Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices
on Marriage, Relationships, and Identity
Edited by Carter Sickels
Ooligan Press. 248 pages, $16.95
In an era when so much effort has been directed at gaining the right to marriage for all couples, gay or straight, one might expect Untangling the Knot to be a somewhat academic rehash of the arguments for and against these efforts. One might also expect the book to be deadly dull. One would be wrong on both counts. Carter Sickels, the editor of this lively collection, has cast a much wider net and wound up with something far more interesting: a group of essays that explore the question of whether marriage equality is a goal on which we should be spending all our political capital and, more broadly still, how same-sex marriage stands to change GLBT culture and identity.
One of the old saws directed against marriage has always been that it leads to the loss of a person’s identity. Another is that it perpetuates traditional patriarchal values that many find repugnant. But, of course, the very notion of identity and traditional gender roles gets skewed in gay culture. For instance, Casey Plett’s “The Days of the Phoenix and the Emerald City” begins by talking about a day in 2003 “when I still thought I was a guy,” and continues to describe her personal odyssey surrounding transgender issues (a large number of these essays have to do with the transgender experience). When a person’s identity itself is fluid and there’s no traditional assumption of gender roles, the whole debate surrounding marriage takes an interesting turn. Ben Anderson-Nathe argues that, rather than focusing so intently on gaining the right to marry, the gay movement should focus on “queering relationship[s]and family” instead. He and others in the collection maintain that many gay people have very successfully and creatively constructed new versions of what constitutes a family, and that by trying to mimic a straight version of society, we’re actually taking a step backwards. Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis laments the loss of civil unions as an alternative to marriage—a more flexible option that allowed straight people to join in. Opponents of the marriage strategy make a legitimate point—this struggle has largely taken over the gay right movement—but most of the authors in the book see marriage equality as a powerful engine for wider advances in GLBT rights over the past decade, and even as a radical demand in itself. Thus, for example, Regina Sewell concludes the following in “Unequal Marriage”: “If we want to truly achieve equality, we have to heal the scars and change the culture that causes them. Ironically, one of the most powerful ways we can do this is by getting married. Getting married is the new coming out. It challenges us to face our scars, pushes those close to us to explore their homophobic attitudes, and normalizes our relationship to the world at large.” Whether gay or straight, people’s sense of identity, the quality and substance of their relationships, their reasons for getting married, are as many and varied as the number of people so engaged. Sexual orientation only adds another element to the mix. This unusually entertaining and well-written collection of essays offers a wide range of 21st-century perspectives on a cluster of age-old human problems. _____________________________________________________ Dale Boyer is a writer living and working in Chicago.
