Some of your email responses to my post about Jonah Goldberg’s baby is worth responding to in a post. My point, broadly, is that heterosexuals do not usually realize that they disclose their sexual orientation all the time. Whenever they mention a wife or husband or child or all the other quotidian aspects of being straight, they don’t think of it as a declaration of heterosexuality. They just think they’re talking about life. And they are. But with gay people, any such references to our partners or homes or joint travels is regarded as somehow bringing up sex. Here’s en email that expresses the point well:
I hope the Jonah tiff is tongue-in-cheek. The equating of the birth of a child or a father’s pride with your lust for the boyfriend is stunningly stupid.
Note that this reader can only conceive of my relationship in terms of lust. Not love or companionship or respect or shared interests or reading the paper together or taking turns to walk the dog or watching Jimmy Kimmel each night. All my relationship will ever be to this reader is sex. Here’s another email making the point more graphically:
I’m not sure you’ll get your wish. Heterosexuality is normal and it’s about life. Homosexuality is about sex. It’s normal and reasonable for heterosexuals to be repelled by implications of homosexual sex.
But homosexuality is no more about sex than heterosexuality. It’s a sexual and emotional orientation with exactly the same contours, dramas, blessings and bugbears as heterosexuality. 99 percent of a gay relationship is about life when sex isn’t happening. It’s about waking up together, getting to know each others’ friends and family, getting into a fight on vacation, or complaining about the weak coffee your boyfriend just made. That’s what I think of when I mention the boyfriend. I wouldn’t dream of talking about our sex life, which is as private as any heterosexual’s. And part of the trap gay people are in is that we don’t even have a vocabulary to describe our lives. Imagine trying to describe your relationship with your wife or husband without being able to ue the terms ‘wife’ or ‘husband.’ Would ‘girlfriend’ do? Or ‘partner’? Or some other either infantilizing or euphemized term? Without the right to marry and the vocabulary of marriage, gay people will be permanently, rhetorically and culturally marginalized, shunted to the side of families into which they are born, uniquely unable to participate in the rituals that bind families together and keep them intact. That’s why marriage is so important an issue. And that’s why the fight for equal marriage rights does not come from a place that wants to hurt the traditional family. For most of us, it comes from a desire to finally be enfranchised in the traditional family into which we were born. It’s a unifying, conservative impulse. And it has almost nothing to do with sex as such at all.
The Dish 