We grow up and are given a set of words that we use to communicate: ideas, places, things, ppl.

But as all of these things change — as they always do, thanks to the passage of time — words that once seemed perfect become inadequate to describe the new world in which we live.

Thus we have a choice: we can suffer with old words or invent new ones. (In this sentence, words are a metaphor for words.)

It should further be noted that the words we use or invent may or may not be applicable to anyone else.

If I can describe the infinite pieces of my life in the most beautiful and accurate way possible, why should I care if you describe yours — which is infinitely different (or not)– in the same way? Moreover, why should I care if you take bits and pieces of my language to build yours? (Note to the litigious: we are not talking about copyright law here.)

In this way, we may not agree, but we may not be in conflict, either.

As long as guns are not involved, we should be able to live in peace: you will write your book, and I will write mine.

Lately we’ve been thinking about how much we still kinda h8 the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’  Though we know that many in ‘the community’ consider this a ‘settled issue’ — and perhaps this is a vestige of our own self-h8red, which is not small by any measure — we still generally feel uncomfortable identifying with either term beyond the most perfunctory shorthand, like when d-bags in the locker room are talking about how they want to ‘bone some broad’ and they look in our direction for validation we’re like ‘stfu — we’re gay.’

We went to dictionary.com and looked up gay:

Gay –adjective

1. having or showing a merry, lively mood: gay spirits; gay music.
2. bright or showy: gay colors; gay ornaments.
3. given to or abounding in social or other pleasures: a gay social season.
4. licentious; dissipated; wanton: The baron is a gay old rogue with an eye for the ladies. [Ed. wait -- what?]
5. homosexual.
6. of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues: a gay organization.

If  you’re like us, none of these definitions remotely captures anything about your life, except maybe numbers five and six, to the extent that it’s synonymous with “non-heterosexual.” But as we all know, “homosexual” is a scientific term invented in the late 1800s and thus cannot be used without sounding like you’re an animal in the zoo, e.g., “Yall, let’s get a grant to study the homosexuals! We heard that they have enlarged brains/thumbs/swirly hairdos/six-packs!”

So what about queer?

–adjective

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different; singular: a queer notion of justice.
2. of a questionable nature or character; suspicious; shady: Something queer about the language of the prospectus kept investors away.
3. not feeling physically right or well; giddy, faint, or qualmish: to feel queer.
4. mentally unbalanced or deranged.
5. Slang/Disparaging and Offensive a. homosexual. b.effeminate; unmanly.
6. Slang bad, worthless, or counterfeit.

We understand the idea of ‘reclaiming your identity’ — kinda like how all the kids on the subway call each other ‘nigga’ — but do you srsly want to be called queer? We don’t! (Might be ‘too old’.)  ‘Columbia University has excellent academic programs in Nigga Studies and Queer Studies?’ What makes one soooo much more ‘acceptable’ than the other?

While many of you may or may not agree, in either case we suspect you’d like to challenge us to come up with something better. After all, these terms have many decades of history/study behind them, and it’s possible to envision a day 100,000 years in the future when they might be entirely divorced from the superficial/derogatory meanings from which they originally arose.

Our solution is vexed.

1. irritated; annoyed: vexed at the slow salesclerks.
2. much discussed or disputed: a vexed question.
3. tossed about, as waves.
4 [Proposed as of 2k9]. non-heterosexual.*

*Although we don’t ever endorse the use of adjectives as nouns except in an ironic context — ‘the gays were upset that Madonna/Cher/Britney canceled her tour’ — we propose the alternate form ‘vext’ to allow for similar uses, e.g., ‘the vexts lobbied hard in Albany/DC yet achieved nothing despite Democratic majorities in both houses.’

Seriously, how much more ‘empowering’ and — especially w/r/t definition number three — poetic is ‘vexed’ than any other alternative? It’s basically like saying: ‘Don’t fuck with me/us,’ while maintaining a certain and appropriate degree of intelligence and impatience (but not anger or violence, which we don’t support) for mainstream convention that frankly needs to be a hallmark going forward in any interaction with those str8s who don’t ‘get it.’

Try it out. ‘Yall, don’t talk bullshit to me about _____! I’m vexed!’ In politics. ‘Yall should be able to ‘get married’ if you’re vexed.’ Or for students of literature: ‘Marcel Proust was the best novelist of all-time; not coincidentally, like most great novelists except during the dark ages from 1945  to 2010 — he was vexed.’ Note also that ladies are equally welcome to be vexed, and won’t be appropriating a tired old term like gay, which inevitably makes them (as usual) second-class citizens on the gender front.

We are not gay or queer.

We are tossed about, as waves.

We are vext.

You’d be surprised how often ‘str8 bros’ write in to tell us how ‘wrong’ we are in our assertions that this or that is homophobic, that we really shouldn’t be offended by something that’s ‘not that offensive,’ that we’re actually hurting the ‘gay community,’ or that our anger is ‘misplaced.’ More than once we’ve been told that we ‘need help.’

It kind of reminds us of 100 or so years ago when various people with whom our relations had soured encouraged us to go to therapy because we were ‘so angry.’ What they couldn’t have predicted was how this process — i.e., therapy — made us understand more clearly than ever how justified our anger was, given — and here’s the irony — the offensive actions of those who had encouraged us to go.

So listen up, str8 bros: if you’re going to make a prostate-exam joke for laffs, develop an ad campaign based on the negative connotations of a man’s face in another man’s crotch (or any other similar non-heterosexual innuendo), or whatever other bullshit joke you want to make at a fggt’s expense, be our guest.

Just don’t ‘get upset’ when we call it homophobic or more-stupid-than-funny, or tell us that we have to laugh at it, or ‘understand where you’re coming from.’ And when you have failed to convince us, please don’t write to tell us your life story and how gr8 you are because you ‘have gay friends,’ or that your prostate exam made you feel as if you had been ‘kicked rlly hard in the ballz’ or had ‘the wind knocked out of you.’ Finally, please don’t encourage us to write to Andrew Sullivan to ‘see what he thinks,’ as if he were the god of all things geigh.

A question to our str8 lady friends: how do you put up with obnoxious bros who try to ‘tell you how to feel’ after they’ve insulted you?

Because mostly we want to direct these bros to the George Washington Bridge, where they can jump off and never be missed.

In the fourth book of 2666, we are presented with something of an encyclopedia of the literally thousands of crimes (99 percent of them against women) that occur in Bolano’s fictional border city of Santa Teresa — modeled on the real Juarez — over a period of perhaps ten years, with an emphasis on those who were tortured, raped, mutilated (sometimes but not always in the same horrible way) and murdered, and whose bodies were most often found in the desert or an illegal dump or a remote ravine or ditch.

For the most part, Bolano describes these murders in the distant, clinical tone of a medical report — or sometime the more hard-boiled prose of a detective novel — and gives a short summary of the investigative follow-up, which invariably dissolves into the case being “shelved” for all of the usual reasons (apathy, no clues, lost evidence, no resources, horrible bureaucracy, possible cover-ups). But even as the mounting atrocity of the events described threatens to paralyze us, there is enough nuance and lyrical beauty to the prose, so that we are like a victim beaten down and increasingly horrified that these murders could continue for so long, with so little apparent repercussion to those committing them.

Which of course begs the question of who in fact is committing them, and here Bolano also has an amazing ability to draw us into the many different possibilities, while identifying none as dispositive. There are drug dealers and pimps and rich capitalists — the factory owners who hire these women — who may or may not be involved; there is a creepy “gringo” who “seems like” a serial killer and may or may not be orchestrating kidnappings/murders from a prison, even after he’s arrested; there are government officials who may or may not be in league with the drug dealers and pimps and capitalists; there are the police, whose baseline level of misogyny is so high as to be completely demoralizing as they laugh about all the different ways a woman can be raped; there are men in general in this society, who are brought up to view women as subhumans, and there are women who for whatever reason become enmeshed with these men; above all else, there is capitalism and money, which trumps even the most violent of crimes.

Bolano gives us all of this and more, so that by the end, we have no choice but to indict society, i.e., ourselves, because while Santa Teresa (and Mexico) may or may not be a special case, it’s clearly less (of a special case) than more. In essence, it’s hard to emerge from this book without a conviction that we are all guilty of these horrible acts.

It could probably be argued that Bolano’s reflection of reality in this regard is a little too realistic for purposes of a novel; is it really necessary to introduce us to so many characters and leave their stories unresolved? Ultimately it didn’t bother us, because underneath the brutality his work resonates with a compassion for the murdered women — or women in general — that leads us as readers to care about what he’s describing, even if we know — like in real life — so little of it will lead anywhere.

One question we continue to ask is exactly where Bolano stands with regard to the gays. Although Bolano (unlike 98 percent of U.S novelists, who obv prefer to ignore the issue completely) is to be commended for weaving — what? an awareness, a motif — a presence through the text — e.g., “[a]s you’re well aware,” says one character about Mexico, “this is a macho country full of faggots” — it cannot be doubted that 2666 is pervasively homophobic to the extent that virtually every character — from university professors to blue-collar cops to outspoken feminists — when offered even the slightest opportunity uses it to express nothing but disdain for limp-wristed faggots or fudge packers or whatever else. (There are also brutally violent prison scenes of men raping each other — and worse.) While we admire the truthful tone of this hateful treatment of faggots in Bolano’s work, so far we’ve felt none of the compassion he shows for women; it leaves us a little wistful, knowing that in this fictional world — like the real one — we are somehow even worse off than the hundreds of desperate whores left to rot in the desert and be picked apart by the vultures.

The 2666 Review Roundup:
The Part About the Critics
The Part About Amalfitano
The Part About Fate
The Part About Archimboldi

Recently we heard from Scott Gunther, an old friend of ours from college (we also spent a semester together in Paris) and law school. Scott is now a French professor at Wellesley — i.e., he’s practicing as much law as we are, lol — and it turns out that he’s just published a book on the history of homosexuality in France.

Our memories of Scott are not extensive, due to the fact that we did so little to cultivate the relationship when we had the opportunity, a result of our own closet-case insecurities. But what we do remember was his startling ability to speak French perfectly — actually, it was beyond perfect, somehow even better than most native speakers — so that his thick-tongued classmates (and sometimes, the professors) were left with their jaws on the floor. By some fluke of scheduling, we ended up in the same class during our first year at Cornell, and despite having taken the language since seventh grade, we could barely say our name and count to ten; Scott, meanwhile, could hold forth on complicated, esoteric (but important) subjects such as what you will find within the pages of his new book.

Although we can still only dream of speaking French with the grace of Scott Gunther, we have learned to love and appreciate the country to an extent that we like to think — at least in some ways — parallels Scott’s devotion. When we were younger, we used to say that there were people — Scott was a good example — who were more French than American, and it was only a fluke that they had been born in this country; we now understand that we were really describing an unconscious (at least at the time) desire of what we wanted to become, i.e., more French than American. (Though we would no doubt say the reverse if we were living in France.)

It’s for this reason that we look forward to buying and reading Scott’s book, and encourage everyone else to do the same. We welcome any book that promises to shed light on a society that’s both more and less evolved than our own, and thus has much to teach us in both respects.

“Like any good closet, the French Republic has served both to protect and to restrain its gay citizens, keeping expressions of both pro-homosexual and anti-homosexual sentiment within a narrower range than has been the case in places like the United States – where both ‘gay pride’ and homophobia tend to be expressed more aggressively. The Elastic Closet examines the interconnected realms of law (from legal discrimination under Vichy to anti-hate speech legislation in 2004), politics (from the homophiles of the 1950s to distinctly French articulations of queer radicalism now) and the media (from postwar journals like Arcadie to Têtu and PinkTV today), with a focus on the relationship between French republican values and the possibilities they have offered for change in each of these three spheres. It is a reminder that in foreign places, other logics produce different, yet equally legitimate, strategies adapted to the constraints of their particular environments.”

For more info, see Scott’s website, or buy here.

When we first read about The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, we were excited! Not only was it short-listed for the Booker Prize, but it was rated the #1 Editors’ Pick for Best Book of 2008 by Amazon.com.* And oh yeah, Hensher is “openly gay” — kinda hate that expression, but whatevs — and has written trenchantly about the lack of gay actors in Hollywood, so without knowing that much about the book, we expected some insight into what we tend to think about as gay identity, or the gay voice.

The first quarter of the book is stunning. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Hensher describes the interactions among and between two families in a northern British suburb, one that has lived there for some time and another that is relocating from London. It’s the early 1970s, and as Hensher easily shifts perspective — at his best, reading him is really like getting wrapped up in a good teevee series — from the mothers to the daughters and the sons, he perfectly captures a sense of suburban ennui on one hand, and a kind of crushing terror of adolescence on the other. There are a few scenes — e.g., one of the mothers sort of loses her shit after her husband goes A.W.O.L. and kills her son’s pet, another in which a boy’s leg is broken during an elementary school recess — that are shockingly disturbing and brutal and ultimately heartbreaking, because we are taken back to the inexplicable cruelty and horror of youth as it plays out under the tranquil sheen of the suburbs.

Moreover, we are left with the sense that one or both of the youngest boys in the families are — or will be — gay, because they are nervous and obsessive and uncomfortable in ways that resonated with our own 1970s suburban upbringing, and so as the first section of the book ends, we look forward to learning more, not only about the boys, but about their older siblings, each of whom has appealing quirks and charms and less-appealing faults.

At this point, however, the tone of the book completely changes as we jump the shark lol ahead perhaps a decade into the future. We briefly meet the boys  — both are out of high school — but they are now beyond our empathy: one is sort of a freakish communist/Marxist who now hates his parents and agitates with some snobby leftist students on behalf of the local union, and the other has dropped out of college and moved back to London, where we don’t learn much about him except that he occasionally dates women (but without success), likes classical music and works a boring job. In short, we kind of suspect that he’s probably gay, but we don’t really get any insight or exploration into his condition, just a kind of blanket denial — at one point he sort of holds out that he’s asexual — that ultimately fails to hold our interest. Meanwhile, none of the other characters are developed with greater resolve, so that as we trudge forward, we find ourselves longing for the beginning of the book.

Also, instead of focusing on his core characters, Hensher allows the plot to seriously drift and instead offer pages and pages and pages — to give what is perhaps the most pointlessly egregious example — of a subplot involving a drug-dealing/money-laundering scheme. (We cannot help but wonder: did anyone edit this book? It could have easily been 200 pages shorter without losing anything.) True, the mother had an affair with a man in the scheme, but do we really need to follow him to a country house and meet his mafioso boss and family, when all we’re interested in is the fact that the woman had the affair and the ways it has impacted her relationship with her husband (i.e., the father of one of the boys)? If Hensher’s objective was to elevate the mundane into the dramatic — and he does this brilliantly at the beginning — why introduce a cheesy teevee plot device like this?

Which — i.e., the drug-dealer subplot — may have been forgivable except the rest of the book never recovers from similar digressions — e.g., an Australian we meet on one page kills himself in act of auto-eroticism ten pages later! someone starts dating a working-class girl, whose parents of course are sweet and lovable and dance the tango and earnestly offer tea in their best china — so that by the end, we don’t really have much sense of — or feelings for — any of the characters (much less insight into questions of gay identity).

We’re not saying that Hensher — or any gay writer — has a responsibility to explore these issues, but after setting them up so beautifully, he seemed to miss an opportunity to explore the truth as it’s so rarely done.

If the book at its best feels like it was made for teevee, this is also its flaw; it’s like one of those series that starts out with promise, but quickly drifts into hackneyed melodrama, leaving us with a longing — even if we choose to watch — to change the channel or perhaps fall asleep, where we can dream in images that while at times blurry at least hold some sign of our true selves.

*Despite our mixed feelings, we still encourage everyone to buy this book and judge for yourself.

Last November, we published an essay on the suffocation of the gay voice in American literature, and not much has happened in the past year to change our opinion of this bleak, dreary landscape. The New York Times Book Review recently published its annual selection of notable books for 2008, and although we’re not familiar with all of them, as so often happens when confronting such lists, we were struck by an apparent lack of anything on the fiction half of the list — characters, themes, authors — that could be considered even remotely gay. Similar observations hold true for Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani‘s respective top-ten lists.

[A few preliminary notes/disclaimers: On the non-fiction side, there is a biography of Rudolph Nureyev, whose relatively unapologetic and well-documented appetite for men and death from AIDS makes the issue impossible to ignore completely (this is somewhat akin to real gays we sometimes see on reality teevee, which are so different than the usual stereotypes offered up by the networks, see e.g., every show ever made except maybe Six Feet Under!); in terms of the fiction list -- our primary concern here -- it's possible that some of these books do in fact deal with gay subtexts and themes (and if so, we'd like to hear about it!), but we could not glean anything along these lines from the capsules included.]

Which — i.e., this lack of “gay” — is kind of telling, given the range of other topics and themes we encounter while glancing through the list, e.g., we find authors confronting racism and ethnic stereotypes and politics and war and crime and terrorism (9/11!) and suburban/domestic ennui and the usual host of marriage/love problems. While all of these are admittedly compelling (or can be, in the right hands), we cannot help but ask: “If we were an alien coming to earth and knew nothing about humans except for these books, would we have any clue about the existence of homosexuality?” In this case, sadly enough, the answer is no, we wouldn’t.

This begs the question of wtf why, which in turn suggests three possible answers: 1) gay themes don’t really lend themselves to literature, 2) gay themes are less important than all of the above, and so we shouldn’t be any more disappointed not to find them covered here than we would if say, we were passionate about golf and found no novels on the topic in any given year; or 3) whether important or not, there were no outstanding works of fiction published in 2008 dealing with questions of gay identity.

As to whether gay themes are appropriate to literature, to say they are not would seem quite plausible if you were relying on the post-war American literary canon, because hey, there’s nothing gay about it, so it couldn’t be that important, right? This of course is casuistry; beyond obvious reference to literary masters both near (Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran) and far (Marcel Proust), there is a case to be made that homosexuality is the most universally reviled trait in the history of humanity — cutting across class, ethnicity, organized religion, gender and nationality — and thus the perfect window through which to examine well, pretty much anything, or at least anything related to a fundamental understanding of who we (collectively) are, which is certainly one plausible purpose (or at least effect) of fiction. (And we would go so far as to say that writers who ignore this do so at their peril, and that their works will be dismissed and forgotten as epitomizing the unenlightened tendencies of the dark ages in which we now but perhaps will not always live.)

Moving on to the importance of question number two, beyond the obvious hey-we’re-gay bias we bring to the table, we cannot help but look at the national socio-political-economic landscape of the past twenty years or and wonder if the issue of homosexuality — as much as race, class or gender — has not defined (albeit in many cases, in a largely unconscious manner) the national “dialogue” in ways that have had disasterous effects on all of us. We think back to how Reagan and Bush actively ignored the holocaust of gay men that took place on their watches, and then we observe the manic behavior of our country under the Clinton and Bush II administrations — the economic frenzy, the ascendancy of Moral Politics, the embrace of the sickeningly masculine culture of SUVs and rigidly stereotypical gender roles in Hollywood movies, etc. etc. — and we wonder if, at least in part, this could not be attributed to the failure of our country (outside of a few marginalized communities, obv) to truly acknowledge what happened twenty years ago, much less grieve or examine it in a meaningful way. Maybe it’s just us, but when we consider New York City, we are often left with the sense that there’s still a pervasive grief that hovers over a city where something like 100,000 people (mostly gay men) died, many at a brutally young age; it’s the skeleton in our closet that nobody really wants to talk about because it’s painful and depressing, but our guess is that until we address this in a broad, public forum, we will continue to be srsly fucked up in ways that both are and aren’t obvious.

As gay forces mobilize in the fight for marriage equality (or as we like to refer to it, civil unions for all), there seem to be practical implications to the sadly straight state of American literature in 2008, namely in the startling lack of stories (by which we mean the literary fictive kind) upon which this movement can turn for solace and inspiration; where, for example, is our James Baldwin? Sure, there are big gay filmmakers on the cultural landscape, but isn’t there something a little unsettling about throwing money at an industry where out gays cannot be considered for leading roles? Where we have to rely on Sean Penn — who omg was willing to “play gay” — for distribution? Whatever the case with movies, the desperate fervor with which these crumbs are gulped down by the gays suggests a strong demand that is largely unmet in the literary context.

Moreover, what books offer that movies do not is the ability to present characters as multifaceted, complex distillations (or reflections) of the kind of people we meet in the real world, i.e., those who do not conform to stereotype and generalization. Relevantly, this includes depictions of gay sex! Because high-minded notions of equality to the side, it’s also important for some significant percentage of the population — i.e., certainly more than could be said to exist now — to understand that cocksucking and assfucking (and whatever gay ladies do) are — or can be — equally valid means of sexual expression, as much as anything our straight peers might want to entertain among themselves, even if it leads to procreation. Bottom line: to be successful politically, we gays need to fight the “ew” factor, and having straights pretend on film is more of a disorienting spectacle than an honest depiction of this fairly serious aspect of our humanity (i.e., something that both separates us and brings us together, to be kind of “Hallmarky” about it!).

Except all of that said — and most depressing of all for us to consider — we have no obvious candidates for inclusion on the sad NYT “notably straight” list. It’s not like we’re outraged that ______, the new novel by _______, in which issues of gay identity are eloquently explored in the context of ______, was left off the list. (But if we’re missing something here — and it’s possible, because we’re not professional critics — please let us know!) The point it, it seems like a ridiculous state of affairs that there are not at least a handful to pick from every year, and we find the absence of gays no less startling that we would if the same were true of women or ethnic minorities. Until we see these books written and accepted (i.e., both critically acclaimed and commercially successful), and in a consistent, regular manner, there will continue to be a somewhat grotesque quality to how we’re viewed by those on whose good will (at least in part) we depend for the political reform we seek.

So today we read a most excellent post on marriage at Emily Magazine, which we strongly recommend (and not just because we’re quoted at some length in it, lol!)

We have to wonder, is it a coincidence that the only two bloggers to link into our post against marriage are both (straight) lady writers (Emily Magazine and the always eloquent Writer’s Block)? We think not! If there’s anyone who’s suffered more at the hands of this odious institution, we’d like to hear about it. But alas, why aren’t the gays more attuned to this? And why aren’t more straight ladies joining in the fight for their own sakes as much as their gay bffs?

One obvs theory is that both groups have been too oppressed for too long to really think clearly. Let’s face it: the women’s movement has struggled with homophobia since the beginning; it’s not hard for us to remember how our own mother — co-president of her N.O.W. chapter in the late 1970s! — had to confront accusations from certain factions in her organization who did not want to be associated with “a bunch of lesbians,” lest this interfere with the quest for (mainstream) acceptance, which was deemed critical to the passage of the (sadly doomed, by just three states!) E.R.A. As for the gays, we too (or at least the men) have long tended to objectify women in a way that frankly does not help form potent political alliances with femiladyist orgs, and a quick scan through the leading “gay culture” blogs doesn’t exactly give us hope that this is changing. (Which is not to say our hands are exactly clean in this regard, either!)

But as Emily points out, the fight against marriage extends well beyond the political and into the psychological (the crushing pressure to be “happy,” which for girls in particular is so cruelly tied to marriage) and philosophical (what it means to be alone, and how this both cripples and releases us).

This makes us remember how, for most of high school and college, we spent all of our time ingratiating ourselves to the cool and artistic crowd — the MFAs who dyed their hair and shoplifted and took acid on school days — and then in our twenties, we could never understand how these same friends could so easily succumb to conventions like marriage and children: did they really want to become new versions of their parents so soon? We were so disappointed, and in turn they hated us (and in many cases, still do) for being so judgmental!

But we understand why they did it. Life is exhausting enough without having to think about the implications of marriage, and — except under the most unusual and often dire circumstances — the majority of people are not interested in being revolutionaries. But for gays like us who do want to dispense with it entirely, we would be smart to pay close attention to our feminist allies; like so many revolutions, this one may be led not by outsiders but by those who have seen firsthand everything society has to offer and responded with a “no fucking thanks.”

“I like your style” is kinda funny, but the back of the bottle is where things get good.

“Wow. That’s some great looking hair you have.”

Did you lol? We did.

For some reason it never ceases to amuse us. We imagine saying these 8.5 words to random people everywhere: on the street, the subway, to co-workers, our supervisors, people we genuinely like and those we genuinely hate. “Wow. That’s some great looking hair you have.”

On one hand, it’s hard not to imagine a 1970s guy in a wide collar oozing up to the Farrah Fawcett receptionist and delivering the line with a knowing nod, but the lack of exclamation points — the comic gold! — causes us to straddle a line between post-modern ironic absurdity and genuine wonder at the incredible quality of the hair we are observing. There is even a sense of relief that we are not beholding anything less than the transcendent, e.g. “Wow. Obama really did it.” We digest this for a few seconds and then laugh, because it’s something we wanted so badly that we could barely bring ourselves to believe that we actually have it. But then it sinks in, and we laugh again.

Thanks, Pert Plus! We hate a lot of products — not to mention having some serious problems with capitalism in general — but you’re an exception. (And give that copywriter a raise.)

Since we are gay and in a long-term relationship — almost ten years! — we are constantly besieged by frenz and relatives with questions that more or less could be summed up as this: “Oh it’s so sweet that you’re together! If you could get married, would you?”

In the past, we’ve generally hesitated before offering something along the lines of: “Well, maybe — but since it’s not going to happen anytime soon, let’s not worry about it.” This answer, of course, is disingenuous to the degree that we would get married in a second if it meant we could receive the same tax/legal benefits that ”straight” couples currently receive. We would even like to throw a party — a$$uming we’re not bankrupt — because even though we’re reclusive misanthropic curmudgeons, “weddings” are fun and offer a few hours of unadulterated optimism before sending us back to the hard travails of daily life.  (Note: we do not ever want to call this a “commitment ceremony” – even if that’s essentially what it is – because omg “precious moments” barf!)  

And yet yet yet! The vocabulary of this process — marriage, engagements, bridezillas, groomzillas, fiances, even weddings — strikes us as distasteful and cumbersome to the extreme, and it’s really this — we now realize — that has been the root of our hesitation. In truth, we don’t ever want to get “married”; after fleeing the wasteland of suburban America — where every single house featured two people who were or had been married – we have no desire to return to that sad landscape of desparation and conformity. Along the same lines, we have never liked the words “husband” and “wife” and frankly never want them to pass our lips when describing our relationship partner, because these words are indelibly tainted by association with an outdated, homophobic, misogynistic and bourgeois mode of thinking (and society) that has absolutely no appeal to us (except in campy movies and teevee shows).  

Though we are obviously not the only gays to express frustration with marriage and everything it implies in this regard, we are often surprised by the failure of those doing so to make the following point, which to us is most critical in the current (and quickly evolving) political climate: it’s possible to be against marriage — even, or especially, gay marriage — but in favor of equality for all, and we should frame our political objectives in terms of the latter, while dispensing with the former. This, of course, is what Obama implied in the debates about “gay marriage,” and we should hold him to it!

Practically speaking of course, this would entail the promulgation of legislation that would strip the word and concept of “marriage” from federal laws and regulations (and by implication the states) and replace it with a ”civil union” that would be open to any two people, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation or even family status. (Because really, there’s no reason why say, two sisters living together shouldn’t have the option of filing a joint tax return and receiving whatever other advantages are offered to “married” couples.)

The reason this is important to consider now is that there is a huge opportunity to make this happen at the federal level and we (collectively speaking) should not squander it by squabbling over “gay marriage.” (Which careful observers should note is the term of choice for Republican assholes and fundamentalist nutjobs, i.e., “the gays want gay marriage! Outrage!”)

As any (good) lawyer will tell you – not to mention any political campaign strategist — legal fights are won and lost based on definitions of the terms involved. Let’s be honest with ourselves: ”gay marriage” is needlessly provocative and moreover a losing proposition in our seriously homophobic country, as California just demonstrated, particularly when we can express the same objectives in terms of ”equality,” which is more often a winning argument. 

So if people want to limit “marriage” to a man and woman, we should happily grant this, but at the same time press our allies (starting with Obama) to acknowledge that the state needs to get out of the business of ”marriage” asap in order to ensure equal treatment for all of its citizens. ”Civil union for all” is the most elegant way forward, and we should join the ranks of the enlightened countries that have already recognized this.