There’s a lot of talk about marriage lately. The government making progress on implementing equality in civil marriage is, predictably, bringing a lot of homophobes out of the woodwork. While some religious people and institutions are in favor of marriage equality, of course a lot aren’t too.
I’m not a religious person so I don’t feel qualified to talk about that (though I will say it’s unfair to ban religious groups from having anything to do with same-sex weddings, although this is starting to change now that civil partnership ceremonies are allowed in religious settings, but there’s still the “separate but not equal” issue to be sorted out, because marriage is currently only for mixed-sex couples and civil partnerships only for same-sex couples).
What I wanted to say, though, is that all this discussion has reminded me of one of my pet peeves.
A lot of people know this issue as “gay marriage,” and this sort of illustrates my problem; it’s not just about gay people. Restrictions on who can currently get married have implications for bi and trans people too (a huge range of issues for trans folk, which I am not qualified to get into and which are outside the scope of this blog, but even what I know is, like so many things about dealing with legal recognition of anything other than happiness with the gender one was assigned at birth, intimidating, complex and unfair), and calling it “gay marriage” erases us and our unique issues.
But we’re used to that. That happens every time people say “LGBT” to mean “gay.” It happens when market stalls selling biphobic t-shirts and main-stage MCs making fun of bisexual people are part of a Pride festival that supposedly celebrations LGBT life. It happens when that great LGB charity, Stonewall, answer the question of whether civil partnerships should be extended to opposite-sex couples with “This is a matter for heterosexual people and Stonewall would recommend consulting with them and stakeholder organisations representing them.” This is bad enough.
Something else, though, bothers me about all this talk of “gay marriage” and “heterosexual civil partnerships” and “homosexual relationships” and “straight relationships.” I really dislike labeling relationships as straight or gay…or anything really.
For one thing, this contributes to bisexual erasure too. When (say) a married male public figure is suspected of or discovered to be having an affair or some dodgy sex or whatever with another man, the press unfailingly reports this as a “gay encounter,” a “gay affair,” a “gay relationship.” The man’s “straight” marriage is negated by this gayness. (Now when the story is about cheating, we might be glad of the potential bi erasure, because we are — wrongly! — assumed to be incapable of fidelity quite often enough already, thank you very much. But seriously, this kind of “straight until proven gay” rhetoric is no good for anyone, of any sexuality.) I actually wrote about this in the now-defunct version of this blog, when a politician faced “gay rumors” that led to him feeling he had to justify his childless marriage by giving details of his wife’s miscarriages. “The implicit reasoning,” I said, “goes something like ‘If Hague’s shagged this young man, that means he’s gay. And if he’s gay, that means his marriage must be at best in tatters and at worst a lie all along.’”
This is just one of the ways that the labeling of relationships, rather than people, with a sexuality can, if carried to its logical conclusion, be very illogical indeed. And needlessly unfair on lots of people.
Take, for instance, my non-bi different-gender partner. We’re married. Do we have a “straight marriage”? I don’t like to think so; it rankles on me. I already dislike how much I “pass” for straight, even as I take advantage of it to, for instance, not cause friction amidst my homophobic family. But we certainly don’t have a “bi marriage”; that’d be unfair on him, give most people ideas of threesomes or group marriages, and anyway it just sounds ludicrous. (I hear about gay marriages and straight marriages all the time, but bi marriage is something my brain trips over and has trouble parsing as a meaningful phrase.)
Again this is something where the tendency of bi people to be in relationships with people who aren’t bi goes ignored. Most people, I’m sure, don’t think twice about saying “gay marriage” or “heterosexual relationship,” because it’s assumed that the sexual identity applies to both the people in it.
It’s not something I tend to bring up, because there are always bigger points to be made. If someone is speaking in favor of “gay marriage,” does it benefit anyone for me to spikily insist that they say “same-sex marriage” or “equal marriage’ instead? Possibly — I have said that a lot — but I pick my battles. Mostly I’m happy that someone’s on the right side, and I don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Similarly, while I may (for example) feel vaguely disappointed when someone I know from bi contexts talks about the “lesbian sex” she’s having, because I don’t understand how it’s lesbian if she isn’t, I’m reluctant to get churlish about word-choice at a time when it’d be such a buzzkill.
But I do think about it.
