thelesbianlifestyle.com

First of all, I’m new on the scene!

I’ve been wondering what might be a good way to get my feet wet here, and I realized tonight while I was out that I had something.

For some reason, oftentimes when something bothersome happens, I can’t really put my finger on what it is or that I am actually bothered by it. That happened to me earlier this week while I was doing an interview for a summer job. I was being interviewed by the kind of person who gets on my nerves because he/she engages in one of my biggest pet peeves, i.e. being a smartass and making things you say sound stupid. And these people are usually men, in my experience, which makes it worse simply because I view males as thinking they are smarter than women are.

So, at some point, this guy kept pressing me, demanding an answer about how I would argue in the courtroom for gay marriage given that civil unions exist. And this came about because I was talking about a class I’m taking in which we somewhat explore parallels to race & interracial marriage and same-sex marriage. So I mentioned one of the pieces that I read recently for that class by Michael Warner, from which I basically got that he has several problems with the fight for gay marriage–as a queer person himself–and he points out that, in general, GLBT individuals had not been interested in gay marriage, and many had even opposed it, until relatively recently (80s and onward). I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more people here who are more knowledgeable about Warner and/or GLBT history, but this is my very, very brief breakdown of how I interpreted Warner’s piece.

And so this guy says, after I give him that brief bit also, something like, “Well, there are a lot of straight people who don’t want to get married”…and he said it in a smart-ass, almost like “duh,” tone, as if he was just saying it to be contradictory or argumentative. And he and the other interviewer–a female who basically just let him do all the talking and asking of questions in the interview–just laughed as if that was so funny. And, pretty much, I had been laughing at his lame smart-ass comments the whole interview, you know, for the impression…but I really don’t think I laughed at this comment.

I told this story to some people tonight, and they seemed a little bit shocked that he said that. These were all straight people, too, and I know one of them is extremely gay-friendly…always goes off on people who make homophobic or borderline-homophobic comments and so on. And I just kind of realized my reaction to the whole thing is basically like, “Are you kidding me? Are you really comparing gay people not wanting to get married to straight people not wanting to get married??” One group has the choice–if they don’t want to get married, they don’t have to…but the option to is there. And I know that I am not interested in marriage, and this might be one of the reasons why it took me a while to put my finger on how I felt about his saying what he did and acting like it was some joke. I just know that near the end of the interview, I thought to myself, “Wow, I need to make sure I get an offer from somewhere else, because I really don’t think I want to work here.” I mean, it’s a law firm with one of its main focuses on various discrimination causes of action, and one of their lawyers is this silly.

But the point is, even as a queer person who is not interested in marriage, I know that if I were it wouldn’t matter. That’s just not so for a straight person. He or she can change his or her mind and, bam, he or she is married. The desire, or lack thereof, is not the point–it’s the right, the ability, that’s the point, for me.

And I hate comparisons when you’re talking about gay people, because I just feel like the two things being compared are just not the same even if there are some parallels. I find myself getting irritated whenever I hear a comparison with gay issues, and sometimes it’s on different sides of my identities. When people compare race and homosexuality, I get irritated because oftentimes I feel like the people doing the comparisons don’t know enough about race–nor care enough about race–to really be trying to pull comparisons off. But I also don’t like to appear to be overly-sensitive. But I hate when people can’t see things that, to me, should be obvious enough for them to not even go there. And while I understand why some people draw racial comparisons to gay rights, I just can’t believe someone would be blind enough to miss that–hello–gay people can’t get married, and straight people can.

And he might actually have been trying to make the same point, but I still don’t like the method. I view the right to get married that straight people have as one that is taken for granted, especially among the ones who don’t want to get married. So I heard him say what he did, and it kind of came off to me more as “Some straight people think the right to marry is meaningless, so why does it matter to any gay person,” especially the way he said it—because he said it, to me, as if some straight people just view marriage as awful. Maybe Warner does somewhat view marriage as meaningless or awful–even though I think he was pointing to bigger, more specific issues (and, specifically, how they affect gay people) than that…in which case, this supports my idea about drawing comparisons when you don’t have enough knowledge–and many other gays might, too. I do tend to view marriage in a negative light. But a good portion of the gay marriage fight is really about equality. I don’t view marriage as meaningless, even though I don’t want it. I don’t think it’s awful so much as I think it would be awful for me. So I would like to see two adult human beings who have said that they do want it, and want it with each other, to be able to have it, regardless of sex and sexual orientation.