Queering Marriage

Katrina Kimport

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780813562216
• eBook ISBN: 9780813570358
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Over four thousand gay and lesbian couples married in the city of San Francisco in 2004. The first large-scale occurrence of legal same-sex marriage, these unions galvanized a movement and reignited the debate about whether same-sex marriage, as some hope, challenges heterosexual privilege or, as others fear, preserves that privilege by assimilating queer couples.

In Queering Marriage, Katrina Kimport uses in-depth interviews with participants in the San Francisco weddings to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, she contends, these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality.

During her deeply personal conversations with same-sex spouses, Kimport learned that the majority of respondents did characterize their marriages as an opportunity to contest heterosexual privilege. Yet, in a seeming contradiction, nearly as many also cited their desire for access to the normative benefits of matrimony, including social recognition and legal rights. Kimport’s research revealed that the pattern of ascribing meaning to marriage varied by parenthood status and, in turn, by gender. Lesbian parents were more likely to embrace normative meanings for their unions; those who are not parents were more likely to define their relationships as attempts to contest dominant understandings of marriage.

By posing the question—can queers “queer” marriage?—Kimport provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.

CHAPTER 1

The Winter of Love

This really was our generation’s Stonewall. It was an absolutely unprecedented, thrilling, amazing, overwhelming experience. . . . It just was this moment of love. That’s why they call it ‘the winter of love’ because it was a spontaneous outpouring of joy and love. And the whole city was just bubbly.

—Marriage equality activist

Gavin Newsom was sworn in as the mayor of San Francisco in January 2004. It had not been an easy climb to the top. Mayor Newsom entered office following a highly contested political campaign during which he found few allies in San Francisco’s lesbian and gay community. Nonetheless, newly elected, young, handsome, married to an equally attractive woman, and charismatic, Newsom showed political promise. Among his first actions as mayor, he attended President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address and heard Bush’s call for using constitutional processes to restrict marriage to different-sex couples.1 This troubled Newsom. Although the gay and lesbian community had not played a large role in his election, he recognized same-sex couples as members of his constituency and perceived their exclusion from marriage as discriminatory—and he had an idea how to fix it.2

When he returned to San Francisco, Newsom reached out to lesbian and gay rights activists about his burgeoning idea, asking them whether they thought it would be helpful to the community. After a few meetings and the encouragement of representatives from three activist organizations, on February twelfth, around noon, Mayor Newsom made history by directing city hall to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in San Francisco.

No one involved in the whirlwind planning expected that more than a handful of licenses would be issued before a court intervened to stop the license-granting, so the mayor chose the recipients of those first licenses carefully. First up were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, icons of the lesbian and gay rights movement and partners for fifty years. Martin and Lyon married in a semi-private ceremony in a city hall office, with a dozen or so public officials, lesbian and gay rights activists, and members of the press in attendance. Soon after, city hall opened its doors to any couple who wanted to get married. So began what many participants called “the winter of love.”

The timing of these events owed, in part, to Newsom’s desire to bring his idea to fruition as quickly as possible, but it was also strategic. Beginning in the late 1990s, advocates for same-sex marriage designated February twelfth as “Freedom to Marry Day.” Same-sex couples marked the occasion by traveling to their local city hall and requesting marriage licenses, making visible their exclusion from this cultural rite of passage. In 2004, as Martin and Lyon discretely married inside city hall, gay and lesbian couples gathered outside city hall with plans to request marriage licenses. Among them was Keith, a forty-five-year-old lawyer who had been committed to his partner, Tim, a forty-three-year-old policy analyst, for seventeen years. (Keith and Tim, as well as the names of all respondents discussed in this book, are pseudonyms.)

The year prior, as Keith and Tim sat down to complete their tax returns, they were frustrated yet again that each had to check the “single” box. It felt like a lie to represent themselves as unmarried after over a decade and a half of commitment. On top of that, they knew filing jointly would give them significant tax advantages. After mulling this over for several months, the two decided to become active in advocating for marriage equality. A more personal reason also motivated them: Tim’s parents are an interracial couple, and Tim grew up acutely aware that the law for much of the twentieth century would not have permitted his parents to marry.3 He knew what marriage meant to his parents and his family, and he saw that the law can change.

Despite their hopes that this would be the year they received a marriage license, Keith and Tim assumed they would be denied licenses. Along with the other couples lined up outside city hall, they intended to use the rejection as an opportunity to protest their exclusion from marriage. Some in the crowd had heard rumors that this year would be different, but no one knew for sure. In the short time that Newsom’s plan came together, only an inner circle of activists were in the know. But this year was different: same-sex couples received the licenses they came to request. Almost immediately, a line of eager couples formed as the would-be protesters became newlyweds.

There were other, largely unanticipated, strategic advantages to the February twelfth date. The courts were closed that day for Lincoln’s birthday. As expected, opponents of same-sex marriage quickly mobilized a petition to the state courts to cease the marriages, but no action could be taken that day. When the courts opened the next day, they declined to halt the marriages, allowing Lynn and Anne, together eleven years, to marry. As Lynn, a forty-six-year-old director of a senior center, remembered, it was “lucky Friday the thirteenth.” That morning, while Lynn got ready in the bathroom, Anne, a fifty-four-year-old artist, poured herself a cup of coffee and read the headlines in the newspaper. She shouted to Lynn that same-sex weddings were happening at city hall. Lynn responded, “Do you want to go?” Anne replied, “Yeah, let’s go!” Anne left her cup of coffee half-finished on the kitchen table and the two raced to city hall. As they recounted to me later, both were surprised at how much marriage mattered to them and, indeed, how much it changed their relationship.

City hall stayed open late that Friday, with staff members working overtime without pay to marry the couples lined up for licenses. It opened again on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, despite Monday being President’s Day and officially a government holiday. Isabel and Raine celebrated six years of commitment by marrying on Sunday, February fifteenth. Both grew up in cultures that heavily stressed marriage, and they wanted to honor their relationship by marrying. The two were also jointly raising the children each brought from a prior (different-sex) marriage. Isabel, a thirty-nine-year-old professor, in particular, felt that marriage would change how they all related as a family. They selected the day strategically. Raine, a forty-five-year-old retiree, is in a wheelchair, and waiting in line would quickly exhaust her. They had, Raine said, one shot. Together, they decided Valentine’s Day would likely be too popular and hoped the following day would be less congested. Early in their wait, a volunteer told them they had a 1 percent chance of marrying that day, given the number of couples already ahead of them. They took that chance and several hours later received their license.

By the time the courts were back in session on Tuesday, hundreds of couples had married. Again, the courts declined to halt the marriages, and city hall continued to issue licenses through the end of the week. The line of eager couples snaked up and down hallways within city hall and then continued around the block outside. With city hall open late and over the weekend and newly deputized officials on hand, San Francisco was able to process a higher than average number of licenses in that time. Even then, they could not keep up with the demand. Barbara and Gayle, together three years, came back two days in a row to wait in line—despite Barbara’s belief that marriage is a bourgeois institution that perpetuates inequality. Even as Barbara, a forty-eight-year-old electrician, remained suspicious of marriage, she could not help but acknowledge the pleasure she felt in being part of what she saw as an act of civil disobedience by thousands of gay and lesbian couples. At the end of the first full week of granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, city hall switched to an appointment-only procedure. Soon there was a three-month wait for an open appointment. For these individuals, something significant was at stake.

What was not at stake was these couples’ commitment to each other. For all intents and purposes, many considered themselves already married, using the term in the cultural sense to convey long-term commitment. And yet, notwithstanding their long-existing commitments to each other, these couples dropped everything to get to city hall. Anne and Lynn left their coffee half consumed at the kitchen table; Philip, a thirty-four-year-old project coordinator just starting a new job at a retail company, walked out of a morning meeting after receiving a text message that the licenses were being issued; and Phoebe, a thirty-seven-year-old analyst, drove overnight from Southern California with her partner, Alex, to get married. Gays and lesbians from throughout the United States and around the world came to San Francisco to marry, braving rain and bad weather, camping out overnight, and enduring hours and sometimes, like Barbara and Gayle, even days of waiting in line.

On March 11, 2004, four weeks after Mayor Newsom’s executive order, the Supreme Court of California issued a stay, pending review of the case, ending the granting of marriage licenses. By that time, 4,037 same-sex couples representing forty-six states and eight foreign countries had received marriage licenses, and 3,955 of them managed to marry and get their marriages officially recorded. The San Francisco events were not the first instance of gay and lesbian activists agitating for the right to legally marry, nor were they the first public occurrence of same-sex weddings, but these events garnered extensive media coverage, in both the mainstream and gay presses, and captured the attention of the nation.

Controversy surrounded the mayor’s decision at a national level, but in San Francisco, the events were joyous and celebratory. Lynn remembers watching Anne be overcome by emotion as the magnitude of the events dawned on her. Keith summed up city hall as “the happiest place on earth.” An outpouring of goodwill welcomed lesbian and gay couples into the institution of marriage: cabs offered free rides to newlyweds, flower shops distributed free bouquets to those waiting in line, and bakeries offered slices of wedding cake to couples exiting city hall with their marriage licenses. People in and around city hall applauded, cheered, and cried tears of happiness. Volunteers lined up to be deputized to perform marriage ceremonies. Ernesto, a fifty-eight-year-old health educator, married Tony, his partner of twenty-eight years, the morning of the thirteenth and then, caught up in the excitement of the events, returned the next three days to volunteer at city hall, escorting couples through the process, managing lines, and acting as a witness. For the couples, their loved ones, and their allies, this was the Winter of Love.

Six months after the first same-sex marriage license was issued to Martin and Lyon, on August 12, 2004, the California Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision that Mayor Newsom had exceeded his authority in issuing the licenses, although they declined to rule on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage more generally, effectively inviting future challenges to state marriage law. The court further ruled, three to two, to void all of the same-sex licenses. For the couples who had waited in line and paid their license fee, their certificate was now legally nothing more than a piece of paper. But although those newly minted licenses were no longer legally meaningful, the story of same-sex marriage was far from over. In fact, it was just the beginning.

In this book, through the stories that participants in the Winter of Love shared with me, I offer an up-close portrait of the weddings that helped galvanize a national movement for marriage equality. I empirically examine what happens when same-sex couples wed, what it means to them, and how it impacts their lives. This investigation, even as it foregrounds the personal experiences of gays and lesbians who married, situates their stories in the broader social meanings of marriage. Indeed, their offered meanings and reported impacts of marriage are always tacitly in conversation with contemporary ideas about marriage and provide a window into the institution itself. This book is an account of what the practice of same-sex marriage can tell us about society.

From the outset, it is important to remember that these weddings were only briefly legal; the California Supreme Court voided the licenses. And, as the accounts of some of my respondents detail, many participants never expected the marriages to last. Yet their narratives of the impact of those months of marriage on their lives belie the licenses’ short-lived legality. It is worth emphasizing this point. In the stories shared in subsequent chapters, the immediate effect of the institution of marriage on respondents’ lives even though their marriages were invalidated is clear; there is a qualitative effect of being married that is not dependent on the length of time couples were married.4 Even as the legitimacy of the weddings was always precarious, these marriages felt real. That this feeling of authenticity overrode their rational assessments that the marriages would not last speaks to the utility of this case for exploring what happens when same-sex couples marry. It turns out that marriage has power even in brief doses. In the 2004 San Francisco wedding events, we have a defined group of couples who married within weeks of one another, in circumstances that drew the attention of the world. They were the first large group of same-sex couples to marry and they knew it. Their awareness made them keenly attuned to how and when marriage mattered in their everyday lives. In essence, they were a test case for same-sex marriage, and they demonstrated a demand for marriage that became part of a nationwide movement.

In the years since the Winter of Love, marriage equality has enjoyed significant successes, with same-sex couples gaining the right to marry in several states, and more than a few setbacks, including the passage of constitutional amendments rewriting state constitutions to restrict marriage to different-sex couples in other states. Polls point to increasing support for same-sex marriage, particularly among young adults, even as opponents agitate for a national constitutional amendment against it. Throughout these political and cultural shifts, scholars and pundits have widely speculated about the meanings and impacts of same-sex marriage.

Like San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, the Winter of Love promised to demonstrate a peaceful, loving, alternative way of being in the world. It was a protest over discrimination against lesbian and gay couples, it was a valorization of romantic love as the foundation of families, and it was a challenge to the status quo. Like the 1969 riots outside the New York City Stonewall Inn that are popularly credited with touching off the gay liberation movement, the Winter of Love was a transformative event. The question is, transformative of what?

Transforming Society or Transforming Gay and Lesbian Couples

Many are hopeful that same-sex marriage will transform the meaning of marriage and, with it, society by disrupting the dominance of heteronormativity. Society privileges heterosexuality. As sociologist Chrys Ingraham (1994, 204) cogently argues, heterosexuality is “the standard for legitimate and prescriptive sociosexual arrangements.” Heterosexuality is the norm. We assume, until told otherwise, that people are heterosexual, that they are attracted to people of a different gender from themselves. Think of the scenario of a mixed-gender couple requesting a hotel room for a night. The hotel would give them a room with one bed. However, if the two people approaching the hotel desk were both men, it is hard to imagine they would be offered a room with just one bed. They would likely get a two-bed room. Perhaps those two men do not mind the extra bed, but the underlying message the two-bed room sends is that they are not perceived as a romantic couple—their relationship is presumed platonic. The members of the heterosexual couple, on the other hand, can move through life without having to explain themselves.

There are myriad less benign examples of the ways heterosexual couples are privileged. Marriage is one of them. Throughout US history, rules and regulations surrounding marriage have regulated sexuality (Cott 2000), instituting different-sex relationships as normative and socially rewarded. According to the General Accounting Office (2004), legal marital status carries with it 1,138 federal benefits, including expedited citizenship for spouses, access to a spouse’s social security benefits and/or government pension, and the financial advantages of filing joint tax returns. The exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from state-sanctioned marriage is a legal means by which the state endorses and rewards heterosexuality, since the rights and benefits of marriage are unavailable to the unmarried. The privileging of these particular relationships and their simultaneous marking as simply ordinary reinforces presumptions that everyone is heterosexual and, moreover, the prescription that heterosexuality is normal. In other words, they institute heteronormativity.

As a society, our unquestioned presumption of heterosexuality conceals this operation of heteronormativity. When heterosexuality is naturalized, its discursive production is concealed. Instead of recognizing the ways that law, culture, and language, for instance, privilege and reward heterosexuality, thinking of heterosexuality as universal and natural renders the benefits that accrue to heterosexuals—and the punishment of nonheterosexuals—invisible or, even worse, normal. Ingraham (1994) calls this the “heterosexual imaginary.” Hiding in the imaginary, heteronormativity does not require explanation or critique and its institutionalization of inequality is perpetuated. Without pointed consideration, this is the way the world works.

Weddings are among the practices most commonly marked as heterosexual. Ingraham (1999; 2003) has argued that the romantic discourse around weddings masks the operation of transnational capitalism in the increasingly expensive business of having a wedding, a process that remakes the meaning of weddings to deemphasize love, commitment, and family and instead reinforce heteronormative expectations. Other work demonstrates that weddings continue to valorize heterosexuality over all other sexual identities. For instance, Ramona Oswald’s (2000) analysis of interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people about their experiences attending heterosexual weddings finds that members of the gay and lesbian community consistently report feeling hidden during these events and that the value of their own relationships was being questioned. For many in the lesbian and gay community, weddings and marriage are culturally associated with heterosexuality and heterosexism and are experienced with feelings of exclusion.

With same-sex marriage, some see an opportunity to disrupt the relationship between marriage and heteronormativity and to transform society by undermining (a component of) heterosexual privilege. In this group, scholars argue that the very presence of same-sex couples in a heterosexually dominated institution will undermine heterosexuality’s normative power. Feminist philosopher Cheshire Calhoun (2000), for example, argues that when lesbian and gay couples can marry, the presumption that straight couples are “better” will be undone. Such advocates for same-sex marriage anticipate that including gays and lesbians in marriage, while continuing to privilege marriage as an institution, will assert the morality of same-sex relationships and homosexuality broadly. They hope that this will then translate culturally into increased equality for nonheterosexuals.

Along this vein, most expansively,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Winter of Love
• 2. Marrying for the Movement
• 3. Marrying for Rights
• 4. Marrying for Love
• 5. Gender and Parenthood
• 6. The Persistent Power of Marriage
• 7. Exposing Heteronormativity
• 8. Conclusion
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author