“AS HOMOSEXUALITY becomes more socially acceptable, we may even begin to find families based on homosexual ‘marriages’ with the partners adopting children.” So said Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, the 1970 publishing sensation that introduced Americans to “information overload” and assorted other innovations he predicted for the coming years. About those children that might be adopted by homosexuals, Toffler added, somewhat strangely, “Whether these children would be of the same or opposite sex remains to be seen.” Citing Britain’s 1967 decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, among other developments, he went on to declare, “The day may also come when a court decides that a couple of stable, well educated homosexuals might make decent ‘parents.’”
Thirty-five years later, Toffler’s words sound prescient, and yet already obsolete.
When we talk about same-sex marriage, what kind of future are we talking about? A careful look at GLBT history shows that there is nothing new about gays and lesbians dreaming of marriage equality. Or, to put it more precisely: I want to suggest that, for as long as the state has recognized and given particular rights to male-female married couples, same-sex couples—in public or in private, under their own names or in pseudonyms or simply in their diaries—have both resented their exclusion and asked how long it must continue, even against great odds. As George Chauncey argued in his 2004 book Why Marriage?, the current marriage debate is profoundly structured by a series of changes, dating at least to the New Deal but expanding in the World War II era, by which marriage became a primary mechanism for distributing state and private benefits. In postwar America, gay marriage dreams correspond rather precisely to the shifting menu of rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples only.
Let me suggest that there have been several key moments in the history of “gay marriage talk” in the past half century. Certain questions appear repeatedly. Perhaps the most common are these: What is the purpose of marriage, to stabilize society, to facilitate procreation, or to insure the orderly transfer and preservation of wealth? Is marriage even desirable? Does marriage depend on the unequal status of men and women? And are heterosexual couples somehow better suited for it than same-sex couples?
ALTHOUGH same-sex marriage in America remains futuristic outside of Massachusetts, there is no doubt that the possibility once seemed far more remote than it does today. In August 1953, the fledgling national homophile magazine ONE carried a cover story by E. B. Saunders imagining how the gay world might be different if, in the year 2053, marriage between men were legalized. In response, one reader wrote, in a letter to the editor: “The questions raised by legalized status of ‘married’ homosexuals are rather like the speculations which arise in supposing that, tomorrow, all humans will suddenly become giants, growing to heights of thirty feet or more. Will we then be required to tear down all our houses and build new ones, or can we simply raise the roof?” Still, this reader went on to devote ten paragraphs to a detailed argument against state recognition of gay couples: “I see no reason to try to legislate lasting mutual love on the part of any two homosexuals.” Other letters called homosexual marriage “an eye-catching red herring” and even denounced “scare headlines.”
Significantly, the primary question for the author of the original article had been whether marriage would domesticate gay men and require them to be less promiscuous. On this topic, readers’ opinions varied. More than one letter cited Kinsey’s recent and well-known finding that adultery was widespread, asking how marriage could possibly do for homosexuals what it had failed to do for heterosexuals. Some felt that marriage was merely irrelevant: “I have never heard a homosexual express any desire to adopt a child. How damn fool can you get?” Or: “There isn’t, never has been, and can’t be a lasting ‘marriage’ between two men in which they remain faithful. They may live together for years, but one or the other cheats, and usually they tell each other about it.” But another man declared, “We have generally the same concepts of decency and fidelity to our ‘spouses’ as the heterosexuals,” and cited eight lesbian couples he knew that “have been ‘married’ (‘for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health’)” for periods ranging from three to fifteen years. And one man wrote poignantly that he “would also be for the legalized marriage of homosexuals who desire this. And I am one who desires this.”
One factor in 1950’s discussions of gay marriage was the fact that so many gays and lesbians were then in long-term heterosexual marriages at a time when simply going to a gay bar could result in arrest and the destruction of a career. By the way, I should point out that the ONE reader who compared the likelihood of legalizing same-sex marriage to that of all human beings suddenly becoming giants had seen gay marriage as unnecessary partly because he had “been married for four years, now, to a normal girl” who “has accepted me—no, even loves me—problem that I am, and I love her.” In his 1951 book The Homosexual in America, a landmark of the early homophile movement, Donald Webster Cory asserted that it was common for gay men over thirty, after concluding a sexual encounter, to ask each other if they were married.
That marriage was heterosexual was sometimes taken for granted even by those who imagined a future of legalized same-sex marriage. Cory, for example, profiled two loving male couples that had lived together for many years, characterized by “devotion and sacrifice comparable to that of legal marriage,” and asked readers, “Is it proposed that society recognize and sanction marriages in which both ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ are of the same sex and in which the two parties to such a union have the same rights and obligations as in any other marriage?” Yet his chapter on marriage, “Till Death Do Us Part,” is barely intelligible in the context of today’s debate. It begins by asking whether marriage is “the answer” for homosexuals—and proceeds to outline the pros and cons of “masking” one’s tendencies by entering a heterosexual marriage.
By the early 1960’s, homosexuality was being discussed more openly in the mass media. In 1963, another ONE cover story, “Let’s Push Homophile Marriage,” treated gay marriage as a matter of winning legal recognition for the existing relationships of what author Randy Lloyd called “the homophile married set,” a group he felt had been overlooked in a recent and widely discussed Harper’s article on “New York’s Middle-Class Homosexuals.” Lloyd advocated stable relationships and offered tips for those who wanted such a life. He argued that “marriage is not anybody’s ‘convention’” and suggested that “when society finally accepts homophiles as a valid minority with minority rights, it is going first of all to accept the married homophiles” (a conclusion that several readers vigorously disputed). Lloyd even provided gay marriage with a rather distinguished pedigree, saying, “I suspect that if anyone could be tagged as the first to intellectually push homophile marriage (though cautiously and embryonically), it would be the Englishman, Edward Carpenter.”
As before, readers’ reactions varied widely. One writer thanked the editors for the article that captured the joy and intensity of his twelve-year “married” relationship: “Since I have lost my great love to the ‘Grim Reaper’ I have been a lonesome person.” Someone else, frustrated with the San Francisco bar scene, wrote, “I agree with Randy Lloyd’s article, but he states that there are a lot of homosexuals wanting to get married. If this be true I would like to inquire where?” On the other hand, a reader claimed “I sort of shudder” at the very idea of marriage; still another said the article “just stinks! What does this so-called writer Randy Lloyd want? To copy heterosexual life?” Perhaps most interestingly, a reader suggested that marriage activism would lead to a forceful backlash: “Can’t you hear our enemies saying, as they read [the article], ‘For God’s sake, the queers want to marry each other’?”
Talk of gay marriage exploded in the early 1970’s. With a variety of social conventions under assault, lawsuits by same-sex couples seeking to marry took place in several places and won significant media attention. While they all lost their cases, two Minneapolis college students received a great deal of press and were photographed together in Look magazine. In some sense, the floodgates of mainstream “marriage talk” seemed to burst. Thus, for example, the June 1971 issue of TV Radio Mirror had on its cover the screaming headline, “Secret Ceremony! Homosexual Wedding Between TV & Movie Star.” Inside, the four-page article described a Hollywood ceremony attended by many celebrities at which two famous young men declared their love for one another. “Their names are known in every household in America,” assured the reporter, without giving the men’s names. The reader learns that while homosexuality is not new, having a ceremony is—and not only that, “in this permissive age, it is no longer rare. In fact, homosexuals—male and female—have been banding together and taking up the fight to legalize homosexual marriages!”
The remainder of the article covers a variety of arguments for and against gay marriage, though pride of place is given to a series of experts—lawyers, advice columnists, and psychiatrists, including the ubiquitous anti-gay voice of Dr. Irving Bieber—all of whom proclaim the lunacy of gay marriage. (Naturally, some of their reasons are mutually exclusive.) Two gay spokesmen, Metropolitan Community Church founder Troy Perry and New York Mattachine director Dick Leitsch, are quoted as endorsing the push for marriage rights. Remarkably, the article’s final paragraphs quote “those in the know” as saying that one of the two men getting married is probably about to embark on an affair with a pro football player! In conclusion: “So their secret ceremony hasn’t insured any secure and stable relationship after all—and may, in the end, bring them unhappiness, ridicule, and total ruin.”
As in the 1950’s and 60’s, some gays and lesbians dismissed marriage as an undesirable aspect of the dominant straight world—a view that was buttressed by the counterculture’s critique of virtually all mainstream institutions. For example, in TV Radio Mirror, we are told that writer Paul Goodman (described as “frankly advocating the bisexual life style”) “considers homosexual marriages undesirable” because “monogamy is an unhealthy state for a homosexual since it’s a defensive maneuver to avoid loneliness and to have a permanent friend.” The following year, in March 1972, a Bay Area Reporter columnist sneered, “Hets have what they call the ‘work ethic.’ They work long, hard hours, because they believe that work is a good substitute for sex. Besides, hets must have good jobs to pay for the dream home.”
Alternatively, a fascinating 1971 article in The Ladder, the magazine of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first national lesbian organization, treated monogamous, stable relationships as a longstanding feature of lesbian culture, one that young gay liberationists and women’s liberationists had unfairly dismissed. Rita Laporte, a former national president of the DOB, quoted a recent scholarly account on the nature of American family life: “‘The institution we call marriage can’t hold two full human beings—it was only designed for one and a half.’ So says sociologist Andrew Hacker.” She goes on to qualify his statement: “He was, of course, referring to heterosexual marriage. The Lesbian butch/femme marriage can and usually does hold two full human beings.” Laporte rejected the position of young radicals, whom she admonished for their appalling “attempt to deny the beauty and authenticity of such lifelong, monogamous Lesbian marriages.”
It is important to note that in the 1970’s, not only did GLBT people increasingly debate marriage and sue unsuccessfully for marriage rights, they also stimulated a powerful backlash from heterosexuals. As Peggy Pascoe and George Chauncey have shown, fifteen states passed laws explicitly restricting marriage to one man and one woman between 1973 and 1978. Many young gay activists have heard of the late-1970’s struggles over Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in south Florida and of California’s Briggs Initiative, but the 1970’s backlash over gay marriage is virtually unknown even to the well-informed. We still have a lot more still to learn about our own political history.
The 1980’s tend to shatter any attempt to cast modern gay history as a linear narrative of progress and emancipation. The concerns of the age were prefigured by the February 1980 cover of Christopher Street: “Your lover just died … and the family arrives to take everything.” The article featured a young man whose lover of twelve years had died from a sudden heart attack and who stood to lose the apartment and the possessions they’d shared and all of his partner’s money. The bereaved protagonist stated: “I had no idea we needed gay rights or any kind of protection. It seemed to me that gay people didn’t have too much to complain about. Now it seems like Germany in the Thirties.” His words, of course, sound eerie, since they came on the eve of a medical crisis that would devastate America’s gay male communities while the federal government stood idly by.
By 1990, the prospects for same-sex marriage in America were hardly more promising than they had been in 1970. In a March 1990 cover story, “The Future of Gay America,” News-week noted that the “ultimate act of assimilation” for gays “would be marriage, a right some gays have placed on their future agenda”—but that, “[g]iven the objections of church and state, legal marriage remains unlikely for the foreseeable future.” Impressively, the article went on to report that “Many in the community oppose quasi-straight unions, on the ground that they are too imitative and not uniquely gay,” and mentioned the galvanizing effect of AIDS, which took more lives every year until the arrival of combination or “cocktail” drug therapies (protease inhibitors) in 1996. The popularity of assisted reproduction, which led to a “lesbian baby boom” in the 1990’s, further demonstrated the vulnerability of gay households. Yet, while many victories were won, a victory at the Hawaii Supreme Court produced a backlash far more vicious than that of the 1970’s.
The backlash of the 90’s led to a new and unprecedented obstacle in our struggle for equality: the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, arguably the most wide-ranging and comprehensive anti-gay law ever passed by the U.S. government. Winning marriage equality will probably continue to be more costly here than in other Western democracies, and among these costs are the sacrifices involved in making marriage the central issue in our struggle. Thus, while antidiscrimination laws offer the prospect of greater security for all of us, marriage inevitably benefits only some gays and lesbians—leaving out, at the very least, those who remain single. Nonetheless, the fact remains that many gay and lesbian youths today assume that they will some day have the right to marry, and this alone is a monumental achievement. Certainly, we can no longer say, as Toffler did, that “the day may come” when a court finds us fit to be parents.
In a stunning turn of events, the California legislature recently passed a same-sex marriage bill. In a testament to the importance of movement alliances, the efforts of the United Farm Workers and its founder Dolores Huerta successfully beat back a powerful campaign by the religious right to sway the state’s Latino legislators to oppose the law. While Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the legislature’s marriage bill, the press coverage of his decision was remarkably unsympathetic, even in the “red states.” And it has become increasingly routine for the media to treat our opponents with the same degree of ridicule that once greeted the idea of same-sex marriage. For example, one editorial blasted Schwarzenegger’s decision and offered what may be, for middle America, the most compelling case for marriage equality: “How could two men getting married harm the institution more than Britney Spears, whose first marriage was a skanky 55-hour Las Vegas affair?” So said the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, under the headline “Veto the future.”
Timothy Stewart-Winter is a doctoral student in modern U.S. history at the University of Chicago whose focus is sexuality and society in the post-World War II era.
