It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.
Interpretation
Acceptance and normalization of gay marriage will take time and societal change.
Dan Savage reflects on the evolving nature of gay marriage, suggesting that true acceptance will require generations. He indicates that current attempts at normalization may feel superficial, as there hasn't been enough time for gay marriage to become an integral part of society.
In practice
During a Pride event, to highlight the ongoing struggle for equal rights.
When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.
My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.
A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.
And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that the bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.
Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.
I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.
Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.
Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.
- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
Tis the only comfort of the miserable to have partners in their woes.
Plenty of the women who were single in the nineteenth century wrote about their desire to evade marriage. Marriage was scary in a lot of ways. It often involved having a lot of kids, losing your autonomy, being in service to a husband and children who were often born at an unremitting pace without the benefit of modern medicine.
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