"Being told we can't is making a lot of homos wanna"

In "The Commitment," sex columnist Dan Savage explores what gay marriage actually feels, sounds and smells like -- but should he tie the knot?

By Louis Bayard

Sep 30, 2005 | I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I didn't give a shit about getting married until George W. Bush told me I couldn't. My partner and I were in one of those "dignified" gay relationships, the kind whose very longevity triggers smiles of amazement in straight people. We had all our appliances; we were jointly leveraged; and because we were the fathers of two rampaging boys, we knew that neither of us could ever leave without the other putting a bounty on his head. Who needed a fucking ring to keep us in one place?

But as Dan Savage says in his fractious, uneven, ultimately moving memoir-screed "The Commitment," "Being told we can't is making a lot of homos wanna." So it was with this homo. The idea that someone could deny me a basic right of citizenship -- even go so far as to try to write me out of the Constitution -- was enough to make me sit up and notice this right, even though I (and my purported representatives in the national gay-rights movement) had never really paid it much attention before.

And at first, I could see gay marriage only through the prism of its enemies. It seemed to me that the best reason to marry was to piss off, in one stroke, George W. Bush, James Dobson, William Buckley, Ann Coulter, Fred Phelps and the pope. There was a certain luster to that; a glamour, even. But when I thought about it, I realized I could just as easily piss them off by giving out free condoms or morning-after pills or voting Democratic or skipping church -- or going to church -- all of which would entail significantly less expense and taffeta than a wedding. Regardless of whom I angered, what would I gain? In today's America, why should any gay man or woman (outside of Massachusetts) get married? Would it be an act of revolution or just volition? Would it bear a public or strictly private meaning? And would I have to buy a tux?

That's just it, you see. The debate is being waged from pulpits -- holy and secular. Voices are raining down on us, some of them shrill, some (Andrew Sullivan, most notably) eloquent -- all speaking in abstract cadences because they're trying to define an institution that has barely begun and, in some quarters, may never exist. What we need, clearly, is someone to field-test these abstractions, to show us what gay marriage actually looks, feels, sounds, smells like in these legally and culturally proscribed times.

Well, OK, I didn't know we needed that until I read "The Commitment." But having realized we did, I can now see that Savage was just the guy to fill this peculiar niche in our national discourse. In addition to penning the sly and scabrous sex-advice column "Savage Love" (his most sustained work -- an underground comédie humaine), Savage has, in his last two books, staked out the front lines of cresting social movements and given us a view from the trenches. "The Kid" was a funny, achy, refreshingly unsentimental look at how Savage and his boyfriend, Terry, went about acquiring a baby. (It was also an ur-text for a whole generation of gay parents.) "Skipping Towards Gomorrah" was a takedown of William Bennett and the virtuecrat movement in which Savage (not always convincingly) went about committing or witnessing all seven of the deadly sins in order to show how little harm they posed to sinners or the surrounding populace.

So it stood to reason that, if anyone were going to scout the terrain of gay marriage, it would be Savage -- although he spends most of the book wondering if he should venture in at all. On the face of things, he and his partner (a word Savage hates) have no particular need to tie the knot. They have long ago graduated into the "dignified" category of relationships. They are living comfortably in a politically liberal community in the Pacific Northwest; Savage's career is singing along; Terry stays home with their 6-year-old son, D.J., who likes skateboarding and Iron Maiden.

But their 10th anniversary is fast approaching, and they want some way of commemorating it (Terry suggests tattoos) without, of course, putting any jinx on the relationship and, oh, maybe they could have some kind of ceremony or maybe they shouldn't have any ceremony -- and through this valley of indecision gusts an alarming new prospect: Why don't they get married?

Next Page: Would gay people be bad at marriage?

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