Links
Archives
Saturday, February 07, 2004
|
The Normal Heart
I've noticed that opponents of gay marriage can give no arguments against it; but I've also noticed that I - a proponent - can give no arguments for. I intuit, over years of life with gay people in the world around me and in the novels and essays I read, that people attracted to people of the same sex are (somewhat disappointingly) just like everybody else. Beyond the need of gay couples to indicate (left; right) who's who in their photograph, I discern no interesting difference between the Sunday New York Times straight and gay wedding announcements. Children, from what I've seen and read, are subject to the same blessings and curses in gay as in straight households. The fifty percent of children whose gay parents will divorce will suffer precisely the same damage as the fifty percent of children whose straight parents divorce. Having two fathers or two mothers is no doubt odd, but having no television in your house (my daughter's stigma) or a father who's a manic depressive or a mother who's a renowned mezzo soprano is also odd, and you adjust, as does the world. I find claims that gay homes are bad for children rather disgusting. Gay people often adopt children whom no one else wants. Whatever the genetic provenance of their children, these parents display, to my eye, the same loving intensity toward them that straight parents do toward theirs. Will gay parents' kids turn out gay? Some of them. So? A small number of Americans will always believe that all gay psyches are twisted and all gay sex is perverse. A much larger number of Americans, faced with the increasingly apparent truth that bland Uncle Melvin and sweet Aunt May have been flamers all these years, will, on their big days, smile and wish them well. |