The Invention of the Heterosexual: interview with Hanne Blank

in Salon:

If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.

Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, “Straight,” as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of “straightness” really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.

Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.

Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?

We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.

So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?

“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing. ...

In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?

Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.

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Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, heteronormativity, homosexuality, Marriage, men, sex, transgender issues

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:07 AM VOTE

STUDY: DO MEN FLASH CASH TO FIND A MATE?: USA Today

reports:

When women seem scarce, men may compete for them by being impulsive, saving less and borrowing more, according to a new study.

"What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates," lead author Vladas Griskevicius, an assistant professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, said in a university news release.

"How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products," Griskevicius said.

He and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments with male volunteers and found that they would save 42 percent less and borrow 84 percent more each month if they believed there were more men than women in their local population.

And after looking at photos that included more men than women, men were more likely to take an immediate $20 rather than wait for $30 in a month, according to the study published in the January issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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Labels: culture, gender, heteronormativity, men, women

posted by Eve at 12:35 AM VOTE

CHILDREN OF THE HYPHENS, THE NEXT GENERATION: NYTimes

feature:

...I don’t have children yet, but plenty of others in my cohort — the first in which nontrivial numbers were born hyphenated — do. And reproducing while hyphenated brings inevitable quandaries. I was curious to see how my peers have handled them. So I asked around. What I found was a whole gamut of solutions. The name-blending pioneers now have grandchildren whose names embody an intriguing mix of the traditional and the maverick.

I encountered several women who kept their own hyphenated names when they married, but gave their children the father’s surname. This scenario seems to deviate the least from the mainstream: after all, many other women with single surnames do the same. ...

Same-sex couples face their own quandaries, since there is no tradition to follow. Cora Jeyadame (née Stubbs-Dame), 37, a first-grade teacher in Newton, Mass., was determined to share a name with her child, and to think ahead more than her own parents had.

“It’s a one-generation solution,” she said of hyphenation. She and her wife, whose surname was Jeyapalan, spliced their names together into an entirely new, hyphenless amalgam.

How did they decide on the name? “I actually put it out on Facebook,” she said: “ ‘I challenge you to come up with good combinations.’ ” The winning entry, Jeyadame, is the legal surname of Cora and her 4-month-old; her wife uses it socially.

Naming decisions raise novel questions for hyphenated men. There is little precedent of husbands changing their names at marriage or giving up the prerogative to pass their names on. Traditional practices grew out of a male-dominated culture and a need for simple rules. But there is another, less obvious motive: to hold men accountable for their offspring.

“How do you attach men to children?” said Laurie K. Scheuble, a senior lecturer at Pennsylvania State University who has done several studies on naming practices. Names are “a very functional and practical way” to do so.

But perhaps, in an age when men wear BabyBjorns, it is no longer always necessary. When Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, 32, an English professor who lives in Portland, Ore., married Laura Rosenbaum, he toyed with the idea of a creative synthesis.

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Labels: children, culture, Fathers, feminism, gay couples, heteronormativity, men, parenting, women

posted by Eve at 8:04 PM VOTE

MODERN WIVES STILL TAKING HUSBANDS' NAMES: MSNBC

Today Health:

As a girl, Andrea Grimes assumed that she would take her husband's last name when she grew up and got married. But at 27 and newly engaged, the Dallas journalist and feminist blogger now has no interest in switching her surname.

But not everyone has caught up: Both Grimes' mother and her fiancé's stepmother have already referred to her with her fiancé's last name. Those assumptions aren't surprising, given that decades after the feminist revolution, most women still take their husband's last name upon marriage. While no national statistics exist, some recent studies suggest that women keeping their own name is actually becoming less popular. And a recent nationally representative survey found that half of Americans support women being legally required to take their husband's name upon marriage. These traditional attitudes persist even as divorce, remarriage, gay marriage and blended families make naming more complex. ...

Regardless of which side you come down on, the push and pull of identity is at the core of the naming debate, according to Powell. He and his colleagues surveyed a nationally representative sample of 815 Americans, asking them not only yes-and-no questions about name-change choices, but also why they felt the way they did.

The researchers found that more than two-thirds of Americans in the study said that it's best if a woman takes her husband's name upon marriage. The researchers expected that a majority of Americans would feel this way, Powell said, but they were more surprised to find that 50 percent supported a law requiring women to take their husband's name.

As for people's reasons for advocating that women change their names, family identity was a reoccurring theme, Powell said.

"One key theme was this idea that marriage is about shifting your identity from an individual identity to a collective or family identity," Powell said. "What they don't explain is why it is that women should change their names as opposed to men, or both the husband and wife shifting [to a new name]."

Some people cited the importance of having the same name for the couple's children, while others said tradition or convenience made women changing their names the best option. Several harkened back to the traditions of coverture, with one person responding, "Women should change their names so there's a connection there, just a connection to let you know that she belongs to him."

Among the 30 percent of people who didn't think that women should change their name, their reasoning was rooted in another type of identity: personal identity. Like Grimes, many people think of their name as core to their identity, Powell said, and associate name changes with a loss of identity. ...

When the researchers asked their participants how they felt about men changing their names, 50 percent said that a man taking his wife's name would be okay. But that response rate didn't seem to reflect much gender liberation based on how the participants answered the question, Powell said.

"They were incredulous," Powell said of the respondents' responses. "They would laugh at it. One quote was, 'Sure, if he wants to be a woman.'"

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Labels: children, culture, divorce, gay couples, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, parenting, religion, remarriage, women

posted by Eve at 11:50 AM VOTE

A NEW DAWN FOR "SUNRISE, SUNSET" AT SAME-SEX WEDDINGS: Playbill

reports:

One of the most common things in the world happened on Oct. 1 in Tappan, NY. "Sunrise, Sunset" was performed at a wedding.

Only this time it was a little different. The song — which has accompanied thousands of nuptials since its debut on Sept. 22, 1964, in Fiddler on the Roof — graced the wedding celebration of two men, entertainer Richard Skipper and landscape architect Daniel Sherman, and the melancholy-happy tune's story of a "little girl I carried" and a "little boy at play," now told of two boys.

"I've been doing same-sex weddings since New York law permitted it in July," said Rev. Joshua Ellis, whose new career as a New York-based Interspiritual minister was preceded by many years as a theatrical press agent in New York City. "And something was missing. Nobody was singing 'Sunrise, Sunset.' It's sung all the time in weddings of mixed couples. I guessed it was because they talk about a little boy and a little girl. So I contacted [lyricist] Sheldon Harnick."

Ellis continued, "Within a few days, he wrote a note back. He'd contacted Richard Ticktin, who was best friend of Jerry Bock and his representative. Attached to that email were revised lyrics of the song." Ellis then gently asked Harnick if he could also write a set of lyrics for a female couple. Those arrived soon after.

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 6:43 PM VOTE

WHY WE NEED (OPENLY) GAY MUPPETS: Julian Sanchez

blogs:

...Now, I don’t know a lot of “best friends” who share bedrooms in an apartment that size, but fine, let’s roll with that part. What I want to note is that the (presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek) observation that puppets “do not have a sexual orientation” is just manifestly false. Lots of the puppets on Sesame Street are portrayed as having a “sexual orientation,” insofar as they’re shown in romantic couples.

Oscar has his girlfriend Grundgetta. The Count has been involved with a series of different Countesses. The Twiddlebugs are your standard nuclear family. And of course, there are no shortage of one-off songs and sketches centered on families or unmarried couples. Muppet squirrel girl groups sing about their boyfriends. The human characters Gordon and Susan were married from the outset (and later adopted a child), while Maria and Luis famously got married on the show.

What all of these have in common is that they’re heterosexual couples. Because it’s regarded as the default, that “sexual orientation” is invisible. But, of course, it’s still there—and nobody imagines that simply depicting all these straight couples and families somehow counts as injecting inappropriate “adult” or sexualized material into a children’s show. ...

That omission is not neutral. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of same-sex relationships on a show that otherwise routinely celebrates family is, in itself, a message and a value judgment. ...

Update: Doug Mataconis articulates what I think is the natural reaction to this kind of argument, which is that “the mission of Sesame Street doesn’t really have much to do teaching children about sexuality at any level.” Whether it’s the “mission” or not, however, that’s what it does. It’s just that when it teaches us about heterosexuality, the teaching is invisible.

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Labels: children, culture, gay marriage, heteronormativity, homosexuality

posted by Eve at 10:06 PM VOTE

SAME-SEX COUPLES CRITICIZE WAITING PERIOD FOR MARRIAGES: NYTimes

reports:

The year was 1936, and Jane H. Todd, a state assemblywoman from Westchester County, went to Albany with a warning: the institution of marriage was under siege.

Too many frivolous youngsters were falling in love and eloping on a whim, only to have their marriages end in divorce. These “gin weddings,” as Ms. Todd called them, had to stop.

After two years of lobbying, Ms. Todd, a Republican, persuaded her fellow legislators to enact a law mandating a three-day waiting period between receiving a marriage license and being wed.

The law, and others like it around the country, became so notorious that in 1945 Hollywood made a film, “The Clock,” starring Judy Garland, about a young soldier who falls in love during a two-day leave in New York and tries to find a judge to waive the waiting period so he can marry.

Today, New York’s waiting period, which has been shortened to 24 hours, is back in the limelight because of the legalization of same-sex marriage. Many gay couples want to get married on the first possible day, July 24, and they are now scrambling — in many cases with the help of municipal officials — to find judges who will waive the waiting period.

“We think of Hollywood movies about changes of mind at the altar, but these are couples that have been together for many, many years and have been waiting impatiently to tie the knot,” said Susan Sommer, the director of constitutional litigation for Lambda Legal, an organization that advocates for equal rights for gay people. “They certainly have had a long time to get to know each other.”

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Labels: culture, gay marriage, heteronormativity, Marriage, New York

posted by Eve at 1:57 AM VOTE

DO SCHOOL HUGGING BANS GO TOO FAR?: The Globe and Mail

feature:

Fifteen-year-old Meagan Campbell likes to hug. A lot. “I consider myself a hugger. It’s hi and goodbye. You’d feel like you’d been left hanging if you didn’t get a hug.”

At Citadel, her old high school in Halifax, hugs were administered at the start of the day in the locker room and again at the end. Girls are generally more demonstrative than boys, who passively accept a clinch. Hugs are generally reserved for close female friends. ...

Teenage hugginess is epidemic, and (outside of Canada) schools have taken notice, with some in the United States and Britain banning all public displays of affection between students. Kids protest, especially since administrators offer murky rationales: that extended embraces are a gateway to make-outs and sex in the halls, or that they choke corridors and distract in class.

Only staid handshakes were spared at a small New England high school that outlawed all physical touching between students this month. News of the policy went viral after a 17-year-old student at the school complained anonymously to FreeRangeKids.com, a parenting website.

The girl hoped to protest the rule, which was intended to “thin out the kissing couples who clog up the halls,” as she understood it. “Interpersonal touch is not inherently sexual, and to treat it as such is to make it so,” she wrote in a petition, adding, “… micromanaging merely infantilizes us.” ...

For other administrators, the fear is sexual. “Schools have to draw the line and hugs are probably an easy place to draw the line at because if you don’t draw the line there, where is the line going to be?” Utah’s Chris Williams told the Standard Examiner. The Davis School District spokesman said there were exceptions to the PDA ban, including hugs after a winning basketball shot.

Other schools were more exacting: A Texas school ban stipulated holding hands, while another in Virginia expanded the prohibition to include high-fives.

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Labels: adolescence, culture, heteronormativity, schools, sex

posted by Eve at 7:56 PM VOTE

GIRL WITH GIRL CHEATING OK, HALF OF BOYFRIENDS SAY: Reuters

tackles the big issues:

Half of men would forgive their female partner's infidelity, as long as it was with another woman, according to a new study on cheating.

Women, however, were less likely to forgive and forget if their boyfriend had been with another man, the University of Texas at Austin study showed.

Researchers asked 718 college students to imagine being in a long-term relationship and what their reactions would be to several different cheating scenarios.

They found that overall, 50 percent of men would likely continue a relationship with a woman who had a dalliance with another woman, while 22 percent said they could forgive betrayal with another man.

For women, the results were reversed. If their boyfriend cheated with another woman, 28 percent said they'd keep him around, but only 21 percent said they would if he cheated with another man. ...

So, the researchers asked participants about their real experiences with cheating. There again, men showed less tolerance of cheating than women.

"Men were significantly more likely than women to have ended their actual relationships following a partner's affair," according to the study.

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Labels: bisexuality, committed relationships, culture, gender differences, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, men, sex, women

posted by Eve at 7:52 PM VOTE

WHY DO LESBIANS EARN MORE THAN STRAIGHT WOMEN?: The Atlantic Wire

round-up:

Research indicates that lesbians tend to make more money than heterosexual women. Over at Big Think, Marina Adshade attempts to demystify the phenomenon:

Sure, lesbian women are better-educated on average, are more likely to be white, live predominantly in cities, have fewer children, and are significantly more likely to be a professional. But even when you control for these differences, the wage premium is still on the order of 6%.

It is fascinating when the data starts looking like the majority is being discriminated against. Is it wage discrimination, though, or is there an economic argument for why lesbians are getting paid more?

Adshade's question has invited a number of responses. How are people accounting for the so-called "lesbian wage premium?"

more (haven't checked whether any of these responses mention my first thought, which is that the causal arrow may run the other way in many cases--if you have more economic security you may be more "out")

Labels: culture, economics, heteronormativity, lesbians, parenting, women

posted by Eve at 8:51 PM VOTE

DOES DENYING UK OPPOSITE-SEX COUPLES ACCESS TO CIVIL PARTNERSHIP VIOLATE THEIR EQUALITY RIGHTS?: Sherry F. Colb

at FindLaw:

Do opposite-sex couples have a right to civil partnership? Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle of the United Kingdom plan to argue in a future lawsuit that they do. ...

Some have suggested, moreover, that sexual relationships ought not to be considered binary in this way and that individuals ought to be able to marry anyone they wish to marry, regardless of whether either of the parties has any desire to have or to be a "husband," a "wife," or something in between. This argument suggests that what's wrong with insisting on opposite-sex marriage is not simply that people might want to choose a different sort of role (i.e., a woman might want to be another woman's "husband"), but also that people might reject the idea that there must be "husband" and "wife" roles within such relationships at all. On this approach, the rigidity of traditional marriage is stifling and far too scripted, no matter how flexibly the dual roles within it might be allocated. Some might react to this rigidity by wanting something other than marriage, and this is where civil partnerships can come into play.

For a gay couple seeking to marry, a civil partnership might be inadequate, given its "consolation prize" quality -- we won't let you marry, but we'll give you all of the concrete legal benefits of marriage and name the institution something different. But for some gay couples and some straight couples, a civil partnership could be just what the doctor ordered -- an institution through which two committed partners who love each other and want to spend their lives together monogamously can do so, receiving the full legal benefits that come with this commitment, without associating themselves with all of the connotations of marriage.

We can get a sense of what these objectionable connotations might be by asking what someone who is opposed to gay marriage (and gay partnerships) would say is the proper definition of marriage. An opponent of gay unions might say, first, that marriage is about a union between a man and a woman. A straight couple that rejects this script might accordingly prefer an institution that does not contain a traditional sex-role division as part of its historic definition. Though the couple "qualifies" for the man/woman institution, the members of the couple might seek a union that does not emphasize or demand that one member be male and the other female, given the couple's own perception of what unites its members. It could also be that the man and woman in the couple are bisexual and do not like the idea of entering a union that inherently negates this aspect of their identities (by affirming their union as necessarily a heterosexual one).

A second part of the traditional definition of marriage is the couple's openness to the possibility of producing children. A couple that wishes to join together but has no desire to have children might find that this aspect of marriage creates undesirable expectations that they do not plan to meet and may not wish to confront. If marriage is understood to be about children, then this couple might want to opt out of marriage, even as it opts into many of the legal benefits that marriage offers, via a civil partnership.

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Labels: childfree, civil unions, discrimination law, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, Marriage, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 4:21 PM VOTE

Marriage, Unique for a Reason: US Conference of Catholic Bishops

new website, videos etc.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Marriage, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:03 PM VOTE

A "QUEER" ARGUMENT AGAINST MARRIAGE: NPR

interviews Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore:

Marriage equality has become a central pillar of the modern gay rights movement. Five states and the District of Columbia offer same sex marriages and a case involving California’s ban on gay marriage is expected to end up in the Supreme Court. But despite recent advances, not all gay people are so eager to ring the wedding bells. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, self-described queer activist and author of “That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation,” says gay people should stop fighting to uphold what she considers to be the failed institution of marriage.

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Labels: beyond marriage, culture, gay marriage, heteronormativity

posted by Eve at 4:10 PM VOTE

THE BATTLE FOR GAY MARRIAGE--IN THE CLASSROOM: Katherine Franke and Katherine Biers

in Salon:

Many people regard marriage rights for same-sex couples as the civil rights issue of this generation. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't have strong feelings one way or the other on this issue: Should courts recognize the marriage rights of lesbian and gay couples as a matter of dignity and equality, or should we respect opposition to same-sex matrimony based in religion and traditional morality?

This issue has taken a new turn in recent weeks as Seton Hall University political science professor King Mott was notified that the class he was planning to teach in the fall, titled "Gay Marriage," might be canceled by the university's governing board when it meets on June 4. Newark Archbishop John J. Myers said the course conflicts with the teachings of the Catholic Church (Seton Hall is a Catholic university). "This proposed course seeks to promote as legitimate a train of thought that is contrary to what the Church teaches," Archbishop Myers said in a statement. "As a result, the course is not in synch with Catholic teaching."

We have taken a special interest in professor Mott's class because we too are scheduled to teach a new class titled "Gay Marriage" this fall at Columbia University, through the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. The flier we put together to advertise the class poses two views of the marriage issue: One image captures gay rights demonstrators protesting laws that preclude them from marrying, while the other image, from the group Dyke Action Machine, asks: "Why Be Boring for a Blender? You Might as Well Be Straight."

Unlike professor Mott, we have little worry that officials from our university will step in and cancel our class for ideological or moral reasons. But that doesn't mean that we are immune from ideological criticism of the material we will cover in our course. Oddly enough, that criticism may come from the LGBT community itself.

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Labels: Catholic Church, culture, feminism, gay marriage, heteronormativity, religion, universities

posted by Eve at 5:13 PM VOTE

EDUCATORS CHALLENGE VIRGINITY CONNOTATIONS: The Harvard Crimson

reports:

Health educators, feminist bloggers, and queer activists gathered at the Rethinking Virginity Conference on Monday to critique American society’s negative portrayal of losing one’s virginity.

“Why do we say ‘losing it’ anyway?” said Shelby Knox, a feminist activist and blogger. “Why don’t we say, ‘I am celebrating my first time!’?”

Many of the speakers at the panels, which were hosted by the Harvard Queer Students and Allies, agreed that sex and virginity are often associated with loss and even shame. They argued for a more positive approach to sexuality.

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Labels: culture, heteronormativity, homosexuality, sex, sex education, universities, virginity

posted by Eve at 2:02 PM VOTE

MIXED-GENDER DORM ROOMS ARE GAINING ACCEPTANCE: Los Angeles Times

reports:

They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad.

That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation. ...

Although the number of participants remains small, gender-neutral housing has gained attention as the final step in the integration of student housing.

In the 1970s, many U.S. colleges moved from having only single-sex dormitories to providing coed residence halls, with male and female students typically housed on alternating floors or wings. Then came coed hallways and bathrooms, further shocking traditionalists. Now, some colleges allow undergraduates of opposite sexes to share a room.

Pitzer, which began its program in the fall of 2008, is among about 50 U.S. schools with the housing choice, according to Jeffrey Chang, who co-founded the National Student Genderblind Campaign in 2006 to encourage gender-mixed rooms. Participating schools include UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, Sarah Lawrence, Haverford, Wesleyan and the University of Michigan.

College officials say the movement began mainly as a way to accommodate gay, bisexual and transgender students who may feel more comfortable living with a member of the opposite sex. Most schools say they discourage couples from participating, citing emotional and logistical problems of breakups. Officials say most heterosexuals in the programs are platonic friends. ...

Parents cannot veto such a decision at Harvey Mudd, but Gerbick asks students to discuss it with their families ahead of time. He also asks applicants whether they are romantically involved; all of this year's participants said no. But if they were, the school could not forbid them from rooming together.

"If we are going into a post-gender world, then the regulation of private behavior is just not practical," he said.

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Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, gender, heteronormativity, heterosexual couples, universities

posted by Eve at 4:07 PM VOTE

IN WASHINGTON AREA, GAYS' NEW RIGHTS STIR UP OLD CONFLICTS: Washington Post

feature:

On the first day same-sex weddings were held in the District, Dustin Rhodes could barely stomach the outpouring of matrimonial enthusiasm: the joyful couples exchanging vows in front of family, friends and colleagues, with all the flowers, cake and flash photography that come with the show.

"It's so personally revolting to me," said Rhodes, 36, who has been in a committed relationship with a man for 13 years.

"I'd rather see marriage abolished than see me married," he said as he ate lunch in a Columbia Heights cafe with his partner, Bray Creech. "The materialism of it, what I perceive as kind of a narcissism. Like all the money and decoration. . . . I have no interest in having a performance, which to me is what weddings are."

Creech, 33, got a faraway look on his face. "I would do it," he said, with a little smile of resignation that comes with years of losing the same argument. "You get all those gifts; that would be so nice. I have no problem with the performance part of it."

Many same-sex couples who rushed to make history this week by marrying in the District cited reasons such as spousal benefits, inheritance and hospital visitation rights, and greater societal legitimacy. But for some couples, the option to legally marry has raised a thorny issue -- to wed or not -- that had long remained safely in the realm of the hypothetical. For those who can't agree on whether to tie the knot, the new horizons have stirred up old conflicts. ...

As with heterosexual couples, the reasons for one same-sex partner balking are myriad. Some simply aren't ready to commit; others refuse to consider marrying until the right is extended nationwide and includes federal benefits. Some say that although they committed to their partners long ago in their hearts, they oppose the idea of marriage as an institution -- especially because it is one that so often collapses. ...

"There's a whole segment of the [gay] community for whom the marriage equality bit seems way too heteronormative," mimicking conventional heterosexual practices, said Suzanne Scott, director of women and gender studies at George Mason University. "Some would even argue that marriage is an outdated norm based on archaic rules."

Like immigrants who once sought to become Americanized and now embrace their ethnic roots, Scott said, many gays and lesbians embrace their differentness but also feel torn because they value the benefits that come with marriage. ...

"Marriage for me presents an opportunity for approval, social approval," said the Frederick woman, who has never married but whose 54-year-old partner lost faith in the institution after a heterosexual marriage. "And I shouldn't care after all I've been through, but I do, I do care. I'm tired of being marginalized."

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Labels: culture, DC, gay couples, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, heteronormativity, Marriage

posted by Eve at 2:37 PM VOTE

GAY MARRIAGE ON "TOP CHEF"

Apparently on Top Chef last night the "cheftestants" were asked to prepare dishes for an engaged couple's bachelor and bachelorette parties. One chef objected to the challenge because gay marriage has not been instituted in most states (including Nevada, where the show films this season). Although she did end up participating in the challenge, I'm still pretty interested in how the show has been handling this; you can read head judge Tom Colicchio's defense of both gay marriage and the recent challenge here. (He points out that in season 1, TC catered a gay wedding/commitment ceremony [I forget which].)

There's also a video on the Bravo site described as "Cheftestants take a stand against Prop 8."

ETA: Some contestants also had a problem with the fact that the challenge required the women chefs to cook for the bachelor party's men, while the men chefs cooked for the bachelorette party's women.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, gender, heteronormativity, Proposition 8

posted by Eve at 3:20 PM " target="display" style="text-decoration:none;color: rgb(204,0,0);"> " target="display" style="text-decoration:none;color: rgb(204,0,0);"> VOTE