage it, and how it can transform individual solitude into (with luck) lifelong collaboration in the greater society. In a world where having a thousand Facebook “friends” is more or less routine, social researchers tell us that there has never been as pervasive a sense of solitude as the Western world faces today. Where once the extended families created by organized marriage were the chief reprieve from personal solitude, new sorts of marriages have arrived, sometimes conventionally gendered on the surface but far more complex within the compact.
Shirley Royster’s first marriage ended after she came home early one day to find her husband in conjugal delirium with two women and the bedroom door chained shut. He had fathered her first child. She had a second by another man in Philadelphia and started using hard drugs. When the second relationship ended, she gave up on men and moved north to Massachusetts, physically and culturally far from her childhood home in a small mostly black town outside Richmond, Virginia. It was at a barbecue party in Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts, that she met Catharine, her wife, a quarter century before our conversation. “Catharine was laying in a hammock with her girlfriend when I met her. She was gorgeous. Still is gorgeous. I said to my friend Debbie, you know what, that girl’s gonna be my girlfriend. And she said, how you gonna … that girl’s married! I’m like, I’m gonna wait for her.” A year and a half later Catharine and her girlfriend broke up. When Shirley found out, she asked a mutual friend to invite Catharine to a circulating card game that included both gay and straight, mostly black, friends.
“So we invited Catharine. I’m all up on her. If she’s sittin’ on the couch, I’m right there on the couch. She’s standing up, I’m standing up. I’m all over her. Later she said, ‘I just thought you were being nice.’
“‘Nice?’ I said. I was trying to get in your underwear! What do you mean, being nice?
“I can be nice to anybody.
“She said her girlfriend came home one day and said I don’t want to do this anymore, and moved out.
“I said, ‘Poor baby, if you was with me, that would never happen.’ She was two years younger than me. I asked her out [to a club]. I didn’t drive at that time. Somebody gave me a 1978 Pinto and the floorboards in the back were all rusted out. The kids would say, ‘Ma, we got to put our feet up like this.’” She drew her feet up. “‘They be touchin’ the ground.’ Catharine had patience enough to show me how to drive a standard shift ’cause that’s what she drove. A Toyota. She showed me how to drive and we been together ever since.”
Shirley, who works in social service, and Catharine, a glassblower, got married a few months after Massachusetts approved same-sex marriage in November 2003. Shirley said they married for love, but they also found solidarity in raising their children together. When Jean and Barb married, their two sets of children were already grown and living with or married to men. Jean is an international health care consultant; Barb is a doctor in general practice. Each had a secure income and a wide variety of gay and straight friends. They married each other on November 3, 2003, the day the law passed.
“Why did we get married the first day? Because you say to me I can’t get married, you bet your sweet bippy, I’m gonna be there the first instant it’s possible. Oh no, you say all these things about the construction of my life and who I am that could hurt my kids, you bet I’m going to be married … even if I don’t believe in that form.”
“So you mean marriage is a trap either way?” I asked her.
“You can’t compare what marriage means in terms of my relationship to authority and the state in such a contested time, where marriage is actually an act of resistance, not simply an act of acquiescence to the state. You can’t make the same arguments that you will be able to make in a generation.”
“Yes,” I answered, “but isn’t it also about people’s need for some sort of symbolic ritual?”
“Okay, but that’s not the argument,” she persisted. “You can’t simply say I am happy because I found a great love, and it shaped and reordered my life. The fact that I could marry that person, yes, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. But, the act of our marriage was an act of resistance as much as a reclamation of our relationship. We can’t simply assess it from its conservative component [citing] the difference between us and single people who are uncoupled because they don’t have a great love. My argument is not about single people and that marriage makes people better or arguing that the institution is beneficial for the relationship. I don’t think you can do that in a time when marriage is so contentious. I don’t think it’s clearly true. Maybe it’s true.”
Over the quarter century that I had known Jean, first when I was an NPR health reporter, she had always blended analysis with a sense of playful sentiment. Barb has always been fiercely rigorous in her arguments about how access to privileges like state-regulated marriage is mostly about recognition versus erasure of a minority.
“It’s not at all clear to me,” Barb continued, “that the people who are twenty years younger than we are have themselves never experienced issues of discrimination. Look at young lesbian doctors. There’s a set of people who have the same set of privileges as they would have had as heteros. So marriage for me is a totally different experience. Sort of like having been with the Wright brothers and then seeing the Concorde. People around me—privileged—don’t get it! They aren’t different in many ways than their privileged hets … so if you’re doing a study about what marriage means to them, it probably isn’t so different than what marriage means to their buddies. But it’s very different for us.”
As an example, she cited the case of Jean’s son, Daniel, when he was away at college. “He’d call and say he was coming home for dinner. We thought, Oh God, he’s failing something or some other bad news. But no. It took about four times before we realized that each time there had been something in the news that was bad for gay families. Every time. We were his family.”
Jean’s practicing Catholic family bears uncanny resemblance to the ancient family structure that Stephanie Coontze writes about. It is both a child-rearing institution and a social institution that has historic roots in the community, whereas Barb’s evangelical Protestant parents were more similar to the fire-and-brimstone Holy Rollers I had known in Kentucky. Jean frequently defers to Barb in dinner table talk, as she had on the evening we discussed their family life, but then Jean broke in. “I’ve been very moved by the fact that most of Daniel’s girlfriends have been working class or first-generation immigrants from Lebanon. The thing I find interesting is those are particular places where who we are is contested. I don’t know how he gets them to understand us, but he never doesn’t bring the girls home.”
“I remember going to a Lebanese church outside Lawrence when his girlfriend’s grandfather died, and he wanted us there,” Barb added. “She wanted us there too.”
“The family was moved by the fact that we came,” Jean said.
Jean’s parents had praised them about how they were raising their kids, but they also drew a line about their marital status. “They said, ‘You’re not welcome in our house.’ Then later they set up a double bed for us, after we went to a family wedding,” Jean recalled. “When my brother’s wedding came up six months later and he invited me and the children, I sent the children. I didn’t go. My parents called up afterwards and said, ‘Barb’s welcome here.’ If my parents hadn’t been clear, and we hadn’t been clear, we would never have gotten to the place we got to in terms of the quality of our relationship. It was like you flipped a switch.”
The two Jerrys are among the most famous gay couples in Kentucky, and by chance their organic farm, where they plow with mules instead of tractors, is only a half hour from the apple orchard where I grew up. Neither Jerry Hicks, who does most of the physical labor, nor his husband, Jerry Neff, who commutes to an electronics factory, were married when we met. Kentucky is one of the states that banned both same-sex marriage and civil unions. The Jerrys met in a Walmart parking lot in Winchester, about twenty minutes east of Lexington, in 1998. Jerry Hicks had just returned from a fishing trip on the river and had his aluminum job boat wedged in the back of his pickup. By chance Jerry Neff pulled into a space just next to him and commented on Hicks’ fishing tackle. Great loves can launch themselves in parking lots.
A few passionate months later, Hicks took Neff along for a weekend visit to his grandmother’s house on the edge of the mountains. She showed the two young men to a bedroom with two beds, which they sometimes used. Once the Jerrys could marry, they straightaway set upon organizing the event, Jerry Hicks told me: a quiet celebration among friends out in their hay barn “with plenty of good food and Guinness.” While they both regard themselves as spiritual Christians, no ministers were invited. (“I talk to the Lord whenever I need to,” Jerry Hicks told me, “whether I’m in church or behind the plow.”)
Seventeen years had passed since they met when the Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky, Ohio, and twenty-seven other mostly red states could no longer block two men or two women from marrying each other. Unlike the groundswell in Americans’ overall approval of same-sex marriage, a majority of Kentuckians remained opposed to it—just as a majority of white Southerners had opposed the Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka ruling in 1954 that ended segregation between blacks and whites in public schools along with other rulings that had blocked interracial marriage. Even if a minority of couples in the 646,000 same-sex households (2010 U.S. Census) say they want to be officially married, Jerry Hicks and Jerry Neff had waited a long time to be able to take the legal step. “First of all,” Hicks said, “is public recognition of our relationship. Our relationship is as important to us as heterosexuals’ relationships are to them.” For Neff, who grew up Catholic, getting married was not only about formalizing personal bonds. It was equally about reinforcing the separation of church and state. Condemned by the Vatican for the sex he has with Jerry Hicks, he says he could care less what churches say or do. Public marriage, he said, “nails it all the way down to the floor for all the bigots out there. It says ‘Look, you can believe whatever you want to believe inside your private little church, but when you go into the public sphere, there’s a religious marriage that you all cherish so dearly that you can exclude gay people from, but there’s also a civil marriage, and you need to get that damned idea into your head finally. Marriage in the eyes of the state has nothing to do with marriage in the eyes of the church.”
There were of course more pragmatic reasons they wanted to be married: insurance contracts, hospital visitation rights, health and retirement benefits. “I pay quite a lot of money into Social Security,” Jerry Neff pointed out, “but if I kick the bucket, Jerry Hicks will get none of that.” Jerry Neff’s father had encouraged them to get married in West Virginia, where he lives and where same-sex marriage was legal. But both Jerrys wanted to wait until marriage became legal in their own state. “I don’t want to come home with some certificate from somewhere else, Japan or somewhere, that people in Kentucky can turn their noses up [at] and say that’s not real here. I want it to be real in my home.” Jerry Hicks cut in, “And it wouldn’t be recognized here on the state level,” where they also pay several thousand dollars in taxes and other charges.
Marriage, more than any of the other quasi-cinematic convulsions on the contemporary gender stage, may appear to be the final battle in unraveling traditional social values, a crossroads where sex, sexuality, and daily life converge, where gender as most of us grew up understanding it has either disappeared or been fundamentally redefined. So it may seem. The flagrant sexual display celebrated by 1970s gay liberation, complete with the bump-and-grind floats in pride parades and S and M whips and chains, appear to have gradually but steadily given way to conventional domestic routines. Ozzie and Harry squabble over who will walk the dog while Gail and Gracie trade diaper duty and grocery shopping. The backroom bars and all-night clubs that once defined the sizzling quarters of San Francisco and New York are now dominated by chain drugstores and mini-marts supplying the needs of aging homo husbands and lesbian wives. Marriage, that oldest and most conservative of human institutions, seems to have tamed all and, on the surface, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, it has won the approval of a clear majority of Americans.
Surfaces, however, are often misleading. Public health researchers are often among the first to report subterranean social currents—be they rising rates of disabling allergies despite improved sanitation or newer varieties of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). While the epidemic of sexually transmitted human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has shrunk into the shadows since the 1980s, another marker of what the French call libertinism has flourished in the form of a potentially more devastating virus, human papilloma virus (HPV). HPV is the tiny beast that has infected an estimated 70 percent of adult Americans and presumably was the source of actor Michael Douglas’s famous case of throat cancer, which he proudly admitted (and later denied) came from his addiction to applying his tongue to a vast number of women’s clitorises. Thanks for the explosion of heterosexual cunnilingus goes to Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine (“for those who think pink”) and the late Bob Guccione’s Vaseline-lensed soft-porn Penthouse—both of which in an earlier epoch I wrote for. Both Hustler and Penthouse, however virulently heterosexual they were, owed much of their success to the blatant libertinism that accompanied homo liberation, for in the popular mind the most stereotypical image of oral-genital engagement was embodied in the denigrating term cocksucking. Cocksucker in the 1950s and ’60s was about the worst epithet that could be hurled against a sissy-boy outsider. With the sweeping triumphs of gay liberation, cocksucking and “muff diving” came out of the closet of shame and paraded themselves as the bedroom activities that any hip child of the sixties had to perform regardless of the sex of the players. The behavior once shrouded by social and psychological taboo turned Flynt and Guccione into megamillionaires as their slick magazines pushed aside nearly all their competitors and their editorial pages defended every sort of sexual freedom including gay liberation.
As Hustler, Penthouse, and their imitators flourished, they of course brought out their enemies, most notably Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority. Later in his life Falwell spoke out in favor of gay civil rights and even of same-sex “civil marriage,” but at the peak of the battle he denounced homosexuals as “brute beasts” in service to a “vile and satanic system [that] will one day be utterly annihilated and there’ll be a celebration in heaven.” Falwell and millions of his followers were not only concerned about the sexual acts associated with HIV and other STIs. Far graver, he preached, was “God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.” Chief among those punishments were epidemic sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). But disease represented only the beginning of God’s wrath. “We will see a breakdown of the family and family values,” he intoned, “if we decide to approve same-sex marriage, and if we decide to establish homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle with all the benefits that go with equating it with the heterosexual lifestyle.”
What marriage represented to the Moral Majority remains bedrock faith to hard-core conservatives throughout the Bible Belt, notably in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, where solid majorities of the population still staunchly oppose the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling and often still refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex applicants. At the same time major corporations now lobby hard in favor of gay and lesbian equality, not least because childless middle-class couples today represent a major chunk of the consumer market. For the moment the tide of history appears to favor welcoming same-sex couples into the marriage tent. Yet what forms the fabric and shape of that tent? Barb, Jean, Shirley, Catharine, the two Jerrys, and my Irish activist friend all favor opening the marriage laws regardless of gender, yet none of them even vaguely embraces the meaning that marriage has carried since Abraham fled Ur with his wife and half-sister Sara for the green pastures of Canaan.
For nearly all same-sex parents, some version of that complexity is the reality, a reality that the Hollywood star couple Lance and Michael declared in their marriage video. Strict opponents of same-sex marriage, who almost always see homosexuality itself as evidence of moral degradation, of course have no sympathy for Masha Gessen’s position. Many liberal-minded parenting groups also find such a model deleterious for child raising, but as a child of the semi-Appalachian South, I see nothing especially radical in her viewpoint. Large rural extended families in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America nearly always included multiple older generations that functioned as parents to assorted siblings and cousins, and sometimes even technical aunts and uncles were raised as siblings. Few middle-class Europeans and Americans live any longer in such arrangements, having opted instead for the standard nuclear-family model under the influence of everything from Protestant ministries to housing costs to family insurance policy premiums. Yet one of the places where such arrangements do persist is in Australia, among the Aboriginal population. Nearly all children are raised collectively with clear obligations across the kinship group. Mayan communities in Mexico continue to raise their children collectively as do many Maori in New Zealand and several ethnic groups of Central Europe. And indeed as the divorce rate approaches 50 percent in both America and Western Europe, the nuclear-family model favored by conservative traditionalists appears to have a very uncertain future.
Within all these Occidental family formations the stability of conventional “marriage” is again undergoing profound transformation, which, as Jerry Falwell accurately warned two decades ago, is concretizing even more fundamental changes in the greater gender roles that define what it means to be male or female. However startling and even bizarre it may seem that students are now demanding to be addressed by their own self-crafted pronouns, the inescapable reality is that whether in the nursery, the classroom, the ball field, or the marital mattress, an increasingly fluid sexual and social terrain needs to be addressed.