Honey Davenport was in character, performing his usual set at a Manhattan drag bar. Clad in a rainbow leotard and platform heels, he took a swig of his drink and ripped off his wig?sweaty and exhausted from the hourlong performance. Suddenly cheers erupted: New York?s state legislature had legalized same-sex marriage, and on the eve of gay-pride weekend. Davenport?s boyfriend made his way to the stage and got down on one knee. ?Will you marry me?? he asked.
It was the moment every girl dreams of. In tears, Davenport said yes. But then something strange happened. He started feeling dizzy. He stumbled off the stage and tried to make it to the bathroom, but couldn?t. He began vomiting uncontrollably.
Was it the joy? The pressure? A case of premature cold feet? Davenport?real name James Clark?says it may have been a bit of each. ?It was a lot to think about,? the 25-year-old New Yorker laughs. ?I?d just performed, I was exhausted, and my brain was just like, ?Oh, my gosh, this is a big deal.??
The story has a happy ending?Clark and his fianc? are now blissfully engaged. But for many New York gays and lesbians elated by last month?s legislative ruling, victory has brought with it a new (and very old) brand of pressure?the kind gay couples have never had to face. ?When we found out the bill had passed, we were in a large group of people,? says Brandon Voss, a contributing editor at The Advocate, who lives in Manhattan with his long-term boyfriend. ?There was, of course, a moment of celebration. But then we both looked at each other, like, ?Oh, crap.? Because we knew what was coming next."
For many, the night ended with a flurry of text messages. ?Can I be a bridesmaid?? girls cooed to their gay friends. ?When are you going to propose?? eager moms interrogated. ?I just ran into a yoga instructor on the subway, and it was literally the first thing she asked me,? says Michael Remaley, the head of a local communications firm. ?I?ve had at least 20 people ask me when the ?big date? is,? says another. As one friend puts it: ?It made me feel like I did when I was a 6-foot-1 eighth grader and everyone asked me if I played basketball. When I said no they'd say, ?You should!? It didn't matter that I didn't want to.?
For some couples, the dilemmas were almost desultory. Do you downgrade your ?partner? to ?boyfriend? or ?girlfriend? if she or he isn?t suddenly a ?fianc??? ?I tell my guy he?s been demoted,? jokes Tom Murphy, a 28-year-old interactive designer. ?The bar has been raised!? Still others faced the serious question: will there be a big day? And if so, when? Some found the practicalities suddenly more urgent, as a number of companies announced they?d revoke domestic-partner benefits for couples who did not marry. But what about same-sex couples that aren?t ready to take that step? ?It used to be that when you came out, your parents would say things like, ?Now I?m never going to see you in a wedding dress, never going to get to have grandchildren,?? says Cathy Renna, a local activist who runs an LGBT-focused communications firm. ?Now it?s the opposite: ?When do I get to see you in a wedding dress?!? The more options you get, the more challenges arise.?
As any bride-to-be knows, men can be notoriously commitment phobic. Multiply that by two, and you get an idea of what happens when two guys consider tying the knot. But even for lesbian couples?U-Haul jokes aside?the idea of marriage can be scary. And it should be: Americans don?t exactly have the best track record. To make it all the more complex, many gay couples simply never thought marriage would be an option?even in New York. ?We've not been trained that marriage is the next step,? says Chris Rovzar, a senior editor at New York magazine, who wrote about the experience for the magazine last week. ?Sure, you thought that when you were little, but then when you realized you were gay and started dating, there was never any expectation you'd marry.?
So instead, you didn?t think about it. You shacked up, made your own rules, and said ?f--k you? to the social constraints that wouldn?t recognize your relationship. And in some sense, you reveled in it. ?Growing up gay and being told that our relationships aren't normal or equal?many of us turned that sexual-outlaw label into a badge of honor,? says Carl Sullivan, a journalist and former editor of Newsweek.com, who?s in a long-term relationship. But at the same time, perhaps you didn?t realize that skipping on down to the courtroom for a domestic partnership can be a whole lot easier, and lighter, than all the bells and whistles that come along with marriage?not to mention what goes into planning a big, fabulous gay wedding. ?Marriage comes with baggage,? says Dan Savage, the gay cultural critic and editor of The Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly. ?With all its pressures and expectations, for many gays and lesbians, it was kind of a relief we weren?t expected to go through it.?
Not that the relief outweighed the right. But if commitment-phobic couples weren?t panicking already, imagine feeling like the world is watching?waiting to analyze your divorce patterns and successes as a symbol for the entire gay community. ?When a straight couple has problems, people wonder what went wrong,? says Savage, who is married (in Canada) with an adopted son, in a mostly monogamous relationship. ?But when a gay couple breaks up, people say, ?Look, they weren?t worthy of the right.??
Gay men and women have obviously fought for this right for years--but just because they now have it (in New York, anyway), don't expect them to race on down to the alter. "I've always hung with a single-for-life crowd, and we're not going to change," says Michael Musto, the Village Voice pop culture critic. "We always wanted marriage--for other people."?A study out of San Francisco State University last year revealed that monogamy was not a central feature of many gay and lesbian relationships; about 50 percent of those surveyed said they?d had sex outside of their relationships with the approval of their partner. (About 21 percent of straight married couples surveyed by Oprah.com, by contrast, said they had an open relationship.) ?Gay marriage is the bane of all commitment-phobic gays in New York, who now will have a harder time postponing the inevitable,? jokes Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out Magazine. ?Deserved or otherwise, we all know there?s a perception that gay relationships are more fickle.?
Nevertheless, the ability to be fickle was a hard-fought right: a long-stifled ability to sleep with who you want, when you want, with the kind of hedonistic abandon Larry Kramer famously (and controversially) described in his 1978 book, Faggots. In the 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS certainly changed the way the gay community thought about relationships. Will marriage change it even more? "Marriage is obviously a wonderful, amazing step for New York and gays in society,? says Sullivan. ?But you can't suddenly give us something that's been denied us forever and expect everyone to run to the altar. It's more complicated than that.?
And complicated in more ways than one. ?I'm just worried that I could become even more of an outcast than I already am,? says Musto. ?For the rest of my life, people will be asking, ?Why aren't you married?!?? The equal opportunity answer might be: welcome to the club.
owen wilson casino royale forgetting sarah marshall david bowie zen mick jagger rolling stone
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.