In this article, published on the Wheeler Centre website, Rodney Croome responds to recent commentary on same-sex marriage and gay identity by Dennis Altman and Helen Razor.
Read part 2 of this piece, here.
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Gay academic, Dennis Altman, has more in common with conservative Christian advocates than either may like to believe.
Both are responding negatively to the demand for same-sex marriage because they share the same illusion about what marriage is and who gay men are.
In a recent opinion piece Altman described marriage as a single “model” “predicated on particular gender relations, monogamy and the biological link between children and parents” and gay men as engaging in “a whole range of sexual adventuring” that make male same-sex relationships “different” to heterosexual ones.
These words could just as easily have been written by Baptist theologian, Bill Muehlenberg. I should know. He and I co-authored a book about same-sex marriage last year in which we had to respond to each other’s case in detail.
For both Altman and Muehlenberg, marriage is still on the cultural pedestal it occupied when they were young, the pedestal whose footing reads “the only way to legitimise love, sex and children, the only way to order the interaction of men and women, the only course our lives should take”.
They also both hold to the belief that gay men are natural libertines and that gay male relationships are therefore inherently different.
Of course, where Altman and people like Muehlenberg part ways is how they judge what they perceive to be true about marriage and homosexuality.
As a conservative Christian, Muehlenberg wants to shore up marriage’s pedestal and thinks unrestrained sex is immoral. As a sexual liberationist Altman wants to knock marriage down and smash it to bits, and thinks sexual liberation is fundamental to happiness.
But from that divergence of opinion arises another convergence; both dislike the idea of gays marrying (although, as a supporter of human rights and legal equality, Altman is not against it).
So what exactly have Altman and Muehlenberg mis-judged about marriage and gay men?
Marriage is no longer the cultural monolith it once was.
The legal recognition and social acceptance of de facto relationships, civil partnerships and non-conjugal relationships means marriage is now just another way, among others, of sharing one’s life with another person.
The acceptance of childlessness, gender equity and no-fault divorce means there is no longer just one model of marriage, with the decision about how to conduct a marriage now firmly in the hands of the partners to that marriage.
As Fairfax columnist, Adele Horan, recently observed,
Marriage is more than ever a love match between equals, a primarily personal relationship in which partners maintain a level of independence. They organise their partnership on the basis of personal inclination rather than gender roles, although no one says that battle is won; they value the right to decide whether to have children or not. Is it any wonder that gays and lesbians are saying “Hey, that describes us”?
The general acceptance of Julia Gillard’s childless, de facto relationship is an example of this change.
Muehlenberg might condemn it. Altman may hope it spells the end of the marriage. But most Australians see it for what it really is, two people choosing to do what is right for them.
It is precisely this ethos of choice which is behind popular support for marriage equality, especially among the young.
Polls show significantly higher support for same-sex marriage among the under 40s – people I call the Family Law Act Generation because they grew up with cohabitation, divorce and childlessness as legitimate options, and with gender equity a given.
It makes no sense to this generation that how and if to be married should be a choice for the majority but not for the minority.
Both Altman and Muehlenberg might contend that in the absence of legal incentives and cultural pressure marriage will disappear. But statistics show that marriage rates are actually up, possibly because our greater freedom to marry makes marriage more attractive, not less.
Whatever the reason, the democratising of relationship law, which has seen traditional marriage shift from being the only legitimate relationship to just one among others, no more means marriage is about to disappear than religious tolerance in Europe in the eighteenth century brought an end to faith.
When it comes to gay male relationships, the mistake Muehlenberg and Altman make is to see them as sexually exceptional.
There is no credible evidence for this, as shown during the landmark gay blood donation case before the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal in 2008.
The case hinged on the question of whether gay men have uniquely different sex lives. To prove its point that gay blood donation would be dangerous, the Red Cross presented a range of studies to prove gay men are more likely to have more sexual partners, less likely to be sexually monogamous in primary relationships, and more likely to engage in risky sexual activity, than other people.
The Tribunal dismissed all these studies because they were designed specifically to look at behaviour that poses a high risk of HIV infection in small, unrepresentative samples drawn from gay events, bars and sex venues. Often these samples deliberately excluded men in monogamous relationships.
Researchers like Professor Glen Elder of Vermont University have similar concerns as the Tribunal. He believes,
“We have produced a body of literature about homosexual lives that tends toward the ‘exceptional’”.
When Elder looked at a broader range of same-sex couples who didn’t congregate in one place and agree to be studied – those registered from across the USA under Vermont’s civil union scheme – he found,
“What’s most interesting about this analysis…is the banality of the results. Civil union households simply don’t differ that much from those of the general population”.
Recent whole-of-population studies provide a similar picture of gay men being no less – and in some studies actually more – monogamous than others. The notion that gay men are sexual experimenters is a slander from those who think it a bad thing and a conceit among those who think it good.
The fundamental similarity of gay and straight relationships comes as a surprise to ordinary Australians.
Growing tolerance of same-sex relationships has seen gays and lesbians increasingly spurn inner-city ghettos and relocate to, or stay in, suburban and regional areas. In turn, this has familiarised heterosexual Australians with the daily lives of same-sex couples. An excellent example is the large factory in Hobart where my partner and several other openly-gay people work. The most remarkable thing about them is that their relationships and families are so very unremarkable in the eyes of their mainly blue-collar colleagues.
Naturally, when these heterosexuals see that the lives of their gay friends and co-workers are much like theirs, they begin to ask why their legal rights aren’t too.
My assertion that there is no relevant difference between straights and gays that would disqualify the latter from marriage as we know it, is bound to spark accusations that I am an assimilationist out to dismiss all that is good about being gay. That would be wrong. I am all for the acknowledgement and celebration of difference, where it exists.
For example, on the question of Tasmanian identity, the Hobart-born Altman and I take opposite positions to the ones we hold on gay sexual identity. Altman dismisses the idea there is anything significantly different about Tasmania. I hold firmly to the view of Richard Flanagan and others that Tasmania is geographically and culturally “another country”, and a fine one at that.
I also recently defended the importance of a distinct gay identity in response to Helen Razor’s assertion that there is no need for it, especially in culture and the arts where she believes it simply marginalises and trivialises the contributions of gay people.
But my case for gay distinctiveness is not one that seeks to draw a thick line between two inherently different sets of people. It is not based on the black and white view that the only choice minorities have is to be separate or the same.
At best, gay men (and for that matter Tasmanians) are embellishments in the stories other people tell. We are parodied, demonised, lionised and generally not taken on our merits. Mostly, we are missing altogether. This means that, more than others, we are called on to question who we are, who others are and where we fit. We have to negotiate more boundaries and rely more on own narratives. By doing so we become more self-conscious and more conscious of others. It is the insight and cultural richness that may arise from all this which is a difference worth celebrating.
In my response to Razor I illustrated this more nuanced view of the value of identity by drawing on that period of European history that gave us Marx, Kafka, Freud and Einstein.
‘When Europe’s Jews were released from their ghettos in the eighteenth and nineteenth century they didn’t all suddenly cease to be Jews. They were freer to identify to whatever degree they chose with their inherited ethnic and religious identity, to enrich the broader society of which they had become a part with whatever they considered valuable about this identity. The result was a contribution to western culture from the descendents of emancipated Jews that was unthinkable while the ghetto lasted, and without which the contemporary world would be unimaginably different.
‘I imagine the same future for LGBT people. As we are freer to interact with the society around us in more complex ways, so we will also make a far richer contribution to that society than is imaginable today, a contribution drawn from but not limited by our sexual or gender identities. Integration will not mean assimilation.
So it is with same-sex marriage.
Allowing same-sex couples to marry will not profoundly change marriage or gay people. Culturally and legally each has already grown to meet the other.
Like other steps towards legal equality and social integration, marriage equality will mean gay people are increasingly free to contribute to society all that we are, including the experience we have gained from being excluded, and from our struggle to end that exclusion.
Continue to Part 2 of this piece.