Blog 8 – On Marriage Equality

First off, let me say this is a subject on which I have an opinion but no authority. As a middle aged married heterosexual I am just an interested observer of the changing Western societal attitude to this particular hot topic.

The forces of globalisation and a strange wave of good old fashioned common sense have seemingly led to widespread acceptance of gay marriage across the Western world, and most recently, the United States. Now as an Australian, I am well aware of our national tendency to follow in the footsteps of everything the US does politically. However, in this case we are experiencing, to my personal amusement, some resistance.

That resistance comes in the form of our conservative government and a number of its members holding deep seated religious beliefs. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all amused by our resistance to marriage equality, but rather by the ideological blind spot and the dark corner our right wing politicians have backed themselves into. That amuses me greatly. Watching them stumble around in their self-imposed Dark Ages, continually sticking their collective feet into their mouths, and proving how out of touch they are with the zeitgeist. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve…

They remind me a little of my dear old dad, a very elderly gent from a past and infinitely more homophobic generation. I never quite comprehended what it was dad was afraid of, but he seemed to think if we let ‘them’ get a foot in the door, they would force us all to be gay with them. I often remarked to him, “Dad, it’s not like they’re gonna go around door to door recruiting.” It doesn’t work like that.

Perhaps what most offends that generation (and our conservative politicians) is the common trope of promiscuity that surrounds gay culture. Though why this would offend a dominant patriarchy of whom the majority of its members spend their entire youth trying to get off with as many women as possible is beyond me. I assume from what I’ve read and from hearsay that the whole promiscuity issue arose from homosexuals being for so long an oppressed minority group, forced into the shadows to express the love that dare not speak its name. It was their way of shouting from the rooftops – we are here, we exist. Ditto with the parades and the sometimes outlandish costume and posturing.

Therefore does it not stand to reason that if they obtain equality of marriage, they will in time be re-appropriated to the dominant culture? They will be anonymous and monogamous, to the same extent that heterosexuals are. They will exhibit the same sort of foibles, and have the same percentage of divorces too.

That’s all fine by me. I’ve never met a homosexual I didn’t like, male or female. I am reminded of an amusing incident that happened to me many years ago, living in Canberra, during the prime years of my life. I had arranged to meet a bunch of friends in a certain bar in Civic, right where the bus centre used to be. I believe it is no longer there. Seated alone at a table nursing a drink it slowly dawned on me that none of them were going to show up. As I made ready to leave a middle aged man appeared and asked if he could join me at my table. I was so taken aback I said he could.

It probably should have occurred to me that he looked and sounded a lot like John Michael Howson (no offence intended). Let’s just say that I worked out pretty quickly he was gay and trying to pick me up. He offered to buy me a drink and being young and cocky I thought, why the hell not. My mates have abandoned me, its freezing cold outside (when is it not freezing in Canberra?) I’ve got nothing better to do, so let this bloke buy me a few drinks and chat me up. So I did.

He asked me if I was Greek. I’m not, I’m an Englishman raised in Australia but I’ve always been swarthy due to my mixed race middle European heritage. So I said, “Sure, I’m a Greek.” That pleased him, because I guess he was looking for a bit of rough.

Long story short, I let him buy me several drinks but made sure to keep my wits about me. I could see the bus station outside the darkening window, my escape route at any time. This gent tried every line in the book to try and hook me, bordering on being pushy at times. I did tell him straight up that I was straight, but he wasn’t buying it. He made me explain in intimate detail what it was I loved about women, and curled his nose up in disgust at my answers. He fully insisted I was gay and that I was kidding myself with my faux heterosexuality. He almost had me convinced for a minute – Christ, maybe I am gay!

If anything his lengthy and persistent come on made me appreciate for a brief moment what it must be like for women having to fend off really aggressive men trying to pick them up. On one hand I was leading the guy on and letting him ply me with drink, but on the other hand I did maintain my heterosexuality all through the conversation and never sought to deceive him on that issue. In the end I saw a bus heading to my suburb ease into the station and I practically sprinted out of the bar with a curt goodbye.

That aside, my only other foray into the world of homosexuality has been attending the Mardi Gras in Perth and Sydney to offer my tacit support of that formerly oppressed minority group. Most memorably I was once had the good fortune to be invited by a friend who was in the armed forces to watch the Sydney event from the balcony of a high rise apartment on Oxford Street.

The view was spectacular, but we had to share the view with a collection of young army recruits, let’s call them grunts, one of whom was quite forthright in his opinions of the event. “Fuck off, ya dirty arse bandits,” was typical of the tone of his non-stop barrage of homophobic commentary throughout the evening. So I stood there and bit my tongue, listening to this arsehole, who probably had some deeply repressed gay yearnings himself, because I thought, I’m a guest there, and this apartment belongs to someone in the armed forces.

Then it happened, an ACTU themed float rolled by, and this grunt leaned over the ramparts and screamed, “And you can stick ya fucken unions up your arse as well!”

That was the final straw – I pushed the twat off the balcony.

Anyway, marriage equality has got my support.