Slouching toward same-sex marriage
Book 'What is Marriage For?' addresses the inevitability of civil marriage for gays
by J.A. Lopata
BOSTON — Don’t ask E.J. Graff to go to an activist meeting to
organize a protest against amending constitutions in order to
exclude gays and lesbians from marriage.
She’ll politely decline. “They make my skin crawl,” she says.
But that doesn’t mean that this Massachusetts-based lesbian
author bides her time waiting for others to do the hard work of
social activism so that she can marry her partner.
Rather, Graff has spent countless hours researching and writing
“What is Marriage For?” a book that outlines the fluid nature of
the frequently misunderstood social institution of marriage.
With a decidedly same-sex marriage-friendly audience reading the
book, it’s not exactly preaching to the choir, Graff explained
to in newsweekly by phone, “I’m giving the choir resources.”
The first resource Graff found was her own experience and
beliefs concerning marriage.
When she began working on the book, Graff had to confront the
fact that she hadn’t been singing the same tune about marriage
for most of her life.
“I found myself presented with a puzzle. What do I think of
marriage?”
Graff recalled that at the age of 10, she had a personal
revelation while observing her mother laboring in the family
kitchen. It was 1968, and the idealized 1950s-style image of a
wife suddenly looked like a “menial position.”
Graff decided then that she wanted nothing to do with marriage.
Ten years later, in 1978, the world was in the midst of the
feminist movement. Graff’s mother divorced her father. And Graff
began hanging out with lesbian feminists who saw marriage
primarily as an institution for the oppression of women.
Marriage, if not bad in and of itself, was at least bad for
women.
So it came as some surprise to Graff when, in 1991, she felt “a
personal need” for a public ceremony to establish a commitment
with her partner.
“No one was really doing that then,” Graff explained. But “it
was so powerful doing it in front of other people.”
The poignant feelings that she experienced from the event
prompted her to start asking questions like, “What is it that we
did?” and “What is it about?” “What is it for my mother and
other women?” and “What had happened to my views of marriage?”
She began to understand that her “feminist mentors” of the 1970s
“had an understanding of a historical moment that was a reaction
to” the marriage model of the 1950s.
Graff discovered in her research that the 1950s view of marriage
represented a brief anomaly in an institution that had changed
dramatically in Western cultures since the mid 1800s.
The “Leave it to Beaver” family image found its appeal in a
society that had not yet discovered that in a post-industrial
revolution society, it was no longer necessary to keep women as
property. Arranged marriages for the good of social structure
were no longer required for societal stability.
With love rapidly becoming the arbiter of civilly recognized
relationships, marriage was evolving into being about “having a
best friend.”
“In our egalitarian society, gender-neutral partners are each
equal,” said Graff.
And with that in mind, it is no surprise that gays and lesbians
would simply follow the lead of heterosexual colleagues in
seeking legal recognition of egalitarian-based life
partnerships.
Graff organizes her answers to the title question of her book,
“What is Marriage For?” not chronologically, but by “variation.”
Each chapter explores a different aspect of the purpose of
marriage: money, sex, babies, kin, order, and heart. In every
area, the nature of the institution has changed.
Given the ever-changing aspects of what marriage is and what it
is for, can society expect a slippery slope, as conservatives
suggest, toward recognition of such things as three-way
relationships?
“Is this the polygamy question?” Graff wanted to know. “In a
late capitalist economy, I don’t see triads,” said Graff, adding
that “marriage has traditionally been polygamist,” and in some
ways still is. “Men historically have taken on a new, younger
wife as they acquire more money.” Today we see that trend
continued in a kind of serial polygamy recognized in civil
divorces.
While Graff doesn’t see polygamy coming back into vogue any time
soon, she does see a cultural trend toward “de facto” or “common
law” marriages, particularly in western European nations, Canada
and Australia, where two people can have “obligations of
relationship imposed by the state whether or not you take vows,”
simply by having lived together for a certain period of time,
says Graff.
The U.S. is a bit of an anomaly in this area, explains Graff.
“We are one wacky country,” she said. “We are a lot of different
countries with one name.” Graff cites a particularly large and
strong evangelical contingent as partially why the U.S. is not
following our European allies as closely on the marriage front.
Regarding the outcome of the March 11 continuation of the debate
to amend the Massachusetts Constitution to ban gay marriages,
Graff declined to speculate. “Go ask [activist] Arline Isaacson
about that,” said Graff. s
For more information about “What is Marriage For?” by E.J.
Graff, connect to www.beacon.org.
Photo: E.J. Graff
This piece first appeared in "In Newsweekly: New England's largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender newspaper."
October 1, 2004