NRO Weekend, July 1-2, 2000
Gay Weddings: Being Married or Getting Married?
On the First of July, Vermont starts a new era.

By Steve Sailer, President of the Human Biodiversity Institute. Read his controversial NR article, "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay."

merica's $45 billion-per-year wedding-industrial complex is gladly gearing up for Vermont's July 1st legalization of homosexual "civil unions." Vermont tourist businesses, expecting $40 million per year in revenue from homosexual wedding parties, can now advertise on websites such as GayWeddingGuide.com, run by local innkeeper Randy Guy. (I'm not making that name up.)

The urge to cash in on gay nuptials is also spreading nationally. Wedding supersite TheKnot.com now profiles "Commitment Ceremonies." One, uh, committer (committee?) wrote: "All right, so we're a little theatrical: our ceremony lasted an hour and a half. People sang, recited Shakespeare; there was even a skit. But nobody there didn't have the theater experience of his or her life."

Gay marriage isn't exactly the most important issue imaginable. According to psychologist J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, America's leading demographer of homosexuality, adult gay men make up somewhere around 1% of the total population, and lesbians even less. Still, gay marriage raises intriguing issues that aren't being addressed, due to the media's habit of Sermonize First, Ask Tough Questions Never. Whether portraying homosexuals as perverts in the past or as victims today, the press has always found it less taxing to preach morality than to try to understand reality.

Unfortunately, the headline-writer's habit of using "gay" to also mean female homosexuals is fatal to clear thought on the topic. It's also male chauvinism at its most blatant: "Gay" is just about the last term lesbians would have invented to describe themselves. As one lesbian activist succinctly put it, "We're not gay, we're angry!" So, I'll just discuss gay men.

Although many gays do stick to one partner, on average they tend to be far more promiscuous than straights or lesbians. Leaving aside the symbolic and insurance issues, the main practical question for the rest of society is whether legalizing gay marriage would cause gay men to have sex less randomly, and therefore suffer and spread fewer venereal diseases like AIDS.

The first blow for gay liberation was struck the evening following Judy Garland's funeral in 1969, when distraught drag queens violently resisted an NYPD raid on their Stonewall bar. Within a few years, they were free at last from the police harassment that had kept them from having sex with as many strangers per night as they wished. The result was the AIDS epidemic. (Early AIDS victims averaged 1,100 sex partners apiece.)

Some gay spokesmen, like former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, argue that legalizing homosexual marriage would, "in the wake of AIDS, qualify as a genuine public health measure. . . . My own guess is that most gays would embrace such a goal with as much (if not more) commitment as straights."

But could it be, instead, that fewer gay men want to be married than get married? Does gay marriage appeal more because sexual fidelity offers a role for a lifetime, or because a wedding provides the role of a lifetime? As one gay comic puts it, "Gay marriage is the hot political issue because you get all these great benefits: insurance, adoption, and a really fabulous veil."

Of course, there is nothing preventing gays from acting monogamous today. For example, many a straight man finds a wedding ring a useful tool in staying hitched, since it makes it inconvenient for him to forget to mention to young ladies that he's already married. Yet, I've only met one gay man who wore a wedding ring. And if gays don't like rings, with their connotations of heterosexuality, they certainly possess the creative talent to devise their own insignia that would communicate to other gays that they aren't in the market. Yet, though gays have dreamed up AIDS ribbons, rainbow bumper stickers, and sexually semaphoric combinations of bandanas and earrings, gay men have shown little enthusiasm for this task.

And, after all, what would be the point? A wedding ring on a straight man serves the same function as a brand on a Texas steer. It's a warning from his wife to other women: "Don't bother. He's taken." But with gays, the response from the Other Man would too often be: "I don't want to take him. I just want to borrow him for 15 minutes."

Why do gay men have so much trouble staying faithful? A gay man, to paraphrase Rick's description of Captain Renault in Casablanca, is a man like any other man, only more so. Straight men aren't innately better at resisting temptation. They just have far less placed in their paths. And when they yield to it, their wives often punish them severely for it. Thus, it's not marriage per se that discourages promiscuity; it's the intense sexual jealousy that arises between a man and a woman. Husbands demand their wives' sexual fidelity because, as the old saying goes, "Wife's baby, husband's maybe." Men dread having to pay to raise another man's child. Wives, in turn, insist upon a husband's emotional fidelity so they can be sure he'll support their children. For two gay men sharing an apartment, however, these primal motivations toward sexual envy are moot.

Further, sexual boredom generally sets in faster for two gays living together than for a husband and wife. That's because very few people are narcissists. Everybody lusts for somebody different. This poses a problem for gays, since, as Dr. Bailey's research shows, the majority of gays were effeminate boys who grew up to yearn for manly men. However, there are nowhere near enough innately masculine homosexuals to meet the demand. So, naturally effeminate gays play-act at machismo by pumping iron, getting crew cuts like the one Johnny Unitas wore when he quarterbacked the 1958 Colts, dressing up like the Village People, and so forth. These charades work fine in the bars and bathhouses, but few gays can keep up the he-man acts after they start shopping for spice racks together. Thus, the thrill is gone sooner for gays than for straights, on average.

So legalizing single-sex marriage isn't likely to prevent the next gay venereal epidemic. Yet, will gay weddings destroy society? Overall, I'm not terribly worried. Still, the fervor with which some gay grooms will pursue the perfect wedding will make straight men even less enthusiastic about enduring their own weddings. The opportunities for gays to turn weddings into high-camp farces are endless. For example, if two drag queens get married, who gets to wear white? And anything that discourages straight men from marrying would be widely harmful. While most straight guys eventually decide that being married is fine, the vast majority find getting married a baffling and punitive process. (You may have noticed that while Modern Bride magazine is now over 1,000 pages long, there is no Eager Groom magazine.) About the only comment a straight man can make in favor of his role is that at least it's a guy thing … not a gay thing. But for how much longer?