Just like with the Civil Rights Movement, a cultural ideology cannot be changed simply because the law books are edited. Even now, there are plenty of gays shaking and huddling in their respective closets. Clearly, if states are legalizing gay marriages, if even the government is starting to see that being gay is not a mental illness or a perversion, then we must be far enough along as a nation in our beliefs that it's not a totally ridiculous idea that gays are, you know, normal. Homosexuality... It just is. Always has been. Always will be.
I could say all sorts of shit about why gay marriage should be legalized, why gay people should enjoy equal rights with straights, but I won't bother. To me, it's self-evident. But goddamn, people. I know a girl in the military who has got a friend lined up to marry (a man, obviously) in case she ever comes under scrutiny from the Army about being gay. It has been her dream to be in the army since she was a little kid, but in order to realize that dream, she may have to marry a man already who has a girlfriend. If you think gays marrying gays is going to ruin the sanctity of marriage, how about that? Some poor girl has to marry someone she will never love just so she can serve her country? Now that, to me, lacks respect for the institution of marriage (and not that I think the institution of marriage is all that great, but that's neither here nor there), as well as for both parties. Why should she have to take that lie to such lengths? She was telling me about another person she knows in the army who did just that--married a friend of hers to get the inquirers off her back. So she could keep her job and her livelihood.
More personally, one of my oldest and best friends is getting married this fall to a guy she's dated since high school. That sounds almost romantic, except I didn't mention the fact that she cheated on him for almost a whole year with my best friend, who is a girl. And I have never known the enfianced friend of mine to be happier than when she was pursuing her life on her own terms with another woman. But, as is true in the lives of so many gays, her family and friends were horrified when she told them and put intense and incessant pressure on her to go back to her boyfriend. Now, they'll be tying the knot in November.
Maybe they were happy once. Maybe they will be happy together. I know what my friend desires more than anything is to have a "normal" family. To have kids. It's hard to give up that dream of hearth and home, especially when giving it up means that you have to live a life that is disdained by many, and unlawful in some parts of this great nation. Nobody I've ever known grew up dreaming of anything else. After all, it's the American Dream: 2.5 kids, a dog, a white picket fence. Gays dream of that too, you know. But then they realize that they have to dream a new life for themselves, because the initial dream is simply not in the cards for them... if they want to live an honest life.
Will she be living a lie? I guess only she can answer that. Those of us who know her best, and who have seen her at her happiest, will grieve at her wedding. We might be the only ones. All of us, of course, want nothing more than for her to be happy. To not have to deal with mental anguish and cognitive dissonance if, in fact, we are right. My biggest fear for her is that she will be one of those forty-somethings who one day, "out of the blue," tells her husband and kids that, what do you know! Mommy's gay! Our family is now emotionally gutted, because I can't stay with your father anymore. I don't want that for anyone. I don't think people should have to live in a country that claims to be so great where they feel forced to live that way.
How long can one live in denial? Maybe we're wrong, maybe she is legitimately bisexual and loves her fiancee as much as she loved my friend. Maybe there is no qualitative difference between being with a woman and a man for her. I hope that's true. I want that to be true as much as she does. But I just can't believe it.
Really, why the fuck is it such a huge sin to be gay? So a woman sleeps with other women, who cares? So a man finds himself falling in love with other men, so? Gay people have to redream their lives, is it so much to ask that their families and friends do the same for them? So you have to recast your young daughter's shadowy faceless specter of a future husband as a woman, so what? So you'll get a son-in-law rather than a daughter-in-law, what's the difference?
I guess I'm angry at her family for not respecting her. And to be fair, I'm angry at her for not being strong enough to say, "Fuck 'em," and live her life for herself. Of course, it's not that easy; if it was, she would have stayed with my friend, or gotten with a nother woman. I'm angry for all the people in the world who don't know anything about homosexuality and don't care to find out. It's easier, after all, to just hate them blindly, than to take the time and effort to get to know somebody who's gay and realize, oh, they're just like me. Everything I deserve, everything I want, they deserve and desire as well. I don't understand what is so difficult to understand about that!
My dad hates me for being gay. I used to live in terror of him finding out, but my terror was superceded by the fact that... it's just true. I am. This is the life I live, this is where I find my happiness. If he can't understand or respect it, then that's his problem. For my friend, it's her family's problem, not hers. Except she's the people-pleaser type and can't seem to put her own needs and desires before theirs. And for countless others, that's true too. As if there isn't enough shit in life to have to deal with...
Okay, so they won. She's "straight" now. She told them she was gay, and now magically she's not? If a child tells her parent she's gay, and then they pressure her to live a straight life and she capitulates, what then, have they set her up for? A life of lies and unhappiness? A life of entrapment? Why would any parent wish that on his or her child? Of course, I'm sure they're ignorant and think people can change (just like they can change their own sexuality). Or they chalk it up to a college phase. They don't want to believe it (it's a lot of work to believe it and accept it, for gays too), and so they don't.
I'm happy that the states are beginning to embrace homosexuals as normal citizens rather than psychological or genetic aberrations. I know that there is no culture that can change overnight. Just because the Civil Rights movement happened didn't mean that most people were sold on the ideas therein. All in all, I guess I'd say America is moving at a pretty good clip, as far as tolerance and acceptance is concerned. At any rate, my generation, which is coming to the fore socially and politically, is much more tolerant than previous generations. The baby boomers, they're the worst ugh. They've still got that wartime mentality going, and while this technically is wartime, the homefront isn't engaged with the wartime effort like they were before. The rhetoric is not the same. The war my generation has been influenced by as a sort of cultural inheritance is Vietnam and now, of course, Iraq and Afghanistan (and probably soon to be Iran and North Korea, fuuuuuck). The homefront sentiments about those two wars were radically different than with WWII. Where people got more conservative after WWII, I think American culture, from Vietnam on, has produced a growing number of liberals. Obviously, the conservatives are still a powerful faction in Amurrica, and they are the focus of many of my half-mad rants, but they are the traditionalists. The ones drawing on previous generations' ideas of the world, and are satisfied that those ideas are legitimate because they came before them.
Well, we aren't satisfied now. Generation Y is obsessed with choice. I also think irony has become a powerful force in the media, and in existence altogether. WWII, there were good reasons to go. In Vietnam and Iraq, the population was lied to. Horrible things occur in every war, but the lies and the lack of any believable coverup make modern war almost totally unconscienable to later generations. And yet, here we are, in the middle of this clusterfuck. Choking on the irony of it all every day. Sigh. This post got waaaay off track. It was about gays, and now it's about wartime mentality.
In closing, I guess I hope that the rest of America catches on to this growing trend of accepting people who sleep with people of the same sex. And all those who might choose to do things just a little differently than your parents did. Not that big a deal. So simple, so important, and yet so difficult. I guess humans are just impatient, considering the fact that they live such brief lives. Maybe cultural consciousness has never been able to keep up with humans' imagination. Then again, when has reality ever lived up to the standards of dreams?
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