Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.

Traditional society choked this down—some more progressive parts of it did, anyway—by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity that must be rigid and ineluctable. It hypothesized three millennia of men and women who must have been closeted, before they had such wonderfully enlightened friends and neighbors as we are. Only in this restricted way could society understand homosexuality without gayness threatening to reveal more new choices.

The utopians among us held our peace. It seemed impossible to stay in view of the rest of traditional society, the reactionary and hostile parts, and make our argument to fellow progressives that gay reorganization might be better than the old heterosexuality, and not just a neutral object for tolerance—that liberation from the heterosexual family was something we all could wish for, and that it needn't stop where it has. Then, because such a large part of the gay community publicly seemed to prefer the necessitarian, "eternal" framework, finding it the best way to make sense of individuals' own experiences, and to justify them to family and friends, we utopian straights—bystanders, well-wishers, but dilettantes—had another good reason to keep quiet. ...

Social utopianism has long focused on the reorganization of households, but has rarely accomplished much. Straight utopians argued for free love, free divorce, unorthodox childrearing and communal parenthood, and got divorce, followed by more imprisoning marriages, followed by more divorce. Because the home has seemed to be at the origin of economics (the word comes from the Greek oikos, household, and household management, oikonomia), a revision of the home, say one based on non-reproductivity and made by equals of the same sex, could ground a wider egalitarianism. Because the family, as the crucible of personality for children, seems to be the origin of violence, hierarchy, and tyranny—in the old descending triad of dominance: man-woman-child—a revision of the family, such that children could look forward to forming their own future households on different models, could gain new principles of power for society.

Labels: abortion, beyond marriage, culture, fam, feminism, gay marriage, gay/straight differences

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