COLUMN: Labels aren’t helping in homosexual debate
Michael Stipe isn’t a gay man; he resists any such characterization. But Stipe does have a boyfriend with whom he’s lived for more than three years.
Still, the R.E.M. front man – described by some as the veritable godfather of alternative rock – isn’t quite willing to be pigeonholed into an either/or conception of sexuality. After all, he’s been with women, too.
“I’ve always felt that sexuality is a really slippery thing,” Stipe once famously said. “In this day and age, it tends to get categorized and labeled, and I think labels are for food. Canned food.”
Words from the wise.
As Americans, we’re almost feverishly obsessed with labels. We love our branded perfumes almost as much as our racial classifications and badges of status.
Hardly surprising in a crassly consumerist culture that peddles everything from root beer to religion. Resisting labels is taboo, since it almost always plunges the average American into a state of unmitigated confusion.
Terms such as “flip-flopper” and “fence-sitter” are tossed about with idiotic abandon. The result is a deeply fragmented and polarized society, teetering on the brink of an all-out culture war.
And this war will have many unfortunate casualties.
Julie Reeves and Leigh Mamlin, of Columbus, Ohio, are among them. The couple was the subject of a recent Salon.com article on the plight of gay families in states leading a conservative assault on homosexual unions. Reeves and Mamlin have two children, a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old; Mamlin is the children’s biological mother.
Now, an Ohio initiative currently being voted on at the polls, “could leave Mamlin and the children without health insurance and Reeves without child custody,” Salon writer Michelle Goldberg notes. That’s ironic, she continues, because “if Reeves and Mamlin weren’t lesbians, their nuclear family would seem almost anachronistically average.”
Ohio isn’t the only state seeking to thrust narrow, right-wing subjectivity on already careworn gay and lesbian families. Ten other states – including Utah – are voting on anti-gay marriage amendments.
At issue here are the twin labels of “marriage” and “family.” The political Right would have us believe that marriage was never intended to mean anything more than heterosexual monogamy – and a family is a natural outgrowth of that procreative relationship.
Let’s stew over this one for a bit.
Historical inaccuracy aside (polygamy and polyandry were recognized deviations from secular unions in ancient cultures), the argument that marriage is about reproduction simply doesn’t wash.
Think about the millions of elderly and sterile couples who cannot have children, or the heterosexual couples who choose not to have children. If they can be allowed to marry, why should gay couples be subject to a double standard?
Ah, but homosexuals are virtually incapable of monogamy, the critics say. The insinuation, apparently, is that monogamy is a necessary part of the marriage label. Tell that to the thousands of “swinging couples,” who have been experiencing erotic sexuality with multiple partners for years.
As BayCouples.com, a popular Web site for swingers in the San Francisco Bay Area points out, “In the mainstream American culture it is no longer safe to assume that if a couple is committed or even married – they are monogamous in their sexual relationship…
“Sex is becoming something that men, and now more and more women, are able to separate from love. Therefore, sex with people other than your husband or wife is becoming more of a recreational activity rather than a deep emotional experience.”
Admittedly, swinging may not be for every married couple. But clearly, monogamy isn’t necessarily a feature of marriage in the present day. In fact, as things stand, marriage in modern America is really hard to define.
Listen to sex-advice columnist and author, Dan Savage, writing in Salon.com: “The institution, as currently practiced, is whatever two straight people say it is. What makes a straight couple married – in their own eyes, in the eyes of the state – is their professed love, a license issued by a state, and the couple’s willingness to commit to each other publicly. How a straight married couple chooses to express love, exactly what it is they’re committing to, is entirely up to them.”
Aren’t we thus ethically and morally obligated to let gay couples come up with their own definition of marriage?
That said, both political camps must acknowledge that any constructive dialog on the issue is possible only if we agree on terminology.
Currently, both sides are attacking from ideologically irreconcilable frames of reference. To borrow an analogy from chemistry, the word “organic” means something entirely different to chemists and gardeners. To the scientists, “organic” implies “containing carbon”; to the gardener, “organic” is “natural,” not carbon based.
To the Right, gay marriage is a philosophical and theological issue; to the Left, it’s a psychological and political one. We need to first agree on parameters for debate, lest we drown our voices in a cacophony of insults.
In the end, we need to get away from the divisiveness created by labeling complex ideas and relationships that evade definition in contemporary American society.
This way, we can turn our attention to more serious questions – like human sexuality -and the flow of eroticism that suggests a revolving door between homosexuality and heterosexuality.
Where sexual preference is concerned, I’m with Stipe. Straight and gay people alike ought to save the labels for the supermarket.
Leon D’Souza is a senior majoring in print journalism. Comments can be sent to leon@cc.usu.edu.