babble into their own Pr campaigns—so too
has bourgeois marriage absorbed what was
left of the sexual opposition.
Certainly, there were always members of the gay community who would rather
not have borne the burden of existential difference, who would rather have stayed who they
were while seeing society change in such a way
that who they are might be allowed to count
as normal. The domestication of same-sex desire is surely a good thing for these people. But
their individual advantage does not mean that
the world as a whole is not losing something,
I have certainly known more men destroyed by
the desire to have a wife and child and to keep
them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by
drink and harlots.
—W. B. Yeats, 1909
and it has been one of the great fallacies of the
liberal defenders of gay marriage to assume
that what is good for any given individual is for
that very reason good for society. The loss we
have in fact suffered is one akin to the loss of
some mighty species of wild boar as it is bred
downward into a fat, ugly, lazy, edible pig; or
to the move of indigenous Amazonians from
the rainforest into squalid urban slums. In each
case, one may insist that the absorption of these
once-free beings into the dominant world order
is a bit of progress for them: the pigs will now
be well fed (until they are slaughtered), and the
proletarianized Indians will eventually benefit
from some small dose of welfare-state largesse.
But in each case there is something the world
is losing. With the right to marry granted, gay
couples will visit each other in the hospital and
will get in on the system of inheritance that is
the very bedrock of the sedentist system that
has in much of the world been held, since the
Bronze Age, to be of higher status than nomadism or pastoralism, and that since the rise
of capitalism has been practically imposed in
all corners of the globe.
Why this now, and not some other thing?
What are the circumstances in which this particular social change is not only demanded but
comes to be seen as having universal validity,
comes even to be spoken of in the language of
human rights? And here the answer seems un-avoidably to do with the utility of the domestication of gayness, at a historical moment when
marriage, if reserved for the straight alone, seems
on its way to extinction, and at a moment when
the consumerist status quo is growing rapidly
more sophisticated in its strategies for co-opting
any social force—whether political, musical, artistic, sexual—that had hitherto lay outside it.
We are not supposed to speak anymore of
the connection between same-sex desire and
creativity. We are expected to understand that
every sexual orientation features characters of
all kinds, that sexual others are “just like us” in
every respect save for their sexual otherness. Yet
the historical connection is undeniable, and in
order to acknowledge this we do not have to
mire ourselves in spurious speculation about
the proximity of the “gay gene” to the “artist
gene” in the human chromosome. Creativity itself was a structural feature of the place of the
sexual minority in society. one can with perfect
consistency, again, rejoice at the disappearance
of gay marginalization, and at the same time
bemoan the cultural cost of this.
And in truth we have not ceased to expect
creativity from gay men; we have simply lowered
our standard of taste. Where we once desired art
that shook the very foundations of our society,
that faced up to pain and danger as raw facts
of our existential predicament, we now yearn for
interior decoration that pleases the very most
conventional heterosexual sensibilities. Indeed,
is the recent, familiar casting of the gay man in
the role of interior decorator not a perfect illustration of the process of domestication we are
lamenting here? Where we once had art that
threatened to tear down the home and the conventional values it harbors, we now have men
offering to spruce that same home up for us, to
make it more livable, again, to do what can be
done to make marriage gay again.
