Some Thoughts on the Tyranny of Marriage

A friend of mine recently went to a school reunion. She's in her mid-forties, working, unmarried, lives in her own unit alone. She's not single though; she has a partner. They met through work. He lives in his own place, has done for quite a few years, alone. He was married but that ended a long time ago. My friend and her partner actually live not far from each other and theirs is a commuting relationship. So anyway at the school reunion, when my friend told her former classmates about her relationship, they heaved a sigh of relief, "we'd been wondering if you were gay because you weren't married and didn't have kids." It's in just such little ways that the tyranny of marriage makes itself felt. Presumably having a man in her life has restored some credibility for her, even if she isn't married. And yet my friend's situation is not that unusual. I have another friend who has been in a relationship with a man, a man also previously married and with kids (and grandkids, with whom she has a strong step-grandmother relationship too), for over 18 years now; they have never lived together in that time. And it's not just straight people. I have a gay friend who not does not live with his partner despite their 20 or so years together, they actually live in different countries, here and in Thailand! I'm told that in Thailand it's not the norm, or at least wasn't in the past, for male lovers to live together. Married people do that and marriage is husbands and wives and babies. Marriage there is primarily about children.

So I was curious to discover this essay over at the Guardian the other day. It's called The Tyranny of Marriage by Lara Pawson. Lara is a married woman in the UK and she and her husband want to end their marriage because they've learnt that marriage "conveys gravitas and status ... it's a smug club to which my husband and I no longer want to belong." I recommend you read the whole piece; I reckon it's pretty good, although I also disagree with some parts of it too. I'm going to quote and comment on parts of it but first some background. In the UK marriage is only permissible between a man and a woman. However the UK also has civil partnerships. These are only permissible between two men or two women. A man and a woman can't contract a civil partnership and male or female couples can't get married. Nevertheless, civil partnerships are pretty much like marriage although they lack some of the privileges that marriage has. I'll get back to that shortly.

In the UK there's an Equal Love campaign which is being coordinated by the tireless gay activist, Peter Tatchell. In part it's about the right for same sex couples to get married but it's also about the right of opposite sex couples to contract a civil partnership. A number of opposite sex couples, including Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, have applied to enter into a civil partnership. They've been knocked back as have the same sex couples been denied to contract marriage. I think this is a brilliant campaign with the potential to unleash some major changes which will lessen the tyranny of marriage. I used that term last year in one of my pieces on marriage and I was curious to see Lara Pawson use the same term as the title of her piece.

She starts off saying:

I want to divorce the man I love and he wants to divorce me. We do not wish to separate – simply to end our seven-year marriage... we would prefer "to secure official status for our relationship in a way that supports the call for complete equality and is free of the negative, sexist connotations of marriage". We are both fed up with being part of the hetero-husband-and-wife brigade that is accorded so much status and privilege

They got married in 2003 because they wanted "a public celebration to acknowledge our love, and my husband- to-be felt strongly that a ceremony with singing and reading was important, as well as the almighty knees-up." Marriage, "albeit a God-free one, seemed to be the only available path." They also got married for a practical reason. They were planning to live in Angola and getting visas as two 'single' people, in other words unmarried people - they were, after all, a couple - was a difficult process. Marriage enabled them to cut through the red tape. Marriage is recognised by international treaty, so long as it's monogamous. Polygamous and polyandrous marriages aren't recognised under international law even though they might be allowed in specific countries. Monogamous marriage is the only non-biological relationship that has international recognition, it's one of its privileges and it is privileged by it. (I'm very conscious of that privilege. After I finished my PhD I had high hopes of getting an academic job. I knew too that it would most likely be an overseas job and certainly most of the academic jobs I've applied for have been overseas since I began making applications 10 years ago. I purposely held back as much as possible from getting involved with anyone for most of the last decade because I knew that if did get a job overseas, it would be extremely difficult to get a male partner into which ever country I'd end up in, perhaps impossible with many).

Lara says that she soon discovered how sexist marriage is. "Before we even tied the proverbial knot, I became swiftly aware of discrimination against wives. A job in journalism I was up for suddenly became unavailable: a female manager called to say that now I was married she presumed that it would be difficult for me to be a foreign correspondent." This was in 2003! But it's not the inherent sexism of marriage that most got to her. Rather it's the privilege that marriage receives.

When you marry, you gain a certain unspoken gravitas, as though society heaves a collective sigh of relief: "Thank God they've grown up." Several husbands and wives actually said to me, albeit with a weary smile, "Join the club". Clink clink. And I soon discovered that marriage really is a club.

Being married pulls you into a new elite. It lends you an air of stability and reliability that singles and divorcees are denied. We assume that those who are unmarried probably have something just a teeny bit wrong with them because they have never managed to persuade another to settle down into that cosy unit of coupledom. This is the smug tyranny of husbands and wives.

I think what Lara has discovered here is the fact that marriage is the default in our society, the default of what constitutes a normative relationship, the type of relationship we are all meant to aspire to, the type of relationship that is considered makes for a well-adjusted and happy individual. As my friend found at her school reunion not being married put her in the category of 'suspected to be gay' (presumably lesbian was something too shocking for her classmates to consider). Consequently a suite of privileges attach to marriage. I think marriage even affects the way we have sex. Just today I saw this article someone had posted on Facebook, "Was it (not) good for you? Men say they fake it, too" - it seems that men fake orgasms too, 25% of male respondents in a recent US study. Apparently most of the time guys faked it was during penis-vagina intercourse (it seems the respondents were all heterosexual) which was also the same for women. In other words men and women were both following an erotic script and faked orgasm because they wanted to get out of it without putting their partner on the spot. One commentator, Carol Ellison, makes the astute observation:

"When sex is a performance, and when sex has performance goals — erection, intercourse, orgasms— it's problematic," Ellison, who was not involved in the research, told LiveScience. Ellison argues that sexual success should be redefined as anything that makes you feel goodabout yourself, good about your partner and as something that enhances your relationship.

"If you change the goal of sex to creating mutual pleasure and finding all the different ways to create pleasure... you'll learn a lot more about sexual responsiveness," she said. "Sex will be a whole different experience."

I would argue that this performance based approach to sex comes from the reproductive priority accorded it by making marriage the template of normative intimate relationships. Marriage traditionally and primarily has been about having children. That and property (children themselves are traditionally a form of property) and inter-family alliance have always been the main purposes of marriage. Marriage has given sex a form of legitimacy through its procreative function, especially in Christian societies. Erection, intercourse and orgasms (especially the male's) are linked to that procreative function. They form a script that people believe they have to follow if they are to be counted as normal - normative - human beings.

I've taken a bit of a long detour here but I found the resonances between the fake orgasm article and the broader issue of the privileged default status of marriage too compelling to ignore. However the privileged status of marriage almost has a common sense quality. No one ever questions the centrality of marriage in our society. No one questions the laws against bigamy or plural marriage - everyone assumes that monogamy is the normal 'natural' way to be. No one questions the 'happy ever after' romantic aura that's cast around marriage. As Lara says when people marry they're given a "gravitas" and regarded as "all grown up." And I've been told that, anecdotally anyway, many young women today regard being a bride, getting married, as a kind of formal coming of age. And of course when you get married you're wedded to your soulmate, your partner, your complement, without whom your life is incomplete. It's the ultimate in co-dependency, it's also considered central to maturity. There's a whole industry of psychobabble literature designed to prop up the mythology.

And yet, as I pointed out in my first post on this topic last year the current status of marriage as the stand alone non-biological kinship relation and as the way to psycho-emotional affectional maturity and fulfilment is a fairly recent development in human history. Marriage has always been central, the demands of patriarchy and progeny always made it so, but for our ancestors, it did not have the tyrannical dominance that it does today. The late gay historian, Alan Bray, points out that in medieval Europe marriage sat amongst a web of non-biological (kinship) relationships. Indeed marriage was not regarded as the main vehicle of affectional fulfilment. Such fulfilment was more likely found in one's friendships. If it also happened in your marriage then that was regarded as a blessing. But in that medieval world, people might have entered one or two sworn friendships, they may well even have a sworn brother or sworn sister (sworn brotherhood and sworn sisterhood are more common in the Orthodox East but there were Latin rites of making men brothers too). Baptism and godparenting brought people into relationship - people lived amidst elaborate networks of god-kin. And that's just some of the web of relationships in which people lived and of which, marriage was a part.

All of this began to change in the Renaissance and the Reformation. The practices of sworn friendship, sworn brotherhood and sworn sisterhood were stopped and the church rituals that instituted such relationships were suppressed and forgotten, especially in the West (they linger still in isolated pockets in the East). The networks of god-kin were pruned back. The web of relationship was unravelled. At the same time, marriage moved more and more into the centre of life. It became more formalised, reified, sacramentalised. For the Reformers, marriage instituted the godly household which was to become the fundamental basis of the godly Reformed Christian state. (The Reformers also closed down those suspect same-sex households of convent and monastery). The Roman Church also played catch-up making marriage a sacrament and tightening the regime of confession to monitor the sex lives of the faithful.

But with the rise of the modern capitalist state, marriage became very much a state institution. In much of Europe, the state took it off the Church. In the UK the state sub-contracted to the Church, in the 18th century the British Parliament mandating marriage in the Church of England as the only way to legitimate cohabitation (Jews and Quakers were given an exemption). This process goes hand in hand with the development of capitalism. In its raw state capitalism discourages all human solidarity - ultimately we are nothing more than individual consumers and wage slaves. Marriage, monogamous, couplist, patriarchal, and the nuclear family that goes with it, (once again described and valorised in the literature of Reformers such as Calvin) is the minimalist compromise for capitalism to make with human need for solidarity, in order to ensure new generations of consumers and wage slaves. The marriage household also makes a good unit of consumption and so it's easily integrated into the capitalist state. And propaganda is peddled promoting marriage as the focus of human affectional and personal fulfilment and maturity. The rich literature on friendship, going back through the centuries of Christianity and beyond into the many centuries of ancient pagan cultures too, peters out by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Friendship is instead demoted and trivialised, a situation that would astonish our ancestors for whom it was of such importance.

I've had to summarise briefly and crudely but I do so to bring home just how recent a development the, dare I say morbid, centrality of marriage in our society is. And not just a general concept of marriage but a very specific instance, monogamous, couplist, exclusivist (I won't say patriarchal, sexist or hierarchical because most historical forms of marriage have been that).

But back to Lara's article. She goes on to say that she and her husband will divorce and hope to eventually form a civil partnership if the Equal Love campaign proves successful. But she then goes further announcing a much broader vision of relationship recognition:

As I have argued elsewhere, if we really seek equality we must refuse to accept a society that prioritises conventional coupledom over other forms of love and fellowship. Those who would like to live with people who mean a great deal to them, but are not lovers, are left out of this entire debate. Again, I turn to Tatchell. Five years ago he wrote: "Many non-sexual friendships are as sincere, loyal and enriching as relations between people in love. They, too, should have legal recognition."

She's quoting Peter Tatchell here from an article published in the Guardian back in 2005 when civil partnerships were introduced. Tatchell then rightly condemned the effective apartheid of a dual civil partnership for same-sex and marriage for mixed-sex couples set-up. He then outlined his own proposal for a single civil commitment pact which could be tailored by partners from a pick and mix menu of rights and obligations to work out a pact that best suits their needs. He then goes on to declare:

Many non-sexual friendships are as sincere, loyal and enriching as relations between people in love. They, too, should have legal recognition. Restricting partnership rights to people in sexual relationships discriminates against close friends who support each other but are not in a traditional love coupling. If an elderly brother and sister set up house together and care for one another, why shouldn't they have legal rights?

Unfortunately, few partnerships last a lifetime. Single people account for nearly a third of all households. Friends now play an increasingly important role in people's lives and support networks. It's wrong to deny legal rights to close friends who have a strong, supportive bond, just because they are not lovers and don't have sex.

Similar legislation exists in Tasmania. Legal rights are granted to all relationships of mutual devotion and support, including gay couples, carers and unmarried heterosexual partners. It works Down Under; why not here?

I agree with both Peter Tatchell and Lara Pawson in the need to recognise a wider range of relationships than just monogamous marriage and marriage like relationships/civil partnerships and like Peter Tatchell I like the Tasmanian Relationships Register as a model. My only problem is that Tatchell still seems to stick to a monogamous model. Only one relationship will be registered and that only with one other person. And yet as Tatchell himself says "Friends now play an increasingly important role in people's lives and support networks. It's wrong to deny legal rights to close friends who have a strong, supportive bond." It's wrong to deny the fact that a person might have more than one key friendship. And they might also have a sexual relationship at the same time, too. Furthermore coupledom is not the only model for lovers and significant friendships; there can be triads and other poly arrangements just as we can have more than one significant friendship. Any relationship recognition worth its salt must also have provision for such polyamorous relationships too. It's also not clear from either of the articles whether people who don't live together are covered. I started off this post detailing three such relationships that I know of in my own network of friends, two of which span decades. They don't fit the standard marriage model and neither should they have to. These relationships are also entitled to recognition.

And I'll quote here from a post I wrote on this subject last year:

I would argue that it is about time that friendship was valued and celebrated. It's not clear from my reading whether medieval practices of sworn friendship were another form of adelphopoieia or something different. If adelphopoieia actually brought families into kinship whereas sworn friendships didn't then there is a difference already. One is kinmaking in a strong sense, the other blesses and affirms relationship without necessarily linking two kinship groups. It's time friendship was celebrated, affirmed and blessed. I'm not speaking here about solely romantic erotic same sex relationships. Imagine if two or three male or female friends wanted to celebrate their friendship and have it blessed. Imagine a world in which friendship is celebrated and honoured, including friendships between men and women!

And while I imagine the ways this could happen in a religious setting by drawing on rituals from the past, it doesn't only have to be in a religious setting. Australia now has a well established network of civil celebrants. Their main role has been to perform civil weddings. But as our culture has secularised, many of these celebrants have branched out into funerals and baby namings and same sex commitment ceremonies as well. Maybe it's time for the celebration of friendship or commitment to friendship to be added to the repertoire.

In other words celebrants could develop a range of ritual forms suitable for different types of relationships people wish to celebrate and have recognised. Committed or sworn friendships could then be entered into a relationships register along with the whole gamut of significant relationships in people's lives including marriage and other sexual relationships. Indeed it might make us recognise that marriage-like and other sexual relationships are really forms of friendship and are themselves sustained and maintained by broader webs of friendship.

That's one of the reasons I can't support the rush towards same-sex marriage. I fear that it will close off possibilities for a genuine equal love, a genuine relationship equality. Furthermore that closing off of other options buttresses the status of marriage as the default for relationships and even worse spreads the aegis of that default to cover homosexuality and same sex relationships. I would argue that marriage is not good for heterosexual people but that it is even worse for us queers. Taking marriage as the default for same sex relationships cuts us off from the variety of models in which same sex love was expressed in the past, models which we could be exploring and reviving and reconstructing, rather than forcing our relational lives into a model, marriage, which is oppressive, hierarchical and was not even designed for same-sex love. Quite the contrary, it might even have been shaped by the pressure of homosexual panic (at least that's what my reading of a number of Reformation texts suggests to me). If we are to have same-sex marriage it should come at the end, once we have dethroned marriage from its central position by setting in place a range of options and alternatives for all people in relationships, recognising, affirming and celebrating the variety and richness of human relationships.

Alas, I fear that wont be the case in Australia. When even the right wing nasties in the ALP start calling for same sex marriage then the writing is on the wall. If only the Equal Marriage campaign had been a real Equal Love campaign.

If we do end up with same sex marriage I think the next queer struggle might be to convince queer folks that marriage is not the be all and end all of life, that it's actually pretty rotten in fact; and that maybe we queer folks should not only avoid marriage but instead try to develop new ways (even revive some old ones too) and better forms of love and fellowship.

Ending the Tyranny of Marriage

Well, my original post on same sex marriage made a bit of a splash not so much here but around the intertubes. It got posted around Facebook and even ended up on Catholica. Some people liked it and some people didn't. One critic took me to task not only for the ideas but for using big words. No problem, I knew what I had to say wouldn't be popular with a lot of people.

What I want to do in this post is to sketch some thoughts about how to break down the tyranny of marriage under which we all labour or at least to suggest some possibilities for a plenitude as opposed to a singularity for our affectional lives and affiliations. I'll start with the civil sphere but will turn my attention to the religious sphere or should I say ceremonial sphere, illustrated in a Christian context about how to implement such a plenitude.

Many of the responses made in support of me focused on the religious background of marriage and why should the State be enforcing a religious institution rather than one of it's own. They argued that the State should institute a civil partnership scheme for all and if people wanted a marriage they could go to their church/place of worship afterwards for one. Well, such a regime already exists in France and probably other European countries and their civil partnerships are called marriages and work under the marriage model. So it's not really an improvement.

In fact, I think part of the problem is that people think of marriage as primarily a religious institution. It's not, it's a very old cultural institution and a patriarchal one to boot. Religion is involed because religion is part of culture. Indeed it came as quite a surpise for to discover how recently marriage had become 'religionised' and universalised in Western European culture. For most people in medieval Europe cohabitation, if marked religiously, was accompanied by either a blessing at the church doorstep prior to Sunday Mass or even just the posting of the banns of marriage at the church entrance. Marriage was a family affair - it marked the joining of families not individuals - and, as still applies in India today and throughout the ancient world, it was an event celebrated and solemnised by families. In medieval Europe the aristocracy and the wealthy were the ones who would have a full Church wedding because their status brought into play property, legitimacy and power issues that didn't apply to the ordinary peasantry.

It's the Reformation that marks a major change, at least ideologically. The Reformers saw marriage as a crucial part of the godly order they were trying to implement. The Roman Church in response finally defined marriage as a sacrament and saw itself as the implementer of marriage. The Revolution in France put paid to that. The State took over the role of the Church as the guarantor of marriage a function it maintains to this day as I have already observed. In the UK it was different because there the Church was a State institution already. I was also very surprised to discover that it wasn't until the 18th century that the British Parliament mandated marriage for all in the Anglican Church as the only legitimate way to marry/cohabit, with the exception of Jews and, I believe, Quakers. The State is here basically subcontracting to the Church, its agent, in this model.

So there is nothing specifically religious about marriage even if it becomes invested with a suite of religious ideologies. And in capitalist society marriage has taken front and centre as the main vehicle for our affectional and our erotic lives. Marriage or a marriage like relationship is the goal held up for all of us for fulfilment.

In many respects then civil unions/partnerships are really a form of marriage lite. They're couplist and exclusive and relate to cohabitation. At the same time, I like the idea and I believe that since they were introduced in NZ they've been taken to by many mixed sex couples as well as same sex ones. Sadly though it appears the UK's civil partnerships are only available for same sex couples. In this country the whole civil union thing is bogged down in the processes to try and keep it from looking like marriage lite so it's still to really get off the ground. But even if it is marriage lite it, it's still an advance on marriage. The other important thing is to make sure there is an intenational framework for recognising civil unions as there is with marriage.

At this stage I think that is about as far as the State will go. I personally rather like the idea of mutual adoption but adoption laws vary so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and are really geared towards adoption of children. I don't know if many jurisdictions actually make provision for adult adoption. But the mention of mutual adoption takes me straight into the realm of religion because of the rediscovery by John Boswell of the rites for making brothers or sisters, adelphopoieia, that were practiced in the Eastern Church and seem to have counterparts in the medieval Western Church. Boswell claimed that they were rites for joining same sex couples in an analogous way to say civil unions. Instead these are rites that seem to have someothing to do with adoption of what we might term blood brotherhood. In the Balkans they clearly brought families into relationship in a similar way to marriage. But while I think Boswell was wrong there, I think he would be on firmer ground for suggesting that these rites might have been used by same sex lovers as a way to bless their relationships. We are all familiar with marriages of convenience used to mask one's sexuality. I can easily imagine that some such could work the other way with adelphopoieia. Now while these rites were gradually suppressed over time, in the Greek Church in the 19th century, it seems that there are some Eastern Churches that still use them (and it would appear that these rites are still performed in parts of the Balkans even if unofficially).

I think the time has come for these rites to be revived. No doubt it will be difficult in the Roman Church and various Orthodox Churches that have suppressed them. But they could be revived in Independent Catholic Churches and perhaps even in the Anglican Church. And more adventurous Roman and Orthodox priests should also be encouraged to at least consider celebrating them. I would certainly be much happier using a rite like this than the ghastly traditional marriage rite. The other thing about these rites is that they can cover more than just homosexual relationships. They can also cover non-sexual but homo-affectionate relationships, strong committed friendships.

And I would argue that it is about time that friendship was valued and celebrated. It's not clear from my reading whether medieval practices of sworn friendship were another form of adelphopoieia or something different. If adelphopoieia actually brought families into kinship whereas sworn friendships didn't then there is a difference already. One is kinmaking in a strong sense, the other blesses and affirms relationship without necessarily linking two kinship groups. It's time friendship was celebrated, affirmed and blessed. I'm not speaking here about solely romantic erotic same sex relationships. Imagine if two or three male or female friends wanted to celebrate their friendship and have it blessed. Imagine a world in which friendship is celebrated and honoured, including friendships between men and women!

And while I imagine the ways this could happen in a religious setting by drawing on rituals from the past, it doesn't only have to be in a religious setting. Australia now has a well established network of civil celebrants. Their main role has been to perform civil weddings. But as our culture has secularised, many of these celebrants have branched out into funerals and baby namings and same sex commitment ceremonies as well. Maybe it's time for the celebration of friendship or commitment to friendship to be added to the repertoire.

In our society, to be unmarried or not in a marriage-like relationship means to be counted as single and therefore lacking in some way. And yet so many of us singles live in a rich world of loving friendship completely discounted by mainstream society. At the same time the marriage model of two people dependent only on each other is toxic, masking as it does both the real world of friendship in which such relationships exist and on which they depend. In fact marriage in the best sense is a variety of sexual friendship with the intent of parenthood. And if marriage is to continue that really is the direction, I believe, for it to head. But marriage then must sit in a range of friendships some of which are sexual, some not and some that might be sexual at some stages and non-sexual in others. And all of them celebrated, honoured and blessed.

Some thoughts on Queer Lineages

This is not the follow up post to the same-sex marriage one but it is sort of related. I've been thinking for some time about queer lineages. For many years now I've had a friend who is much older than me. For a long time now I've referred to him as my faerie godmother. I was about 22 when I first met him and only newly out. As I said he was much older, 25 years older, in his 40s then - he's now in his early 80s. The last few years have been quite difficult ones for him healthwise and so he and I and another friend of his my age have been having a bit of a hard time of it. Us two young uns have been his main social and often physical support for the last 6 years or so now. He's now in a retirement home but that only happened earlier this year. I won't go into the details of the health and other issues here but there were several times we almost lost him and there was a period of time when I'd be quite uncertain if I'd find him alive or dead. And there was one day, well if I hadn't turned up he probably wouldn't be with us anymore.

Anyway, back when I'd just finished the PhD, I was visiting him and talking about the plans, well hopes really, that I had and some of the issues I wanted to write about and so forth. Giddy with success I was then and brimming with optimism. But he looked at me and and said "You know I often feel like I made you." We kind of laughed about it because we are really so very different. It's not as if I'm a chip off the old block or anything like that. And we never had a My Fair Lady/Pygmalion type of thing going either. But I learnt a lot from him, from his wealth of experience. He'd lived and worked overseas for many years, a lot of it working on the passenger liners in the 50s and 60s and so had travelled most of the world. He is a rich reservoir of gay history and has been interviewed and had much of his life recorded in recent years so that such experience is not forever lost. But the documenting of that history will never replace the experience of knowing him, and he could be a difficult person to know because he didn't tolerate fools gladly. He is an atheist and an iconoclast and can tell some most outrageous stories of gay life and gay sex from years ago. And somehow we bonded. It's not that long ago that he told me that he'd been madly in love with me for many years after we met. I was flabbergasted. I had major body issues back then and didn't think much of myself despite the bravado I could put on as an out young gay man. Plus I thought I knew the type of guys he liked and I certainly wouldn't have counted myself as fitting that. But we can all surprise ourselves in that regard.

And, yes, he did make me but as I said not in a Pygmalion way and not just through sharing his experience and knowledge. He also helped me through some very rough times. When I think back on it I'm amazed at the way I turned so naturally to him when I had was in a mess or a crisis. And he willingly helped me and supported me. So I was happy that I could help him over these last few years. Well, happy is not the right word. I would have preferred that he didn't need that help and I would have preferred for him not to have been in the state he was.

I say all this because I've been reading a book of my flatmate's on the current Pope's theology. It's a fairly uncritical account and I've been trying to get through a chapter on current Roman Catholic sexual theology as represented by the teachings of the present Pope and his predecessor. The two do represent a bit of revolution in the Roman way of sex but the dominant hallmark of their position is a heterosexual essentialism. Marriage is an icon of God and all sex must be open to transmission of life - hence heterosexual marriage and vaginal sex without contraception are taken as the norm, nay, an icon of God. And it reminds me of a paper presented at a conference I was at many years ago. Ironically the paper was presented by a Catholic priest involved with the AIDS Council. I say ironic because it examined the links between homophobia and the fear of death, death denial. And lets face it, Western society is pretty death denying. And what's more, the one sure thing about homosexual sex, homosexual lovemaking is that there is no way that it can ever be reproductive. Marriage is all about progeny as well as property and patriarchy. The great drive for progeny is the investment in continuity and immortality, socially and individually. Homosexual, homophilic men and women challenge that reproductive imperative and challenge the death denial by embracing what society sees as sterile relationships.

Over the last few years, with my elderly I've become aware as to how he and I stand outside the lineage system. I'm not kin. Whenever there was a drama needing paramedics or such, it became clear that I was not kin and therefore this strange person kindly helping out. Sometimes I'd receive real expressions of surprise about my being there and helping him. I, of course, felt as close, if not closer than any next of kin, none of whom I've met.

But, of course, there is a lineage, a different sort of lineage, one based on love and affection. There's nothing biological or genetic about it, it's not even sexual, so we don't get included in any same sex marriage aura if it was to eventuate, or civil unions for that matter. And I wonder about the queer lineages of love, friendship and desire (and lets face it these regularly overlap) the lineages that don't get recognised because they're not, in societal terms, seeking to cheat death. In times gone past you'd often see the older queens and dykes with entourages of younger ones. They would be bound by friendship, which might often turn sexual, at least for a time, but often would not. Like my elderly friend, the older would support and advise the younger ones, be a role model. That person might in their youth have been part of similar entourages.

What's thrown all these issues into even sharper relief for me lately is a friendship I have with someone a lot younger than me. We've been friends for a few years now; last year circumstances were such we didn't see much of each other. Not so this year and we've seen quite a bit of each other. One of the very strong features of this friendship has been the exchange of ideas between us which is also why I've been reflecting a lot more on the queer dimensions of pedagogical eros (or the pedagogical dimensions of queer love). And pedagogy has it's own lineages, non-biological lineages of the intellect. But with my friend I experienced for the first time the strange sensation of what I might term, rather clunkily, heirship. It's hard for me to get my head around clearly, to find the words to explain., because it's still a very new experience for me. Our interaction is not unidirectional, it's not me passing on to him the passive receptor. It's also not as if I have anything material to bequeath him (except for lots of books I suppose) but then I don't intend to exit this mortal coil for a while yet. But would I stand by him and support him and foster and encourage him? Yes. Am I prepared to pass on whatever I might have by way of experience and wisdom (not that I count myself all that wise)? Yes. Do I want him to challenge and question me and take whatever he can glean from me and run with it developing his own ideas and turn it into something new (do I sound a bit like old Plato here?)? Yes. And, I should add, this is not a sexual friendship and isn't going to be.

So I look at my elderly friend and wonder, is this something like what he what he felt for me, discounting for a moment the attraction he felt for me (and I've also had to deal with issues of my own desires all stirred up by the emotions fired up in me over the last few months). Is that why he fell for someone who I'm still convinced was so not his type? A confusion of desires perhaps? Was our relationship lifegiving? From the essentialist biological genetic perspective obviously not. But in any fully human way, most definitely yes. And for my younger friend I hope I can be as lifegiving and as generous and as loving as my elderly friend was with me. By so doing I will be honouring my elderly friend too. And thus are lineages built.

Why I curse John Howard, or, if Marriage is the answer you're asking the wrong question

This weekend around the country we've had rallies and protests for something called "marriage equality". I've ignored them because lets face it marriage is not about equality. But sadly, over the last couple of years, there has been this rising tide pushing lemming like for same-sex marriage. I first really became aware of it at Pride last year when there were all sorts of placards demanding the right to marry being distributed to carry in the march. I refused to carry any of them because I have a major problem with same sex marriage and I'm pleased to say I'm not alone. So many friends of mine, single and in relationships, are concerned about this marriage push. For me, it's yet another reason to curse John Howard because it was Howard more than anyone else who put marriage on the agenda for LGBT struggles and if same sex marriage becomes a reality in this country then it will be all thanks to John Howard. Back in 2004, he put through an amendment to the Marriage Act defining marriage as between a man and a woman thus ruling out same sex couples. It wasn't a principled move on Howard's part, he has none where power is concerned. No, what he wanted to achieve was the wedging of the Labor Party. Ironically, he failed to secure that but what he did do was to set the agenda for the LGBT struggle in this country. I say that because prior to 2004 marriage was not really an issue at all. Relationship recognition was, but there had been successes on various alternatives to marriage (and these also gave new rights for straight people too) and so there had been no concerted push towards same sex marriage. As friends back in the 90s put it, "queers just aren't that co-dependent."

So why am I not at all interested in "marriage equality" in this country (or anywhere for that matter)? Well, lets face it, marriage itself is not about equality. Marriage is a patriarchal institution - it's keywords are property and progeny, the latter being a specific form of property. The purpose of marriage is control of the womb and its products - that control is always male. Hence adultery is always a crime against a husband, never a wife. The womb is configured as a field and must be kept fenced in to ensure the paternity of its progeny. Pretty much all of our sexual morality is predicated on that assumption, and serves to protect the paternal lineage. The maternal lineage is at the same time disallowed, repressed.

Unsurprisingly, marriage is also about hierarchy, of male over female. Marriage celebrates the establishment of a household/family and the authority in that family is vested in the male, it's his name that the children bear, he who is, or is expected to be, the full time active agent in the world. The woman is configured as mother (to both husband and children), housekeeper and mistress. At the same time the maternal role is abjected. Our society is not organised to allow space for the maternal, hence the ongoing struggles for maternity leave and adequate child care and the recurring moral panics about single mothers, i.e. mothers who are not under the control and supervision of a man and, even worse, whose children are theirs and not connected to a paternal lineage.

Now I'm sure there are people saying that we're not like that and there are plenty of couples nowadays who try and are often successful in getting beyond such patriarchal norms. I agree. I know plenty of couples who have tried to resist and move beyond that paradigm. But I would suggest that more often than not these are moves that must be consciously embraced by the individuals and where things often come unstuck is when children arrive. Again, because our society does not value the maternal. The maternal is dangerous, it must be controlled, repressed. Most of the egalitarian marriages I know are ones where there are no children, making it easy for both partners to be on equal terms.

Of course marriage is not a static institution either. Most people don't realise but it has undergone quite major changes over the last few centuries, changes that have made it as much a capitalist institution as a patriarchal one. These changes have also put marriage front and centre in society as the defining institution for people. In the days when capitalism was in its infancy, marriage was embeedded in a broader network of relationships, biological and non-biological. As well as a network of blood-kin, a person also was part of a network of god-kin. In medieval Europe, there was also a practice of sworn friendships and sworn brotherhoods/sisterhoods. The Church rituals, that the late John Boswell and others uncovered, for making spiritual brothers or spiritual sisters were not rites for joining same sex lovers as such. I would imagine that perhaps the majority of such relationships had no clear homo-erotic component (although many would likely be homo-affectionate) but I can also imagine that many would have been. But most importantly these formalised friendships and forms of non-biological kinship meant that marriage and even parenthood was not the only or even the main significant relationship in a person's life. Marriage was a much more practical institution then, geared around the rearing of children. It was children of course who provided care and support in old age, a situation that still applies in the greater part of the world. If a husband and wife could develop a loving relationship over their lives it was considered a boon but not a requirement for a succesful marriage.

With the development of capitalism this network of relationships was progressively dismantled and done away with. The first to go in the West were the sworn friendships and rites of spiritual brotherhood and sisterhood (although they continued on in Eastern Europe, especially in the Balkans, up until the late 19th century). Similarly the networks of god-kin were dismantled. At the same time the household was progressively transformed into the nuclear family. In the houses of the wealthy, this was most marked by the separation of servants from family and the demarcation of servants by class. Whereas before, servants and masters would sleep together and servants were very much a part of the household interaction, by the 18th century servants were consigned to their own quarters and invisibilised within the workings of the house.

For most people though the focus stayed around the nuclear family of husband wife and children, with or without servants or other family retainers. Reformation ideologies of the household in society basically map out the role of the nuclear family. Luther still accepts a place for servants but in Calvin's ideal world the household is husband wife and children, without servants, and it's Calvin's model that becomes the norm for capitalist society with the embourgoisification of the working classes, starting in the 19th century but accelerating post-WW2 with the rise of consumer capitalism

Ironically, capitalism is not one for promoting human solidarity. It's model is the marketplace and it's fantasy is that we are all equal agents in that marketplace, a fiction that serves to buttress the power relations in society. Any sort of human solidarity is anti-capitalist, anti-market. The nuclear family is about as close as capitalism can get to any sort of human soldiarity and even that remains unstable in the face of the fissiparous atomising dynamics of the marketplace. So the nuclear family, the creation of capitalism is constantly destabilised by it.

In late capitalist society, marriage remains the means of establishing the nuclear family. That's its purpose and it is accompanied by a suite of mythologies designed to make marriage desireable. Ironically these mythologies primarily target women, the ones who come out second best in the marriage/nuclear family institution. You can tune into these mythologies on TV talk shows, in the plethora of magazines marketed to women, in the diet and beauty industries, in TV soaps, in most advertising actually, in film and song. They permeate the culture. Marriage is presented as the central goal of life, almost a coming of age, and a means of fulfilment and personal maturation. Some of the material addresses men but by far it's greatest focus is women. Furthermore marriage is now a commodity that's marketed vigourously, it's a big business! And it's a business that plays on romantic fantasies, idealised desires, indeed the whole big E of experience. Marriage is spun as the key to fulfilment and personal growth and status too.

I was recently talking about this issue with a young gay guy who described himself as a "revolutionary socialist". He could not understand why I did not support the push for same sex marriage. When I said marriage was a patriarchal instution, he corrected me saying it was a capitalist institution. Of course the reality is that it's both. But then surprisingly he said that same sex marriage might actually change marriage for the better. In other words he might be a revolutionary socialist, but he's clearly bought right into the marriage mythologies. And yet there is a whole history of marriage resistance in the history of socialism, anarchism and feminism. And what would surprise many people even more is that there is an even older religious history of marraige resistance both within and without Christianity going back millennia.

But could same sex marriage perhaps improve, maybe even redeem, marriage? I don't think so. In fact I think it might open up some very conundrums. Luce Irigaray says of patriarchy that it operates under the law of the Same. What she means is that under patriarchy there is only one effective gender, men. There are also wombmen who are not quite men and, because the womb is a potent life generator, the object of desire/envy, need to be controlled and fenced in and guarded. The discourses that govern these wombs, that define the heteronormative model that is patriarchy, are determined by men. Discursively the wombmen, the women are men. Women have yet to speak, have yet to make that discursive space from which a real conversation can unfold. There is as yet no heterosexuality, only heteronormativity. At the same time homosexuality is repressed because it makes visible this law of the Same and, whatever else, Patriarchy must cover up it's indebtedness to this law.

Capitalism has incorporated, built upon patriarchy. It strikes me that, like Patriarchy, capitalism recognises only one gender, the consumer. The consumer is discursively mostly framed as male - they must have agency, income to spend and so forth. The ideal consumer is single and a free agent, unencumbered by wombs and children. But failing that there is also the nuclear family. Despite its instablity, the nuclear family is important as a site of consumption and as a site for inculcating consumerist norms in the children. Under Patriarchy, gender roles were and still are quite rigorously enforced not least to mask the law of the Same. I'm not certain if that's so for capitalism. I think that's why women and LGBTQ people have made such rapid advances in recent years. From a systemic perspective, they are all consumers, or potential consumers. Capitalism is totalising - everyone must be incorporated into its dynamic. Thus both women and LGBTQ people must be integrated into the system.

And so I think same sex marriage is something that fits that dynamic. It's integrating - queer folk are offered the opportunity of establishing nuclear family households of their own. But it's also exclusive - not all the types of same sex relationships fit the marriage model. But homogeneity is also a hallmark of capitalism, that way desires can be determined and exploited. So from a capitalist perspective it doesn't matter if marriage doesn't suit the variety of same sex relationships there are out there. It's of no consequence because we will all live under the tyranny of marriage. And homosexuality will be heteronormatised.

And ironically, capitalism might even manage to fulfill that old patriarchal dream of eliding completely the maternal body by means of same sex marriage. On the weekend, the Age ran this story of two gay men in Victoria and their quest for parenthood. I'll preface my comnts by saying that I make no comment on their relationship or their parenting abliities and certainly nt on their love for their children. But what grabbed my attention in the story was the process by whch these children came to be. They "outlaid $40,000 to collect eggs from one woman and rent a womb from another to gestate their babies in a Mumbai fertility clinic" This account rang all sort of alarm bells for me, alarm bells of race, gender and colonialism. But further I was struck by how they seemd to have almost successfully elided, deleted the maternal body from the process. Not one but two women were involved, the one to provide the eggs and the other to provide the womb. By using two women in this way they have effectively made sure that neither woman can make any sort of claim to the children. The maternal lineage is confused and hence erased. The children here are clearly the property of the father alone

And so marriage is no solution, no answer to our quest for relationship recognition (and I certainly support the need for relationship recognition). As an institution it's flawed and will work to heteronormatise and privilege certain types of same sex relationships - those that are most marriage like. It will also cut us off from the various alternatives from the past that I would argue better serve our recognition needs and are actually much better models for our relationships than marriage, such as the sworn friendship models and spiritual brothers/sisters. And I also like the civil union, civil partnership models as well but not in isolation. Adopting same sex marriage, however, would close off any possibilities for developing such alternatives

I don't labour under the illusion that we can get rid of marriage but what I would like to see is the tyranny of marriage overthrown and marriage re-embedded in a broadwork network of relationships such that it becomes one among many and maybe not all that important in the scheme of things. And one thing is for sure providing a plenitude of relationship models would benefit both straight and queer.

One possible future for marriage could be one in which it is re-oriented towards childrearing. In other words two or more people take on a commitment to parenting. I don't restrict parenting to two because one of the basic facts of same sex parenting is that there is always a third, the provider of egg, womb, sperm. With the focus on the children I could see how the perspective could shift from children as property to children in relationship with parents. Indeed I could almost imagine the end of divorce (unless initiated by the children themselves to divorce from their parents) because it's no longer the relationship between the parents that counts but instead the commitment to and relationship with the children that counts.

But above all I want to see the celebration and acknowledging of friendship, passionate friendships, romantic friendships, sworn friendships, a matrix of loving friendships put front and centre in our society so as to open up richer affectional possibilities for all, straight and queer and to bring to an end once and for all the dead end tyranny of marriage.

I plan to follow up this post with some reflections on the implications of this position for religion, primarily Christianity which has as its endtime utopian vision a world without marriage. But for now I would strongly urge people to resist the call to go chasing after that "marriage hearse".

Some Thoughts on Life, Death, Loss, Love and Homosexuality

It's been an interesting afternoon today. Jeff and I finally got together to talk about Colin and much more. It's been several years since I saw Jeff, let alone get a chance to really talk. He, Colin and I were all part of ACT UP back in the early '90s in Brisbane. Jeff and I were also part of GLoC - Gays and Lesbians on Campus - back when I started at the University of Qld in 1992. Back then Jeff and Colin were sharing a place in West End (Brisbane). I would move to West End to Steven's place and Colin moved there in 1996. Jeff and I spoke a lot today about Colin, about those days, about death. It seems to have been the peculiar fortune of Western gay men of our generations to experience the impact of death in a way that the rest of our societies had not known for very many decades. I found out from Jeff that someone else from those days, Thomas, a delightful and energetic HIV+ young man, died back in November 2007. He'd left Brisbane several years ago to head west and then returned to his home town Adelaide when his health began to deteriorate. Who in Brisbane knows that Thomas is dead? How many are left from those days who remember Thomas? As Jeff asked, who is there left to remember and how does this memory get handed on? Is it just ego to want it to be handed on?

The one feature of same sex relationships is that ours are not reproductive. As Pansy Division sing, 'nothing out of our loins, sweetie, will ever see the light of day'. Indeed that non-reproductive nature of the homo-erotic is one impulse behind homophobia. Reproduction, children are one form of guarantee against the 'dying of the light'. Immortality is invested in reproduction. The fact that same sex relationships cannot reproduce (well not without significant outside intervention) reminds the broader society of the fact of our mortality. And ours is especially a death denying society. Heaps of fundamentalist Christians hope that they are going to cheat death and much more by being lifted off the planet by Jesus in the Rapture, a particularly spurious 19th century doctrine that animates the Left Behind cultural phenomenon in the United States. One of its attractions, at least evidenced by discussion on the many sites where people engage in rapture watching, is that the Rapture is a way to avoid death, a get outof gaol free card that gets you into heaven without any pain (and in some versions even taking your pets with you). I think the succcess of Rapture beliefs lies in the death denial so much a feature of US and other western societies generally. In a capitalist fantasy of untramelled consumption death is the unwelcome spectre at the feast. So being carried off in the Rapture or in its new age variant, in a UFO, expresses the hope of eternal consumption without the pain of death and separation to intervene and destroy. For the Left Behinders there is additional schadenfreude of knowing the unbelieving masses will suffer extraordinary horrors in the Tribulation before mostly being consigend to eternal damnation.


Memory is both collective/cultural and individual. Hence memory is political. There was a slogan often graffitied around West End here in Brisbane that went something like 'the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting'. The societies in which we live make determine what memories shall be preserved as part of the cultural whole and what will be lost. Many memories survive through the fact of reproduction, people pass on alternative memories to their children; religious, ethnic, and political minorities attest to this fact. But for us who love without thought or expectation of progeny, what do we do to pass on our memories to those who will, like us and after us, love without thought of progeny? I love the young fags and dykes today. They have so much, so much, so many opportunities that I could not even imagine at their age. They are so beautiful. I'm not saying their world is perfect. Homophobia has not gone away, there is still much to be done. But so much has been lost already, so many dead. The movement that has given them the possibilities that so many in the past could not even imagine is itself a fragile flower of fairly short duration and our memoirs are not the memories the mainstream and ruling culture is interested in retaining.

Jeff has spent a lot of time in South East Asia, Thailand especially and he spoke about how pervasive Buddhism and the sangha, the order of monks and nuns. Even Angkor Wat, which was a Hindu temple complex in which Siva is the dominant deity, is now also a Buddhist site with shrines and monks and nuns all about it. Monastic orders, religious orders are interesting models of same sex societies of people who live without expectation of progeny. Indeed the spectre of monastic sodomy was one image wielded by the Reformers in their struggle against Rome and in building a new society in which marriage would be compulsory for all (something not fully realised until the 20th century).

That's why I'm not comfortable with the promotion of same sex marriage. I'm all for recognition of our relationships but I don't think marriage is the best model for the dynamics of the same/homo. And even though I am a homosexual that doesn't mean I want the homogenous sameness of marriage for all. Marriage itself must change dramatically so I don't see why we shoudl be dragooned in to its very flawed and patriarchal dynamics.

I know in my case that I not only love the young fags and dykes but I am also attracted to younger guys (maybe one of the pleasures of getting older is that the world becomes more and more full of younger men). It is pretty much a trope of male male love (but not the only one), the mentoring relationship, the daddy/son, the big and little brother and the avuncular, uncle/nephew. This is also not an exclusively male phenomenon. The poet Michael Field was in actual fact a female couple who were themselves aunt and niece.

But the one thing that strikes me about such relationships is their potential for openness. In many respects mentoring is very much a part of academic dynamics. A teacher/mentor usually does not have only one student and while the pedagogical bonds might last a lifetime those student go on to form mentoring relationships of their own. It strikes me too that, as someone who aspires to be in a relationship with a younger man, one of the basic facts of such a relationship is that he will in all likelihood outlive me. It would be a cruelty on my part to expect him to be in a monogamous relationship. I would encourage him to open out the relationship, so that at the very least, he would not be on his own when I die. Such relationships, like father-son, fraternal, avuncular and mentor/'mentee', are in actual fact communal by nature. Mentoring teacher/disciple lineages are a fact of monastic societies Buddhist, Christian and other. The shamanic role too was often associated with a non-biological, often erotic, same sex lineage.

Is this the way too that a lineage of memory, erotically based, but not reproductive can be established? To cite a utopian term from the early days of Gay Liberation, to build a brotherhood (and sisterhood) of sex. How to achieve that is the question? It certainly can't be achieved if we are all dragooned into the marriage model. And in the interim for Jeff and I and other who are the survivors of generations struck down it can only be the fragile shoeboxes of friendships that remain.