Apparently the fact that wealthy white gay people want to be just like other wealthy white people is news again. The Sunday Times magazine had a story on how young gay boys are nuts for nuptials, profiling a handful of white Boston gays in their 20s who have gotten legally wed. The interview subjects discuss such pressing issues as “BMW vs. Honda.” The retro-nostalgic portraits of white domesticity that accompany the article offer a perfect example of what Jasbir Puar has called “homonationalism” to describe the folding of white gayness into nationalism and the war on terror. As The Specials once sang, “If that’s a happy marriage, I’d prefer to be unhappy.”
Over at Details (ok, not the most sociological of sources, but at least as widely read as ASR) a story about a supposed gay male baby boom suggests that having babies is the logical outcome of “the growing prevalence of domestic partnerships, civil unions, and gay marriage.” And the rise of these relationship formations apparently results from the magic combo of “greater freedom and acceptance” and “AIDS.” As in get-hitched-to-avoid-getting-HIV. If the preferred prophylactic against HIV-panic is now legal marriage, what do I need to avoid the next round of gay male staph infection freak out? Will dinner and a movie suffice?
For more on marriage (and with thanks to Greg for sending links to the above), I recently posted a law review article Dean and I wrote about biopolitics, sodomy laws, and same-sex marriage on the Writing page, but you can download it here. For a sloppier, shorter version of some of the same arguments, here’s the text of a talk I gave on marriage fever a few years ago. But really, I found out everything there was to know about marriage and weddings from The Princess Bride, so click and learn:
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brilliant!
And let’s not forget the scene coming up when she attempts suicide at the thought of living this sham marriage!
i really feel like its all coming together when i see you publicly writing about details, the specials, and the princess bride. this is why we joined academia. to the wedding-industry-sustaining-gay-baby-makers/stealers, the specials say
“Call me immature
Call me a poser
I’d love to spread manure in your bed of roses
Don’t want to be rich
Don’t want to be famous
But I’d really hate to have the same name as you. . .
Take control of the population boom
It’s in your living room…”
you have to ignore some of the more offensive content of that song to get to these gems, but selective reading doesn’t feel inappropriate when responding to people who are selectively forgetting hundreds of years of feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist critiques of marriage in order to feel liberated by registering their sex life and family formation with the state.
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