The crippling doubt set it minutes after my feelings of joy over the votes legalizing same-sex marriage in Minnesota.  As a public relations professional, I don’t like the sanitized term “same-sex” anyway.  It’s gay and lesbian marriage; but that kind of talk alienates straight people ultimately uncomfortable with the visuals of gay men getting it on, right?  Want to talk about alienation some more?  The dirty little (not so secret) secret in the gay and lesbian community is the horrible sense of exclusion many gay and lesbian people face in the dizzying array of subcultures and internal prejudices entrenched in the culture itself.

A decade ago, when I wrote about the fetishizing of marriage within the gay community, I was taken aback by the 1950s stylization of magazine shoots in magazines like Lavender and also in national publications like The Advocate and Out when it came to the image spinners portraying brilliantly appointed photographs of “normal” J Crew clad gay men picking out china patterns and posing for Town & Country-inspired photo-essays designed at disarming heterosexuals seized with the idea that gay men have leather chaps as part of their daily wardrobe and snort poppers as they head in to work—if they have respectable jobs at all.  I mean, who could have time for work if you’re busy plotting the systematic revolution of traditional moral institutions?   At any rate, these squeaky clean images have been used as exclusionary tactics within the gay community in tandem with their use as ways to disarm on-the-fence homophobe-ish Americans.

Consider the other exclusionary messages, if you’re familiar with them at all.  If not, let me enlighten you:  no fats, no femmes, no hairy guys, no smooth guys, no balding guys, no Abercombie & Fitch-less guys, no “scene” guys…need apply.  No jocks, no aesthetes, either—depending on your own prejudicial lens of what it means to be gay.  Go to any gay club/bar/dive and see the “stand-and-model” gays, the hipster gays, the “oh-my-god-I-don’t-fit-in-anywhere” gays and you can begin to appreciate the notion that, sometimes, gay men are as cruel to each other as homophobes are to gay people.  We make fun of effeminate guys.  We roll our eyes at machismo posturing and “bro” language.  We talk indiscriminately and derisively about looking or sounding like a “tranny.”  We make fun of fat boys and we’re the ultimate “mean girls.”  But, we still, bewilderingly, demand unconditional acceptance from straight society.  

Now that we can legally get married, are we in danger of entrenching one new layer of exclusion?  I was reminded of a Sex & The City episode where Carrie and Co. head to Connecticut for the baby shower of a friend of theirs that used to flash her tits and dance in clubs ‘til all hours.  She had traded her club days for luncheons and was on trajectory to join Mommy & Me classes.  When she welcomed Carrie and the girls into her Horchow-paradise of a home, she wrinkled her nose at Samantha (blasphemy!) and the immaturity of not being married, settling down, and joining the picket-fence set.  Of course, Charlotte was in her element—the ever-yearning one that laments not having something the normal girls have.

Imagine, if you will, the scene translated a million times over in the minds of gay  men who have no desire to get married or those who will never have the superficial attributes required to get a gay man’s attention in the first place.  We have abused ourselves and each other so much on top of the abuse we’ve gotten from society, in general, that another subculture of “the marrieds” threatens to tip the mental ship on its side.  One of the things LGBT activist Urvashi Vaid wrote about was the “mainstreaming” of gay and lesbian culture and how that can relieve past injustices.  But, in this mainstreaming, let us not forget the validity of checking OUT of mainstream straight societal expectations as expressions of being gay.  Fetishizing marriage threatens those wandering around outside the “Connecticut” of gay society just as much as saying “no fats, no femmes, no jocks” need apply.