This is interesting to me, since it seems rather likely that plenty of straight guys will marry another guy as a business arrangement. As being gay becomes more socially acceptable, I predict a rise of gay marriages for the purpose of getting another guy citizenship, or for tax/benefit reasons. I knew a guy and girl in one of those marriages in the navy… she needed insurance, and he wanted the extra ‘live off the base’ money he would get for being married.
Guys i think just tend to take marriage a bit less seriously than women on a whole, and will use it more often as a tool.
I’ve heard this concern before, but I’d really like to know if it’s got any basis. I just can’t see a whole mess of straight women explaining to dates that they’ve got a wife at home or straight guys willing to present themselves as gay men for the tax breaks or citizenship. Yes, it will happen, but more than it does currently between men and women? I don’t see it.
Can any Canadians weigh in? Or people from other countries where it’s legal?
Yea most of you stuck with the political ramifications.
I was thinking more whimsically. Like whether or not particular traditions might crop up, a la debuttante balls. As it is we have culture that deals with females like debuttante balls, and then males like bachelor parties, and recently some mixing of the two, though more women adopting male conventions like bachelorette parties. I was wondering if possibly some relatively unique cultural institutions might crop up along the lines of debuttante balls and bachelor parties that would be specific to homosexual culture. There is both a robust gay culture and a robust lesbian culture that are somewhat distinct from mainstream culture and even one another.
I’m kind of sad that I haven’t gotten to attend a gay/lesbian wedding or even commitment ceremony. Obviously, the former is a bit unlikely given my location.
My closest gay friend is my boss, who doesn’t really do the LTR thing.
There will be a huge rise in barroom sightings of gay guys bitching about what a whore their ex-husband was. Oh, and more gay guys asking to crash on your couch because their asshole husband kicked 'em out of the house.
I don’t know where you’re from, but ‘debutante balls’ really don’t feature (at all) in mainstream hetro culture round my neck of the woods, so it’s kinda irrelevant.
Here, we’ve had hen parties for girls for years (your equivalent of a bacherlorette party), so with lesbian weddings, each girl has one - and most of the friends therefore get to go to two parties instead of one. These parties are also not split along gender lines - so if I was to get married, my hen party would consist of male as well as female friends. Division of gender is just irrelevant when you don’t have opposite sexes getting married. You also tend to have more mingling of friends generally (no boys night’s out, for instance), hence everyone going to both parties.
Even the straight folks around here don’t do “debutante balls” (well, I suppose some of the snootier old-money types still might because it’s the snooty old-money thing to do, but it’s certainly not a widespread custom outside of those rareified circles).
I suppose it would give a whole new meaning to a “Coming Out” party, though.
Keep in mind, too, that even though SSM has only recently been legalized (or is still fighting for legalization), it doesn’t change the fact that gays and lesbians had been throwing Commitment Ceremonies and Civil Union Parties and the like for many, many years. I know a few couples who have had two ceremonies - one in the pre-legalization years, and a second one to make it official once the laws changed.
The gay community already had traditions and customs surrouding those celebrations, and if anything, the fact that they’re now able to get married in the legal sense just means that some of the more unique aspects of the commitment ceremonies have been swept away in favour of something more “traditional”.
Yeah, I don’t know, dude. I don’t really find that there’s much of a distinct lesbian culture where I live. Around here (St. Louis), I know there are remnants of some sort of lesbian culture among the older generation – the feminist nazi let’s-protest-everything-just-for-the-sake-of-protesting crowd. We avoid those folks. And, yes, during Pride weekend we see a bunch of mullets and flannel emerge from somewhere where they lurk during the rest of the year.
But honestly, among our group of lesbian friends, we’re too busy living our lives, getting married (legally or not), paying our mortgages, having families, and so on, to really have that much of a distinct culture. Other than having short hair and wearing boy jeans on the weekend, we’re really not that different from all y’all straight people. Heck, I don’t even have short hair anymore, and I enjoy wearing skirts in the summer, because they’re comfy.
When we got married, we had a small backyard wedding. Then we threw a big party for friends and family. Pretty traditional, huh?
Our friends from Boston rented a venue, just like straight people, got married in the garden of the place and then had a reception. Also pretty darn traditional.
Our gay friends here in St. Louis got married in a gay-friendly church. Had a reception. Same old, same old.
Other gay friends went to Toronto and got married. It was a package deal with accommodations and wedding venue/arrangements all together. Actually, it was strikingly similar to the destination wedding that a couple of my straight friends had a few years ago. And the straight couple had a much more exotic location.
I’ve never heard of such a thing happening and on the face of it it’s asinine.
If people were willing to legally marry to get tax breaks, then men and women would already be doing it en masse. I had a female roommate for years; why not get “married” for tax breaks? But people don’t do that, because it’s ridiculous, and it’s economically irrational; even stupid people will generally understand that the tiny tax benefits of a sham marriage will be hopelessly outweighed by the financial risk and drain of a real divorce.
The results in Canada should be instructive, since it’s the most similar country to the USA. And the results have been, for the most part, nothing. Gay people get married and nobody really gives a shit, to be honest. For all the screaming you hear from the religious right, the attitude of most people is “Yeah, whatever. I’m busy with my own life.”
The military has a few gay couples. When homosexuality was removed from the books as a military crime in 1992, you know what happened? Nothing. There were no disciplinary breakdowns, so masses of soldiers running for the exits. As Northern Piper points out, heriarchy trumped bitching. The government said “Here’s the new rule and if you don’t like it, there’s the door, pal,” and that was that.
The only effect of legalized gay marriage would be a slightly faster track to long term full acceptance of gays, a slight improvement in teh economic health of the country (since married people generally are more economically productive) and a few religious nuts would get all bent out of shape in the short run. For most people, in almost all situations, the change would be unnoticeable. There’s no downside to gay marriage.
This is where I’d expect to see the change – not in society at large, but in gay culture. Didn’t gay culture used to be more fabulous? I’m thinking back to the late '70s, early to mid-'80s, when gay life seems to me to have been substantially different from today. Not to discount AIDS as a factor, but it looks to me like more widespread cultural acceptance – of which SSM is just one sign – has made gay life less distinct.
