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

This idea is most vigorously propounded by Savage's mother and most vigorously resisted by Savage's son, who announces that, if his dads persist in this course, "He's not coming to the wedding. He'll come to the party after the wedding -- provided there's cake -- but there's no way he's going to the ceremony." (Boys, he insists, do not marry boys.) And even Savage is skeptical: "I can't see going to Canada or Massachusetts to marry Terry when all we're going to get for our trouble is the jinx and a scrap of paper that would be worthless in the state where we live."

And nevertheless -- is it fate? family pressure? his publisher? -- he does inch closer to matrimony. And for me, the best part of reading "The Commitment" is seeing Savage come up against all the hurdles -- internal and external -- that have put me off that institution. And if he doesn't exactly clear them, not every time, he at least negotiates them in a plausible manner. Beginning with:

Hurdle 1: The "Notes on Camp" thing

Camp, according to Susan Sontag, is "failed seriousness." At the risk of being rude, may I suggest this perfectly describes the average commitment ceremony? Those handsome men (and women) in their matching white tuxedos and boutonnieres have always looked absurd to me -- like schnauzers in sweaters. The more seriously they take themselves, I'm afraid, the more ridiculous they seem. And no wonder, says Savage: The rituals they're enacting are "pregnant with heterosexual symbolism." He asks: "Wouldn't two gay men walking down the aisle together look just as silly as two gay men doing the foxtrot?"

Solution: Throw a big Chinese New Year party. Invite everyone you know. Wear a T-shirt and jeans. If something happens at or before or after the party, so be it. No tuxes.

Hurdle 2: The baby-with-the-bathwater thing

I've always felt that my "dignified" gay relationship really does have a certain dignity, which is largely the product of surviving in the face of society's vast indifference. I don't think I could have expressed it, though, as well as Savage does: "Unlike heterosexuals, we had to do the hard work of building a life together in order to be taken seriously, something we did without any legal entanglements or incentives. Without the option of making a spectacle out of our commitment -- no vows, no cakes, no rings, no toasts, no limos, no helicopters -- we were forced to simply live our commitments. We might not be able to inherit each other's property or make medical decisions in an emergency or collect each other's pensions, but when our relationships were taken seriously it was by virtue of their duration, by virtue of the lives we were living, not by virtue of promises we made before the Solid Gold Dancers jumped out of the wedding cake at the reception." If gay men start letting in the wedding cake and the Solid Gold Dancers, Savage suggests, "something else will be lost, something intangible, something that used to be uniquely our own."

Solution: Get two cakes. Don't hire dancers. Trust that the "something intangible" will still be in place after it's all over.

Hurdle 3: The gay-membership-card thing

To a certain class of gay theorist (Edmund White, say), the whole idea of aping traditional institutions like marriage is unredeemingly heterosexist. And in its current frangible condition, marriage might not be something we should aspire to, anyway, and even if we did take the plunge, maybe we wouldn't be so hot at it? Savage is even more pessimistic: "I, in fact, fully expect us to be worse at it. With so many homos forced to sit at dinner tables and in pews listening to parents and preachers dismiss same-sex love as diseased or nonexistent, it's highly likely that thousands of immature and/or insecure homos will marry to prove to themselves, to their families, and to their preachers that gay love is so real."

Solution: ... well, this is how Savage's mother responds when Terry makes something of the same point:

"Jerkos have told you both that you're not worthy of marriage. You could flip off the jerkos by doing the right thing and getting married anyway, but you're way too clever for that. So you've decided to flip them off by refusing to get married. You say it's 'acting like straight people' ... You should stop worrying about acting like straight people, Terry, and start acting like the person I know that you are -- a serious, grown-up, responsible person who should be mature enough to make a serious commitment to the person he chose to start a family with, just like his parents did."

And with that, the final hurdle is cleared. Or is it?

Next Page: Savage's rage over gay marriage

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