To mark the Wheeler Centre’s Big Gay Week, Rodney Croome, campaign director of Australian Marriage Equality and an honourary lecturer in Sociology at the University of Tasmania, writes today and tomorrow on marriage and gay men.
Writing against gay marriage in The Australian Literary Review last month, gay academic Dennis Altman had more in common with conservative Christian advocates than he may like to believe. Both are responding negatively to the demand for same-sex marriage because they share the same illusion about what marriage is and who gay men are. In a recent opinion piece Altman described marriage as a single ‘model’, “predicated on particular gender relations, monogamy and the biological link between children and parents” and gay men as engaging in “a whole range of sexual adventuring” that make male same-sex relationships “different” to heterosexual ones.
These words could just as easily have been written by Baptist theologian, Bill Muehlenberg. I should know. He and I co-authored a book about same-sex marriage last year in which we had to respond to each other’s case in detail. For both Altman and Muehlenberg, marriage is still on the cultural pedestal it occupied when they were young, the pedestal whose footing reads “the only way to legitimise love, sex and children, the only way to order the interaction of men and women, the only course our lives should take”. They also both hold to the belief that gay men are natural libertines and that gay male relationships are therefore inherently different.
Of course, where Altman and people like Muehlenberg part ways is how they judge what they perceive to be true about marriage and homosexuality. As a conservative Christian, Muehlenberg wants to shore up marriage’s pedestal and thinks unrestrained sex is immoral. As a sexual liberationist Altman wants to knock marriage down and smash it to bits, and thinks sexual liberation is fundamental to happiness. But from that divergence of opinion arises another convergence; both dislike the idea of gays marrying (although, as a supporter of human rights and legal equality, Altman is not against it). So what exactly have Altman and Muehlenberg mis-judged about marriage and gay men?
Marriage is no longer the cultural monolith it once was. The legal recognition and social acceptance of de facto relationships, civil partnerships and non-conjugal relationships means marriage is now just another way, among others, of sharing one’s life with another person.
The acceptance of childlessness, gender equity and no-fault divorce means there is no longer just one model of marriage. The decision about how to conduct a marriage now firmly in the hands of the partners to that marriage. As Fairfax columnist, Adele Horin, recently observed,
Marriage is more than ever a love match between equals, a primarily personal relationship in which partners maintain a level of independence. They organise their partnership on the basis of personal inclination rather than gender roles, although no one says that battle is won; they value the right to decide whether to have children or not. Is it any wonder that gays and lesbians are saying “Hey, that describes us”?
The general acceptance of Julia Gillard’s childless, de facto relationship is an example of this change.
Muehlenberg might condemn it. Altman may hope it spells the end of the marriage. But most Australians see it for what it really is, two people choosing to do what is right for them. It is precisely this ethos of choice which is behind popular support for marriage equality, especially among the young.
Polls show significantly higher support for same-sex marriage among the under 40s – people I call the Family Law Act Generation because they grew up with cohabitation, divorce and childlessness as legitimate options, and with gender equity a given. It makes no sense to this generation that how and if to be married should be a choice for the majority but not for the minority. Both Altman and Muehlenberg might contend that in the absence of legal incentives and cultural pressure marriage will disappear. But statistics show that marriage rates are actually up, possibly because our greater freedom to marry makes marriage more attractive, not less.
Whatever the reason, the democratising of relationship law has seen traditional marriage shift from being the only legitimate relationship to just one among others. It doesn’t mean marriage is about to disappear any more than religious tolerance in Europe in the eighteenth century brought an end to faith.
When it comes to gay male relationships, the mistake critics like Muehlenberg and Altman make is to see them as sexually exceptional. There is no credible evidence for this, as shown during the landmark gay blood donation case before the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal in 2008.
The case hinged on the question of whether gay men have uniquely different sex lives. To prove its point that gay blood donation would be dangerous, the Red Cross presented a range of studies to prove gay men are more likely to have more sexual partners, less likely to be sexually monogamous in primary relationships, and more likely to engage in risky sexual activity, than other people. The Tribunal dismissed all these studies because they were designed specifically to look at behaviour that poses a high risk of HIV infection in small, unrepresentative samples drawn from gay events, bars and sex venues. Often these samples deliberately excluded men in monogamous relationships.
Researchers like Professor Glen Elder of Vermont University have similar concerns as the Tribunal. He believes, “We have produced a body of literature about homosexual lives that tends toward the ‘exceptional’”. When Elder looked at a broader range of same-sex couples who didn’t congregate in one place and agree to be studied – those registered from across the USA under Vermont’s civil union scheme – he found, “What’s most interesting about this analysis…is the banality of the results. Civil union households simply don’t differ that much from those of the general population”.
The second part of this article will be published tomorrow.
Helen Razer will be speaking Thursday lunchtime at the Wheeler Centre as part of the Lunchbox/Soapbox series. Her topic will be ‘Giving Up on Art’.
(Click to watch video.)
Sophie Cunningham, noted writer and departing editor of Meanjin, delivered our Lunchbox/Soapbox last week on the topic of climate change and what seems to be a general paralysis in response to it. You can watch the full video or listen to the podcast.
Here’s an edited extract of Sophie’s presentation.
At about the time I was giving this talk – ‘Still Shocking’ – last week, Prime Minister Julia Gillard was announcing details of the government’s new carbon tax. The passionately expressed opposition to this is very relevant, I think, to the points I went on to make.
I first started thinking about the subject of change and how we deal with it when I was listening to the news coverage of Cyclone Yasi as a ‘200 year’ storm. The term is not exactly inaccurate – it is a way of saying there is a 0.5% chance that a storm of that severity that will occur. But the implication is that storms that large will only occur every 200 years when the confluence of extreme weather events recently suggests otherwise. In 1970, Alvin Toffler published Future Shock. It was – and I quote – “a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change. It is about the ways in which we adapt – or fail to adapt – to the future.” He called this failure to adapt an ‘illness’: future shock.
The thing about change is that none of us can avoid it.
One of the things I want to consider is the ways in which our personal reluctance to accept things, the very human nature of our responses, can become a dangerous thing. This is most explicitly the case when it comes to the work of climate change deniers. Deniers specialise in eliding the difference between weather and climate: short-term ebbs and flows versus long-term trends
Yes, it’s rained a lot lately, but this doesn’t changes the fact that most of the scientific community has forecast higher average temperatures and an increasing number of extreme weather events. This is a crucial point to make: the scientific community is in agreement about these issues.
So why is there such reluctance to act on this knowledge, and why do deniers get such airplay? I wish the issue were as simple as money and power. Unfortunately I think denialism is caused by something more entrenched, and harder to fight: fear. Let me return to Future Shock:
One widespread response to high-speed change is outright denial. The Denier’s strategy is to ‘block out’ unwelcome reality. When the demand for decisions reaches crescendo, he flatly refuses to take in new information. Like the disaster victim whose face registers total disbelief, the Denier, too, cannot accept the evidence of his sense … An unknowing victim of future shock, the Denier sets himself up for personal catastrophe. His strategy for coping increases the likelihood that when he finally is forced to adapt, his encounter with change will come in the form of a single massive life crisis, rather than a sequence of manageable problems.
The problem for us, of course, is that it’s the planet itself that is in crisis, not just individuals. No matter how scary the forecasts for the future, I would argue with knowledge comes agency.
Sophie Cunningham will be one of the presenters at tonight’s Big Gay Week event, The Only Gay Book in the Village, alongside Benjamin Law, Fiona McGregor and William Yang.
The Social Network may not have won the best picture Oscar, but social networking has been given a far greater honour – in Egypt. Parents of an Egyptian girl born during the events that recently led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s grip on power have named her Facebook in honour of the role that the website played in the events. Perhaps the good people at Egypt’s Births, Deaths and Marriages have already inked in an appointment from a certain Facebook Jamal Ibrahim in 18 years. More proof, if it was needed, of how social media is changing the world.
On a related topic, here’s a blog on using social media as a social change agent – or, as writer Heather Dougherty puts it, putting the activism back into ‘slacktivism’.
Speaking of new media, do you find yourself interrupting a romantic dinner to tweet a snarky comment about the table service? Are you waking up in the middle of the night just to tweet that funny dream you just had? If you’re worried you’re too attached to Twitter, here’s a Buddhist perspective.
