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By Perry Brass
Then I had a change of heart. First, I got married, or as close to it as I was ever going to get; and when you do share about ninety-five percent of your life with someone else, then it does make sense to want to get the same perks as the rest of the schnooks who are sharing their lives with someone who just "happens to be" of the opposite sex. Or gender. Or whatever you want to call it. I am, by the way, one of those people who does not "happen to be" gay. I am gay. No matter what term you want to use for it, I am that way, and the only thing I "happen to be" is someone who has put himself, for better or for worse, - or maybe just luckily - in the position to be a little bit more open about it. But getting back to the gay marriage number, I can see that gay marriage is something that we should have. I would like to be able to be on my partner's health insurance plan, just like any decent, hard-working, PTA-attending, soccer Wife/Mom is. I have noticed that the world, or at least the world of a major city like New York, has gone through a sea change about gay couples. We no longer come with horns and tails in our physical descriptions. When you think about it, about thirty years ago in many states, if you were a "gay couple," and anyone found out about it, the most recognition you might get would be having pictures of yourselves on the "Most Wanted" board at your local Post Office. So we have gone from being against-the-laws Sodomites and Fornicators to "valued consumers." This has made life a lot easier for many of us, although there are also times when just getting to fornicate is no easy matter. But we can now go and open joint bank accounts really easily. We can get joint American Express cards and Visa cards. We can get joint memberships in AAA, although AARP has still not got with the program and figured out that millions of retirees don't look like Ricky and Lucy. Maybe Ricky and Dicky, and but not Ricky and Lucy.
In other words, they ain't the frosting on the cake; they should be part of the goodies in the cake itself. The unfortunate thing is that these privileges are exactly that: things that can be taken away just as easily as they can be offered. Actually, they are not "easily" offered: the truth is, in the coming years, you, dear little queer friends and neighbors, are going to have to work your tails off for them. You're going to have to work your asses off for them because ALL Americans will be doing the same thing, for the same huge, mega-corporations, and the fact that gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered employees will be recognized as part of the "corporate" family only means that the corporation, or as I put it, the American "Corporatocracy," has sewn you in even deeper into the whole closed system we're finding around us. We are now working in a tight, closed system of corporate shenanigans and overwork. As a "working culture" it now makes the closed world of the ancient pharaohs look positively open. You may remember that Julius Caesar invaded Egypt to bring some Roman "light" into the dusty royal condos along the Nile. We're now in a closed corporate version of that world-and George Bush, Jr., despite his haircut, is no Caesar. As America's corporate greed level has soared, bringing with it an inflation that has left millions of people either homeless or a few paychecks from the streets, we find that Americans are now working harder than any other group of people on the planet, mostly to stay afloat. And some amazing new statistics are floating around the workplace, where both the American husband and his wife (no matter what gender he/she takes) are either clawing their way to the top, or barely dogpaddling to keep salt water and pink slips out of their mouths.
In the old days, having management who were not married with children-in other words, they should be "real" men with dependent wives and children-was out of the question. You wanted men who had to have that paycheck coming in, so you had them by the balls. It was also important for them to be maxed out with debt, so the idea of them casting about willy-nilly for other opportunities was unheard of. In other words, in the old days, it was important for management and even upper level executives always to have a new Cadillac and keep their kids in private schools. That way you knew who needed the money and who would work nine or ten hours a day to get it. But something new happened at the advent of the Information Age and our Twenty-first Century. Ten or twelve hour days were not enough. And the kind of money that seemed a perfectly "white" wage in the sixties or seventies could no longer keep you in the custom to which everyone in TV-commercial-saturated America felt that he/she needed to become accustomed. (The kind of money you need now boggles me, but then I tell my friends that I'm still living in the age of the $1.75 ice cream cone. In New York, ice cream cones -and I mean one scoop - have hit the $2.50 to $3.00 level. In Boston, I went into a Ben-and-Jerry's where one scoop was an eye-popping $3.50. An elderly English couple went into heart failure over this; they wanted to know if a whole meal came with their Ben-and-Jerry's scoop.) Therefore, we have left the old academic paper chase for the money chase, and we can't get off the money chase, no matter how bad things get. Maybe when the corporate richies are selling apples, but for now, there is only one rule-of-thumb about dollars in America: you can NEVER have enough of them. Even if you have to work ninety hours a week to get that $350,000 + a year you want, even if you have to give up seeing the wife and kids except for once a week in August, when you rent the place out in the Hamptons, you're going to GET that effing-money. Still, corporate people, who are run by the wizards of P.R., wizards who make any old wiseasses out of Tolkien look like schlemiels, hate the word to get around that G.M., Sears, and DuPont are heartless. They know that there are times when you have to spend time with the ol' Wife-and-Kids, because there are times when, despite the fact that she's making more money than you, she may be having a real live baby. Yes, that does happen. So this is where domestic partnership for gays, etc. is so . . . I think the word the kids like is "neat." With domestic partnership, you can scoop up two men for the price of, well, two men. If one and/or both men are working for you, you can work both of the little buggers till their nuts pop off. But for the most part you will not have to worry about the kind of complications that "normal" families have. Now, you may have a lesbian who gets pregnant, or a man may adopt. But these are usually fairly yuppy, "guppy," situations. They are not going to happen very often, and most queers have lowered their expectations so much, and are so grateful for any recognition of themselves as "legitimate," "responsible," working human beings, that even if a blessed event does happen, they can get over it pretty quickly. They will not take off two years to raise a kid, like some men are now doing-after total corporate burn out hits them. I have met so many gay men who have been in this boat-I call them the overworked "castrati," beloved by corporate bosses who think the dear gay boys will do anything to keep up the payments on the Castro co-op, or the Chelsea condo, plus that important half-share on Fire Island that is now going for $35,000 a half-share-a-season (no, I am not making that one up). Therefore the queer boys can work indefinitely, until there is nothing left of them but an empty martini glass- and so, as I say, I have met so many of these busy chaps that we can now start a kind of "sex club" of our own. In this club, you would never take off your clothes (God, that is SO 1995!), but you can just pass around the business cards and talk about how much money you've saved. "I just managed to save $82,000 this year on my team of housekeepers by hiring ones who never wear shoes!" The whole sickness of this is that queer men and their lady counterparts don't understand that domestic partnerships only let us get chewed up deeper in the corporate maw. The Gay Financial Network may gloat about the fact that 135 "members" of the Fortune Five Hundred now offer domestic partnerships, but they never talk about how many of us would prefer not to get into this rat race to begin with. I know that is not a contemporary attitude and it makes me sound like something out of Thoreau, but wouldn't it be nice if instead of working towards domestic partnerships, we actually worked to create affordable housing? Since so many of us now have to spend exactly half (and even 60%) of our salaries on housing, wouldn't it be nice - I mean really nice - to work towards . . . God, can we say it . . . some kind of rent regulations that will keep housing affordable? I don't see a lot of gay men working towards this-and those who do are usually called "deadbeats," "Commies," etc., in our Brave New "libertarian" world, where the only work the "guv-ment" is supposed to do is keep the airlines in business. But, again, wouldn't it be nice to talk so self-congratulatorily about affordable housing in our communities, and keeping people, gay and straight, off the streets, rather than gloating about "domestic partnerships." So I keep wondering at this point, who ARE these partnerships for? And, exactly, for what? 
Perry Brass's newest novel is WARLOCK, A Novel of Possession,
that does deal with the interesting intersection of business and evil.
His "domestic partnership" is not underwritten by any of the Fortune 500.
He can be reached through his website www.perrybrass.com. For more information
on WARLOCK, go to http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ASIN/1892149036/107-8161877-7587701
Telephone: 1 (800) 365-2401. |
I have not always been in favor of gay marriage. Years ago, when I was in my "radical gay liberation" phase and was sure that the FBI was tapping my line, I used to joke that gay marriage made as much sense as "gay divorce," and the only person in favor of that was Ginger Rogers.
Dutch dometic partners, like this couple married legally last year, are afforded rights reserved only for heterosexual couples in most of the United States 
© 1997-2002 BEI