So this week I found out that a queer mom can do it all, go to a supremely heterosexual parenting conference and an anti-Proposition 8 rally in Cincinnati. As a result of all that emotional and analytical chaos I figured out a crucial cultural fact: I know why heterosexuals need us to never, ever, marry.
Two places I've been this week that are so different they shouldn't be on the same planet: Last weekend I went to my first parenting conference, with William Sears, the Leave No Child Inside Guy, other good people I'm sure, and Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence. This parenting conference was 1,500 strong, and I found myself looking for anyone who looked like me, who could possibly be gay. I saw three (three!) women with short hair, and that was it. And I knew it was fantasy to even hope for gayness for two of those three. I found no mirror--saw some people who were probably hippy moms, quite a few baby-carrying moms, and some possibly poorer moms, but the percentage of blond moms and moms with floofy haircuts was distressingly high. I was at sea in a storm of people I should have been able to identify with, and actually did--why else was I there, spending babysitting money I didn't have--but I was also adrift.
Now Wiseman was fierce--articulate, compassionate, loaded with info, and she said: to keep other adolescent girls in line, the top two threats are to call them "uptight" (being easy is better) and "dyke." For guys it's worse: it's "gay" and "fag." I've heard versions of this before but sitting there in the audience with only protecting my daughters in mind, thinking as a parent rather than as a scholar of gender and sexuality, wrecked me. I was crying by the end, unable to leave because the session had been so packed it took ten minutes for everyone to disperse, sitting in the back ransacking my little pink conference freebee bag for some distraction from the pain.
Then I go to the Proposition 8 rally in Cincinnati, with my kids of course, and friends. It was good, well-attended despite the rain, Margaret Cho spoke and sang a dirty ditty she'd composed about the Mormon Church and where they could put certain objects. Saw lots of people I identified with, though only a few moms.
So this is my conclusion: Keith Olberman and others who say: Let gays get married, it has nothing to do with you (you heterosexual who voted yes on 8)--are wrong, dead wrong. Judith Butler is right: we are necessary for heterosexuals to create themselves, and their sense of themselves, we are their boundaries--we limit them, as Wiseman, in other language--affirmed. And the Yes on 8 people are right on this one point: we will mess with with the notion of marriage, of their marriage in particular, and we will, given enough rights, seriously upend with their notion of themselves as heterosexual and as gendered. That's immense.
What does 'heterosexual' mean if not the opposite of gay, right?
Heterosexual:
1. you can marry,
2. you are privileged--even if you don't acknowledge it--
3. you are normal,
4. you are right.
5. you are godly
Gays are--and must stay--:
1. unable to marry
2. not privileged (oppressed)
3. abnormal
4. wrong.
5. sinful
And powerful as that is, that isn't even the half of it, because gayness is also, at its core, about gender. And as we riff on Wiseman via feminist theory, "dyke" and "fag" are on some level about gayness but really it's about maintaining gendered (heterosexual) norms. In other words queerness serves to make "boys" be properly male and "girls" be properly female. So:
What does "masculine" mean if not the opposite of gay? to Wiseman's adolescents (and to too many of us):
man:
1. masculine (in clothes, haircut, style, toughness, lack of emotion, film book and music choices, etc etc, it inflects so much)
2. oriented toward women
3. smart
4. normal
5. athletic
Gay:
1. effeminate
2. oriented toward men
3. stupid "that's so gay"
4. abnormal
5. unathletic
Of course there is also the stereotype of gay men as hypermasculine (both in muscles and funnily enough in being oriented towards men) and the stereotype of dyke as "masculine" and a world of other race-, class-, age-, region-based nuance--but that gets subtle, and this is not about subtle
or about truth, but about our cultural marriage of convenience with binary opposition, about stereotypes and
generalizations that have real effects.
So, heterosexuals NEED us to keep their kids on the straight and narrow, to help their adolescents grow up to be "properly" gendered and with "proper" sexual orientation. If the Mormon Church and other conservative groups allow "marriage" to complicate the sharp binary oppositions they themselves use to form their own sense of self, then their sense of self is blurred, confused, less boundaried. And you know that Mitt Romney and them are uptight, need uptightness, need boundariedness.
And that's why marriage is so important. For us, too. It is a shorthand for how they define themselves in terms of gender and sexual orientation. OF COURSE WE ARE THREATENING! But we are also right.
