Am I being left alone in Pervertville?

First of all don’t get me wrong: I am very happy that some countries are legalizing gay marriage and that it is happening in my lifetime. I feel kind of weirdly blessed, not like a slave who was set free, but maybe like a woman who has just been allowed to vote.

But the thing is: I am not that fond of marriage in the first place. I mean, I love wedding parties, but then there is alcohol and a perfect excuse for my friends to get together, and there is music, and dance, and more alcohol. The institution of marriage, however, is not something I give much value to. Still, here I am fighting (well, not exactly fighting, but I do write on a blog, don’t I?) for this right. And I wonder sometimes, in all my honesty, why do I care?

When I ask this question, a big word comes to mind: EQUALITY. Yeah, right, but then, equality reminds me of uniform, which is not as lovely a word when you point it to lifestyles. After the “why me (being gay)?” phase in adolescence, I stopped dreaming about being the equal. And I actually take great pride of that.

Being gay is a part of this pride of being different. Undeniably, there is this sense of David against Goliath (oh, the bible, such a lovely book.) in the act of being a fag. Edmund White (http://www.edmundwhite.com/) puts it very well in some of his books, but maybe especially at “City Boy”, an autobiography of his New York years in the seventies and eighties. I don’t have the book with me right now to point out the specific section which comes to my mind, but more or less in the middle of the book he talks about a guy he used to see on regular basis. This being pre-Stonewall and they’re being not much older than twenty, they did not see their “thing” as a relationship and fidelity was never an issue. These concepts were entirely foreign for them and, I believe, for many gay “things” in general at the time. This fact shocked me when I read it.

Stonewall changed everything, for sure. And there is no denying that it was for the best. But still, I get myself wondering: “wow, how would it feel to have a “thing” for which there is no common term?” “How free must it have felt?” “If Stonewall hadn’t happened, how would the gay “things” have evolved?”

But now, in a few countries, gays “things” are proper relationships, which can even be sanctioned as proper marriages. And I am happy for the gays who always dreamed of being married and just couldn’t. Hell, I might be one of those guys someday (and I never wore a tuxedo and that could be the perfect excuse for it. Or maybe I would wear a kilt again. Oh, I love kilts).

The yellow light, however, keeps blinking in my conscience. If I had lived in the sixties or in the seventies, I probably would have defended free love. But we are fifty years ahead of that and what I see is marriage conquering us all (with me helping, sort of).

Sometimes I even forget about the fact that marriage is not really my problem as a gay person. But ultimately, I cannot relate to that. So, every time a country accepts same sex marriage I feel very happy for the gay movement and for myself, but it is not a victory I can surely call my own.