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There are writers, journalists, and trend watchers who have suggested that AIDS forced the generation of gay men who grew up in the relatively wild 1970s to "mature and settle down."
Though the impact of AIDS on gay men has been severe, I don't think AIDS is a significant factor in the growing numbers of gay male couples. I do think that AIDS has revealed how common couple relationships are among gay men, however. Through television and magazine stories, as well as newspaper articles and obituaries, we have all learned that many gay men have longtime companions, not to mention loving friends and even loving and supportive families.
According to Lillian Faderman, as she writes about the butche-femme lesbian subculture in her book Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, some lesbians, primarily young and working class lesbians during the 1950s and 1960s, assumed either masculine ("butch") or feminine ("femme") roles. They expressed these roles in their manner of dress, their demeanor, their sexual behaviour, and their choice of partner: butches sought femmes and femmes hoped to attract butches.
Today, while some lesbian couples and some gay male couples may play traditionally masculine and feminine roles, the strict butch-femme role playing of earlier decades is no longer common.
All couples, heterosexual and homosexual, face challenges. Gay and lesbian people face some extra challenges, not the least of which is a world that is still fundamentally hostile to same-sex couples. For example, gay and lesbian couples cannot count on the support of family or religious institutions and gay people are not allowed to legally marry. Besides the legal and financial benefits of marriage, gay and lesbian couples are denied the psychological benefit derived from having their commitment to each other sanctioned and affirmed by the state.
Before gay men and women even get to an age when couple relationships are possible, they have to overcome their own negative feelings about what they are, the result of society's general condemnation of homosexuality. Add to that society's expectation that gay and lesbian relationships can't possibly last, and that lesbian couples have few role models, and it begins to seem miraculous that there are any gay and lesbian couples at all.
No state currently permits two people of the same sex to legally marry. [As far as I know, Denmark is the only country in the world that allows same sex couples to legally marry.]
(Note from the person formatting this---as of December 15, 1995, the state of Hawaii seems well on its way to legalizing either same-sex marriage or some equivalent status that confers the same rights and priviledges of marriage, but without the actual name.)
Gay and lesbian people are fighting for the legal right to marry because they want the same legal protections and financial benefits granted to heterosexual married couples.
The legal protections and benefits of marriage are considerable. In most states, married couples have the legal right to be on each other's insurance and pension plans. Married couples also get special tax exemptions and deductions and are eligible for Social Security survivor's benefits. A married person may inherit property and may have automatic rights of survivorship that avoid inheritance tax. Marriage laws also offer legal protection in the event a relationship comes to an end, providing for an orderly distribution of property.
In the case of death or medical emergency, a spouse is the legal "next of kin," which means that he or she can make all decisions regarding medical care and funeral arrangements. And the next of kin is granted automatic visitation rights. The story of Sharon Kowlaski and Karen Thompson tragically demonstrated what lack of these automatic rights means when something goes wrong. After a 1983 car accident, Sharon Kowlaski was brain-damaged and quadriplegic. It took her spouse, Karen Thompson, seven years to be named guardian over the objections of Sharon's parents, who said their daughter had never told them she was a lesbian. They also barred Karen from visiting their daughter's nursing home for several years after the accident. What took Karen Thompson seven years would have been granted automatically to a legal husband or wife.
For gay and lesbian couples who are raising children, the fact they can't marry means that only one of the two parents can have legal custody of the child. (Only very rarely are two unmarried people allowed to adopt the same child . . . .) In the event a couple separates or the legal parent dies, the nonadoptive parent faces a legal nightmare if he or she wishes to retain custody of the child or even secure visitation rights.
And finally, there is the kind of dilemma faced by a couple like Charlene, who is a United States citizen, and Sandrina, who is French. Shortly after Sandrina arrived in the United States to get her master's degree in English literature, she met Charlene. After six months, they moved in together, hoping they could figure out a way for Sandrina to stay in the United States after she graduated. For a heterosexual couple, marriage would have been a natural solution. If Charlene and Sandrina could marry, then Sandrina would be allowed to live and work in the United States. Sandrina will graduate in a few months and still has no idea what she will do once her student visa expires.
I've heard all kinds of arguments against letting gay people marry, from "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," to "It will devalue heterosexual marriage and destroy the American family."
First, we live in a constitutional democracy with a strict separation of church and state, not a Christian state governed by the Bible. So whether God created Adam and Eve, Adam and Steve, or any other combination, it should have no bearing on state marriage laws. Second, encouraging stable couple relationships among gay and lesbian people can't help but strengthen American family life. Third, I've never heard a convincing argument that allowing gay and lesbian people to legally marry devalues heterosexual marriage.
What I find interesting is that some of the very same men and women who once condemned gay and lesbian people for having failed relationships and for leading lives of promiscuity are now some of the most outspoken opponents of gay marriage. I imagine they would have opposed gay marriage long ago, but who would have guessed that the rights of gay and lesbian couples would ever become a burning issue?
For those people who believe that gay men and lesbians will never be granted the right to legally marry, it helps to remember that until a 1967 Supreme Court ruling, some states prohibited marriage, sex or procreation between black people and white people.
A handful of private companies and colleges, as well as a few local governments, offer the same benefits - including medical insurance - to the spouses of gay and lesbian employees as they offer to heterosexual married couples . . . .
Many, many gay and lesbian people marry heterosexual people, and for a variety of reasons.
Some gay and lesbian people marry heterosexuals because getting married is what we all learn is the right thing to do. Our culture is geared toward heterosexual married relationships, and gay people, like heterosexual people, want to fit in and "do the right thing."
Some gay and lesbian people who marry partners of the opposite sex do so with the hope that they'll "get over" their homosexual feelings. That was exactly what Edward hoped when he married Susanne. "We were both very young," said Edward, "and neither of us knew anything about homosexuality. I even told Susanne that I had had these feelings, but the psychiatrist I was seeing reassured us I would get over it, and the best thing I could do was get married and have children." Shortly after the birth of their second daughter, six years into their marriage, and after ten years of seeing the same psychiatrist, Edward left his wife. "I didn't get over it. In fact, by the time I left my wife - and fired my psychiatrist - I couldn't have been more certain that I was gay and that my psychiatrist was a quack."
Edward's experience is not uncommon. Plenty of psychiatrists and psychologists believed - and some still believe - that homosexuality is something that can be, and should be, cured . . . .
Some gay and lesbian people enter heterosexual marriages for cover, hoping to fulfill family or professional expectations. Some don't inform their opposite-sex spouses beforehand. Some do, and these include a number of closeted gay and lesbian celebrities, who have made arrangements - financial and otherwise - with opposite-sex spouses to enter marriage.
Sometimes gay people marry heterosexual people for love, friendship, and companionship. Sometimes the gay spouse informs the heterosexual spouse prior to marriage and other times not. I've known a few mixed gay male heterosexual female couples in which the wives knew prior to marriage that their husbands were gay, including one marriage that has lasted for more than two decades.
Many gay and lesbian people at the time they marry a heterosexual spouse are either in denial about their sexuality or are simply not fully aware of their sexual feelings. When Katie married at the age of eighteen, she knew she "felt different from other girls, but I didn't know why. It wasn't until I'd been married for seven years and had four children that I had my first adult crush on a woman. And would you believe it was a woman in the church choir? Even after Mary and I became sexually involved, it still took me another year to admit to myself that I was a lesbian. I couldn't even say the word!"
Yes, there are gay men and lesbians who have married and even had children together in order to appear heterosexual. Some people do it because of their careers, others because of family pressures. I remember one young woman in college who came from a very prominent and wealthy family. From what she knew about her parents, she assumed that they would never let her take over the family business if they discovered she was a lesbian, so se she set out to find and marry a gay man with a similar need to appear heterosexual.
I should also add that there are gay and lesbian people who marry each other unknowingly and discover during the course of their marriage that both are homosexual.
Some gay people who hold hands in public do so to make a political statement, to make the point that gay people should be allowed to do the same things in public that heterosexual people do. But most gay people who hold hands in public do so for the very same reasons that heterosexual people do: they simply want to hold the hands of someone they care about. But because of public hostility toward gay and lesbian people, particularly those who display any kind of affection in public for a same-sex partner, they rarely hold hands in public without first considering where they are and whether or not holding hands would be a safe thing to do.
One friend, who enjoys holding her lover's hand in public, had a more blunt answer: "We hold hands because we're too scared to kiss and get shot." Sadly, this is not much of an exaggeration. Two gay men I know were attacked in midtown Manhattan in the middle of the day by a group of teenagers who spotted them holding hands as they crossed the street. One of the two suffered a fractured skull.
A transvestite is technically someone who dresses in the clothing of the opposite gender and for whom that dressing is sexually exciting. Most transvestites are heterosexual men, and they do their cross-dressing in secret or only in the company of other heterosexual transvestites.
People who dress up in clothing of the opposite gender for a costume party, a play, or just for fun are "cross-dressing" or dressing in "drag." A gay man who does this is sometimes called a "drag queen." A man who dresses as a woman to perform professionally in public is called a female impersonator.
Many people got a close look at one type of drag ball in Jennie Livingston's remarkable award-winning documentary film, Paris is Burning. In it, Livingston introduced viewers to Harlem drag balls, where black and Hispanic gay men and women dress up to compete for trophies in different categories. In the "Realness" category, for example, gay men try to "pass" as straight schoolboys, executives, street thugs, soldiers and beautiful, glamorous women.
Another type of drag ball is held in the context of the Imperial Court System, which is one of the oldest and largest gay charitable organizations. Dating back to the early 1960s, the several dozen individual "courts" of the Imperial Court System around the country hold fund-raising balls to benefit both local and national gay, as well as straight, charities. People who attend these balls, primarily gay men, dress in all kinds of formal attire. For example, the instruction booklet for the high camp "Night of a Thousand Gowns" charity ball held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel by the Imperial Court of New York states, "Full court dress is preferred: elegant gowns with tiaras, orders, and family jewels, and/or white tie and tails (knee breeches with silver buckles, for those with the legs for it). Black tie is acceptable, though there is always the possibility of your being mistaken for a waiter. Military personnel may wear dress uniform with full regimentals; swords are optional (but dueling is prohibited.)"