Andrew Smiler says the mass wedding at the Grammy’s shows how boring gay marriage can be, and that’s a good thing.
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Does it really matter that Queen Latifah publicly married 34 couples at the Grammys? It does to me. The New York Post’s David Hinckley is disappointed that Academy of Recording Arts President downplayed the importance of the event, while Fox News’ Hollie McKay questioned the Academy’s decision to make a political statement.
The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber doesn’t approve. He chastised the show’s producers, calling the event a self-serving spectacle that allowed “the musicians on stage and recording-academy members a chance to announce themselves as good people.” Ultimately, he concludes this was “an example of the Grammys liking gay people, so long as they’re represented by and intermixed with straight ones.” Kornhaber seems to want the event to have been gay-er.
I understand Kornhaber’s concerns that those very real couples, gay and straight, were being used as props to make a statement. I’m pretty sure those people didn’t get through the vetting and planning processes without figuring out that their weddings were part of a larger statement and that they had very little control over any of it.
But spectacle and symbols are important, even if it’s not clear if or how they affect change. For many years, the Rose Bowl has had a couple get married on one the parade’s floats. A few weeks ago, for the first time ever, they had a gay male couple. No complaints from the mainstream press on that one.
Here in the US the folks that need to be persuaded are primarily straight, White, and male. Most of our elected officials are members of that group and popular opinion polls show that’s the demographic group that is most strongly opposed to gay marriage. If the goal is to make gay marriage legal, then the group that needs convincing is straight white men.
Remember this group of straight white guys making decisions about reproductive rights without involving any women in the discussion? They got the law they wanted, accompanied by a PR disaster. Whether you agreed or disagreed with those men, it was hard to miss the symbolic (and real) point of a picture of men making decisions about women’s bodies.
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For the record, I’m a straight white guy. Or, more accurately, a cisgender(-ed) heterosexual male of European descent. Part of my professional work is spent debunking stereotypes about boys and men, including the notion that all men are “roving inseminators” who are only interested in getting laid, have no interest in their female partners, and have no desire for any children they happen to sire in the process. I believe firmly in equality across various lines: gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and ability.
I currently live in Winston-Salem North Carolina. It’s a city of about 250,000. Drive 30 minutes from my house and you’ll probably be looking at a farm. Before this, I lived in rural New York: Oswego, population 20,000. I grew up in the urban north to a twice-divorced, pink-collar mother of three.
When I talk to guys about what it means to be a man, they’re usually defensive to start. I can’t say I blame them. For the last 40 years, many of them heard that straight white men are the cause of all the world’s ills.
I didn’t really understand that claim until I got to my mid-20s. It’s true, especially if you ignore issues of class: all major decisions in the US had been made by (rich) white men. Obama’s got one White parent, so I’m not sure if he counts or not.
These guys understand that “men are pigs” is now a recognized and accepted part of American culture. They’ve been told that holding the door for a woman is polite and also a sign of chauvinism. They’ve seen t-shirts saying “boys are stupid, throw rocks at them” sold to a generation that is also being taught not to bully. The mixed messages are confusing, to say the least. (And I’m not saying that this group has it nearly as bad as any other group; they don’t.)
Many of those guys understand that everyone should be treated equally. But they don’t really get why holding a door open is problematic. Some guys tell me stories about trying to figure out what’s changed and asking others—mostly women—for clarification. I don’t have a good sense of what they’ve been told because it doesn’t make sense to them, so they can’t explain it to me.
Many of them feel like they’ve been under attack from Feminism and women. And now, they’ve got “the gays” to deal with. And the white guys also feel like they’re hearing it from the Blacks too.
No one has ever really spent time helping them understand their privilege backpack. For a good many of them, their backpack was substantially depleted by poverty when they got it, so it’s that much harder for them to understand that they’ve even got a backpack. (And again, they got a backpack; many people don’t.)
This is a very real segment of the people I work with and write for. It’s also the demographic that is most opposed to gay marriage.
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Many of these folks don’t have any contact with someone who’s gay. Or if they do, that person is sufficiently closeted that the folks I’m talking with don’t know.
Now, despite their highly staged nature, I have some very public gay weddings to point to: The Grammys, the Rose Bowl parade. For many of the people I talk to, those are the only gay weddings they’ve ever seen. At the Grammy’s, they were side-by-side with a bunch of straight folks and the straight folks seemed to be doing just fine. At the Rose Bowl, they looked just like any other couple you’d see in that kind of setting.
Those weddings looked like a standard American wedding, not something from the movie The Birdcage. The Rose Bowl ceremony was highly traditional; the only thing missing was a woman in a wedding dress. The Grammy ceremony, despite being a Hollywood production, looked pretty tame. No flamboyant outfits by the folks getting married, no guys in full drag, no pink tuxes. Even Keith Urban shed a tear. As far as I can tell, the only person who might have been cross-dressing was Madonna.
Sorry Mr. Kornhaber, but I’d like to thank the folks who organized the Rose Bowl and the Grammy’s. You’ve shown just how banal these weddings can be and that’s exactly what many people need to see.
-image from NYPost
I think there is a difference in a born homosexual and a sodomite, a lifestyle homosexual. Consider the difference between a perceived mentally ill person that chops their fingers off and another person that convinced your child to chop their fingers off. How do you think society would or should react to that person? They didn’t do anything. They just said “try it”.
I agree – a “sodomite” is a fictitious story while homosexual people are fact. Very much a difference.
I loathe seeing homosexuals kiss. Ban all homosexual ‘weddings’ on TV! People who are homosexual are going to Hades. We don’t want to see the fallen.
I hate watching heterosexual kissing on TV. Should we ban all heterosexual weddings on TV?