National Review 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 (<A HREF="http://www.iSteve.com">www.iSteve.com</A>),
President of the Human Biodiversity Institute. Read his controversial NR
article, "Why Lesbians Aren't Gay" <A HREF="www.iSteve.com/lesvsgay.htm">www.i
Steve.com/lesvsgay.htm</A>)

America'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, gays 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 to connote his committment to another man. 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?

Steve Sailer
<A HREF="http://www.iSteve.com">www.iSteve.com</A>
President, Human Biodiversity Institute