Outside the marriage machine
With queers now entering into the bonds of matrimony, the ranks of proud outcasts are shrinking.

By Annalee Newitz

ALMOST ALL OF my friends went out to City Hall to offer support to the about-to-be-married queers. They brought doughnuts and flowers and umbrellas to waiting couples. They took pictures. They threw rice. It was like Pride Week, but instead of exulting in the sexuality of outsiders, the city welcomed queers into the bosom of normalcy. And I didn't go.

I understand, from a utilitarian point of view, why same-sex couples want to have state-recognized relationships. Hospital visitation rights, inheritance, co-ownership of property, and parenting are all absurdly difficult for unmarried couples. But marriage isn't merely about kids and taxes.

As proponents of gay marriage inform us ad nauseam, this is a symbolic issue. It's about granting homo love the same cultural value – the same privileges – as hetero love. It's about forcing mainstream U.S. society to acknowledge that same-sex couples are worthy of Air Supply songs, bad movies starring Meg Ryan, and target marketing from Pottery Barn. It's about saying, "We are just like you. We are normal."

But I don't want to be normal.

One of the reasons I've always felt at home in the queer community was because we had no recourse to the laws of heterosexuality and therefore we had to make our own. Plenty of people have made lifelong monogamous commitments to each other in the queer community without the aid of marriage. But the rest of us could build our own kinds of relationships, ones that suited us, without feeling we'd somehow failed to live up to the expectations of our community. What expectations were there? All we had, in the words of fantasy writer Jacqueline Carey, was the commandment "Love as thou wilt."

And that suits me just fine. I have three partners whom I love very much. It's not exactly a conventional arrangement, and to people who haven't bothered to learn about polyamory, it would seem that I'm "cheating" on one or another of my partners. But this is the way I love. I need my partners for all the things that couples need each other for, like emotional support and resource sharing. But there's no marriage for us. Ever.

I don't believe in the myths of heterosexual love on which marriage is founded: no amount of bureaucratic paper-signing can make it true that lifelong monogamy is possible for everyone, that divorce is failure, or that state-regulated unions are somehow more enduring than unregulated ones.

Now that queers can get married, I'm left here with a diminishing group of sexual outcasts and minorities, dreaming about a world where kinship isn't codified by the state. Although we love each other in profoundly human ways, pundits compare us to people who want to marry their pets or cars. We're the perverse remainder, the sexually unassimilated. But we soldier on; we blunder toward romantic fulfillment, and we find it or we don't. In true love, there are no laws. And there are none to break.

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