Marriage

Abstract

In an earlier chapter on long-lasting relationships, I referred to evidence showing how in the West, as well as in cities like Mumbai and Hong Kong, gay men were capable of conducting stable, long-term relationships resembling the companionate marriage in all but name, and had a history of doing so. This chapter and the next are paired because they both consider the views of the men from the international sample regarding the push for marriage equality or formal recognition of same-sex relationships. In this chapter, I examine the arguments of those men who favoured marriage equality, and in the chapter that follows will examine the arguments of the men who opposed it. These two chapters most clearly reflect aged-based differences of opinion among gay men. As the discussion in this chapter shows, it is men aged 31 and younger who most uniformly support marriage equality; while, by contrast, in the next chapter, the strongest arguments against gay marriage are to be found in the views of men aged 51 and older.

As friends my own age who are heterosexual get less and less into the idea of traditional marriage … the gays have really embraced … [the] bluestone church and black and white tuxedo. … Gays are pretty much the only ones who really care about marriage these days. If you took away the right of marriage from heterosexual twenty-somethings, they would not care.

(Denis, aged 27, Melbourne)