OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Integration Day
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
Published: May 17, 2004
ASHINGTON — Today is the day that gay citizens in this country cross
a milestone of equality. Gay couples will be married in
Massachusetts — their love and commitment and responsibility fully
cherished for the first time by the society they belong to. It is
also, amazingly enough, the day of the 50th anniversary of Brown v.
Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that ended racial
segregation in schools across America. We should be wary of facile
comparisons. The long march of African-Americans to civil equality
was and is deeply different from the experience and legacy of gay
Americans. But in one respect, the date is fitting, for both Brown
and this new day revolve around a single, simple and yet deeply
elusive idea: integration.
It is, first, a human integration. Marriage, after all, is perhaps
the chief mechanism for integrating new families into old ones. The
ceremony is a unifying ritual, one in which peers and grandparents
meet, best friends and distant relatives chatter. It's hard for
heterosexuals to imagine being denied this moment. It is, after all,
regarded in our civil religion as the "happiest day of your life."
And that is why the denial of such a moment to gay family members is
so jarring and cruel. It rends people from their own families; it
builds an invisible but unscalable wall between them and the people
they love and need.
You might think from some of the discussion of marriage rights for
same-sex couples that homosexuals emerge fully grown from under a
gooseberry bush in San Francisco. But we don't. We are born into
families across the country in every shape and form imaginable.
Allowing gay people to marry is therefore less like admitting a
group of citizens into an institution from which they have been
banned than it is simply allowing them to stay in the very families
in which they grew up.
I remember the moment I figured out I was gay. Right then, I
realized starkly what it meant: there would never be a time when my
own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family. I
would never have a relationship as valid as my parents' or my
brother's or my sister's. It's hard to describe what this
realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound. At that
moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it:
the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable
relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you
were born into and the love you feel.
You recover, of course, and move on. But even when your family and
friends embrace you, there is still the sense of being "separate but
equal." And this is why the images from Massachusetts today will
strike such a chord. For by insisting on nothing more nor less than
marriage, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has abolished
that invisible wall that divides families within themselves. This is
an integration of the deepest kind.
It is, second, a civil integration. That is why the term gay
marriage is a misnomer. Today is not the day "gay marriage" arrives
in America. Today is the first time that civil marriage has stopped
excluding homosexual members of our own families. These are not "gay
marriages." They are marriages. What these couples are affirming is
not something new; it is as old as humanity itself. What has ended —
in one state, at least — is separatism. We have taken a step toward
making homosexuality a non-issue; toward making gay citizens merely
and supremely citizens.
This is why I am so surprised by the resistance of many
conservatives to this reform. It is the most pro-family measure
imaginable — keeping families together, building new ones,
strengthening the ties between generations. And it is a profound
rebuke to identity politics of a reductionist kind, to the
separatism that divides our society into categories of gender and
color and faith. This is why some elements of the old left once
opposed such a measure, after all. How much more striking, then,
that the left has been able to shed its prejudices more successfully
than the right.
I cannot think of another minority whom conservatives would seek to
exclude from family life and personal responsibility. But here is a
minority actually begging for a chance to contribute on equal terms,
to live up to exactly the same responsibilities as everyone else, to
refuse to accept what President Bush calls the "soft bigotry of low
expectations." And, so far, with some exceptions, gay citizens have
been told no. Conservatives, with the president chief among them,
have said to these people that they are beneath the dignity of
equality and the promises of American life. They alone are beneath
the fold of family.
But this time, these couples have said yes — and all the president
can do (today, at least) is watch. It is a private moment and a
public one. And it represents, just as Brown did in a different way,
the hope of a humanity that doesn't separate one soul from another
and a polity that doesn't divide one citizen from another. It is
integration made real, a love finally come home: after centuries of
pain and stigma, the "happiest day of our lives."
Andrew Sullivan is the editor of "Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A
Reader."