Little Black Book: Queer Marriage Rites
Corey‘s new column, Little Black Book, runs Tuesdays at 9am. Tune in for creative writing on queer life.
The queer marriage should begin by the age of 24, when – exhausted from 2 or 3 years of the woes of gay dating – two partners decide to settle and settle down.
The queer marriage needs by default to be tacky and unseemly, for while one gay might mean good taste, two almost always means a mess of uncompromising positions.
The queer marriage should not take place in a church, or other house of worship, because how fucked up is that?
The queer marriage should not seek to redefine the word “marriage”; after all, to redefine suggests something stable and concrete. Rather, the queer marriage should seek to tinker with the institution and settle on whatever definition sounds good at the moment.
The queer marriage should make single gays envy your life and married heteros hate their own.
The queer marriage should scare heterosexuals, except for wedding planners, divorce lawyers, and politicians who use the civil liberties of others as a wedge issue.
The queer marriage should feature a great amount of drama, for drama keeps things interesting and yields that indefinable tension, that je ne sais quoi that keeps things fresh. It also yields unspecified sums of makeup sex.
The queer marriage should not, however, feature infidelity. That just makes me sad.
The queer marriage should be just that – queer – because what good has “normal” marriage done the world?
The queer marriage should not seek to reincarnate the characters of Norman Rockwell. The queer marriage should be its own piece of installation art, a constant performance of contemporary poise, unnerving, and subtle grotesqueness.
The queer marriage should not be a one-time thing. The queer marriage should encapsulate the idea of, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Gays can make up for centuries of being denied the right to marriage by using that right many, many times over the course of their life when the right eventually arrives.
The queer marriage should be over, in its first act, by the age of 30, for relationships should almost never cross a decade line in one’s life. Having begun the queer marriage at the age of 24, one will have spent more than enough time fixated on one individual; and having the aspiration of being married several more times by the point of death, one had better get to work finding new mates.
For how could someone spend a lifetime with one person? It seems altogether as horrid and unrealistic as spending a lifetime alone, hence the need to get married to begin with. Getting married is like buying a car; you will probably have to do it at some point in your life, but you’d be an idiot to keep the same one running for fifty years.
The queer marriage should be celebrated with a wedding of lots of whites. Nothing too bright, nothing too dark.
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