Young, Gay, Married...Well Optomistic At Least

I ran across this article on Facebook which was posted by The Good Men Project, entitled Young, Gay and Still Married. The article revisits several couples in Massachusetts who had gotten married, or were planning on getting married. That state is one of only a handful around the country that allow full marriage to same-sex couples, those states being Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington, D.C. I'll talk more about that later in this post.

I wanted to write about this because I was in Massachusetts during the political firestorm surrounding the recognition of same-sex unions and I think it had a profound effect on some parts of my outlook on life. The first thing I want to say is that in spite of all the rhetoric surrounding the 'activist judges' and all that, those judges agreed to stay their Sept. 2003 ruling until May of 2004 to give the Congress a chance to deal with it legislatively. Their decision was based on the Massachusetts constitution, which they were proud to state was the oldest constitution in the United States, having predated that of our nation. The fact that there was a stay on that ruling was a clear indicator that those judges were willing to be reasonable and allow there to be a legislative process to go forward, allowing the lawful representatives of voters to work out the issue. A constitutional convention was convened and a period of political maneuvering, campaigning and strong-arming created a pressurized situation especially around the Boston metro that grew painful the closer we got to the deadline set by their Supreme Court and the end of the stay of the decision.

Immediately after that stay ended, couples lined up at city halls all over the state, and especially in Cambridge and Boston, to get their marriage licenses. While most of those couples were, and still are, older couples, many middle aged or older, there was some presence of young people from the very beginning. Many good articles were written at that time about the effects of the recognition of marriage on the gay community and on LGBT people individually. One of the best, however, discussed its effect on young people, including interviews with young people who lived in and around Boston. That article in particular had a profound affect on me and forced me to rethink a lot of things. Aside from more specifically personal issues, it made me reexamine what I thought about the institution of marriage in general. I was pretty pessimistic about marriage before that, understandably so in light of the rate of divorce and the oft-ignored topic of monogamy and fidelity among married people. As there were already civil unions available in certain cities and in the state of Vermont, I had taken a position that marriage as an institution and a concept was at its core a means of social control that had been passed down from prehistory. I still believe that, and actually know it when you look at the logic behind that argument. It doesn't, however, mean that there isn't value to it on the societal level as well as the personal level.

Almost instantly after the stay of the ruling ended, when I watched the first couples entering the Cambridge City Hall on television, I was numbed by the fact that same-sex marriage had become reality, that those opposed to it hadn't succeeded in yet another attempt to deny us rights, and that as it had overcome its last legal hurdle would probably be there to stay. Soon after it hit me that I in fact could marry, that all those ideas I'd had about marriage weren't important to me as they'd been in part fueled by resentment in the knowledge that I would most likely never be able to be in a legally recognized marriage. With the publication of that article on same-sex marriage and its effect on the youth of our community, I was shocked by how things quickly changed in my head. Some of the things that were so striking to me were particular anecdotes about how young people were now discussing marriage and thinking about it as something that they might be interested in. They were shifting their thoughts about relationships and the purpose of dating toward something more akin to how my heterosexual friends thought about it, that at some point dating becomes not-casual and that relationships that aren't on their way toward marriage had a sell-by date. A close friend of mine actually had a time frame he'd set for himself in terms of determining whether a relationship would end in marriage or whether it wouldn't and if it wouldn't than he'd break it off. To him, the purpose of dating is to find a partner you can eventually commit to and build a life with. For him that meant eventually committing to each other through marriage.

Most powerful of all, though, was a comment that was made in the article about something that might on the surface seem trivial but for which most older people and many young people in less tolerant parts of the country might recognize the importance of. That something was that now a young gay person might have a conversation with a parent about how to pick out a ring. My mind expanded on that into conversations heterosexual people may have with their parents about marriage and what it's like and advice they may have. For someone who never expected to be allowed to get married, and whose parents at that time were still very uncomfortable and sometimes hostile to the topic of his sexuality, the idea that some young gay person could sit down and have those kinds of conversations with parents who loved them, wanted them to be happy, and who could be a little less worried about what struggles their child might have to go through, that was powerful.

I'm not in a place in my life right now where I am looking to settle down and part of that is that I do not have a partner who I would want to settle down with. What changed for me, though, was that I realized at that time that I could do so if I wanted to. I didn't have to wait or expect to wait until I was middle aged before I found someone to settle down with. I didn't have to look for people, who were usually older, who were in that place where they'd want to make some kind of 'rest of your life' commitment. I could in fact marry someone my own age, at that time I was in my early-mid twenties, and I could look forward to spending thirty, forty, or fifty years with that person rather than going from one 'long-term' relationship to another, none lasting more than a handful of years at a time. For many of us that was reality, that those friends of ours who were more equipped psychologically to find partners and be in relationships, almost none of those relationships lasted longer than a few years, maybe a decade if they were lucky. Even now divorce or breakups between gay couples somewhat mirror straight couples.

It is really difficult, maybe impossible, to explain to heterosexual people the psychological impact of what gaining the ability to marry meant to us. As it is there are far too many people who talk about the sanctity of marriage and how it is fundamental to the structure of our society, many of whom have a rank cavalier attitudes about their own marriage and have had multiple divorces, such as Rush Limbaugh. Marriage, however, implies a level of commitment that civil unions never will. Marriage implies an inviolable commitment and bond that on a purely emotional level provides security and faith in one's partner. It relieves anxieties about the future of a relationship and anxieties over how society, and especially essential services such as hospital care, views your relationship. Young people can look forward to having that security. We can all have a bit more hope for the futures of our relationships and of our own personal security in society because there is legal recognition of our civil contract, that hospitals should treat us as spouses and we should be allowed to make decisions on our partner's behalf, as well as visitation rights and all of that.

For those of us who are older and grew up with the stigma and cloud of anxiety and doubt and fear those things are powerful. It is maybe even more powerful that there are young people at least in some places that are growing up with fewer and fewer of those anxieties to begin with. They can have more hope, and because of all of this they can find partners with whom it is easier to have stable and healthy relationships. They can look for partners with an expectation of eventually wanting to settle down and marry thereby changing the criteria used in their evaluation process. They can insist on the quality of relationships that lead to healthier and happier lives. None of us is guaranteed these things or precluded from them because of our age and where we live, but in a state like Massachusetts where we aren't just tolerated, but actually embraced, more and more teens are growing up without having internalized those prejudiced.

Today I read about another gay youth, this one a man in his mid-twenties, who committed suicide. He was an activist who went to one of the high school programs in New York City specifically designed to provide safe spaces for LGBT youth, and lived in one of the boroughs. This young person is the latest in a series of well publicized suicides among gay youth, some just in their early teens, at a time when LGBT people and the issues we face are getting huge exposure. These teens aren't the only ones who are committing suicide, they are also not even the only gay youth who are committing suicide, however they are the ones getting coverage and bringing this dark social disease that has been plaguing our community probably since prehistory, to light and to the national stage. It is so important that young people have hope and that they are presented with a world full of possibilities so they can overcome the many things which make adolescence so difficult in general but for LGBT youth especially. One way for that to happen is for the laws of this country to change to recognize and accommodate the rights of gay people, such as repealing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. Another and maybe more important way is for the laws preventing same-sex marriage to be struck down and for them to see that no matter who they want to be, whatever life they aspire to have, and whatever they dream of doing, that they those options are available to them. If they don't dream of getting married and having a family, that is not a problem. However, for those who want that, or even for those who feel the absence of that right as a judgment of value on who they are or on their status as an outsider in our society, they need to see these laws changed. They need to have those legal forms of discrimination repealed so that they have time to lose some of those internalized feelings of self-loathing and hatred that often lead to suicide. In this way, same-sex marriage and its legal status becomes for many an issue of survival.

Now there are states that recognize gay marriage already, and I've listed those above but I'll list their abbreviations here: CT, DC, IA, MA, NH, VT. Countries that recognize full marriage equality, and this is interesting as it is important to note those with a historically overwhelming majority of Catholics: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Sweden. Gay marriages are also recognized and performed in Mexico City, although as far as I know not throughout the rest of that country. Also, it is important to recognize states that do not perform gay marriages but that do recognize them, and those are MD, NY and RI. The issue of same-sex marriage in CA is up in the air right now and has become a lynch-pin in the entire debate.

States that perform Civil Unions in the United States are: CA, CO, HI, ME, NJ, NV, OR, WA, WI. Other nations with some form of Civil Union or Civil Partnerships are: Andorra (a tiny nation tucked between Spain and France), Austria, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greenland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Uruguay. The state of Colorado also has some legislation dealing with domestic partnership that does provide some protection for same-sex partners, in spite of it not being marriage or civil unions.

It is important to note, too, that there are cities and counties around the country that provide domestic partnership registries and offer recognition and legal protections within the city for those registered as domestic partners. Among them are: Lacy, Olympia, Seattle and Tumwater, Washington, in Oregon the city of Ashland, Eugene and Multnomah County, in California many cities recognize domestic partnerships including all the big ones you'd expect such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, Berkeley, Nevada also provides domestic partnerships, as does Salt Lake City, as do both Boulder and Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. In Minnesota, my home state, the cities of Duluth, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Edina, and Rochester all provide domestic partnerships. Iowa City, IA provides the partnerships though the state provides same-sex marriage. Lawrence, Kansas and the cities of Columbia, Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri provide domestic partnerships as well.

The list goes on and on, and in particular most metropolitan areas, which one would expect to have a visible LGBT community, have domestic partner registries of some kind. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page providing information on all of this information, including lists and a map of areas of the country with these laws.

Now there are