Looking Squarely at “Gay Marriage”

In what Margaret Whitlam would have called the “hoo-hah” of our federal election, “gay marriage” as an issue flickered in and out of view. Where does the matter stand, now that the dignity of democracy has, up to a point, spoken? Answer: “Very much where it stood before.”

It seemed for a time that a definitive step might follow from the Labor side, and that legislation enacting gay marriage would follow hard upon a Rudd victory. I actually heard him promise that something would ensue within his first hundred days in office; what exactly that something was remained obscure; and late in August Joe de Bruyn, leader of the numerous union of shop assistants, issued a stern warning that his people were by no means solid for gay marriage, and if the leadership pushed it, a split in the Labor Party could well follow. And all that after poor Kevin Rudd had temporised his hitherto staunch Christian principles, in search of a handful of gay votes.

The Coalition is holding the matter somewhat more at arm’s length, for detailed consideration later. During the leaders’ debate in Brisbane on August 21, commercial pollster Roy Morgan detected a favourable audience reaction to this cautious approach.

I suppose no more carefully carpentered and precisely cuboidal “square” than I ever walked the Melbourne streets, and I was led into the following amateur (and risky) speculations via a full-page article by Dennis Altman in the Australian Financial Review of August 9. I must have been reading Dennis’s writings from inside the parallel world of “queer” for forty years now: never less than civilised and clear, as with his current essay, where he ponders where he stands now on gay marriage. Clearly, even he still has points to settle. I’d better have a look for myself.

For example, what is the general magnitude of the problem? Are there at present thousands of suffering and sorrowing homosexual couples, frustrated in the fulfilment of their affections and their hopes, by the provisions of our present laws and current social attitudes? Peter Westmore analysed extensive material lately released from the 2011 Census, and concluded that only a very few couples are directly affected, or would be likely to take advantage of any liberalisation of the present laws. To my mind, his case is highly persuasive, and certainly suggests that we should be wary of such a change being made to accommodate such a small minority. Westmore sets out his conclusions clearly in an article in News Weekly of August 17; see what you think of it.

Now widen the perspective by—say—120 years. Oscar Wilde (d. 1900) was convicted of sodomy in 1895, and banged straight into Reading Gaol for two years. He had committed no “public outrage of decency”; his actions which sent him so swiftly to the slammer had all occurred in private. Upon release, he had become a social pariah, forced to live in exile. Perhaps most appalling for him of all, the sanctimonious London publishers, who had welcomed his stories (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and plays (The Importance of Being Earnest) would not soil their precious hands with his The Ballad of Reading Gaol. This long poem, many people think, is the pinnacle of Oscar’s poetic achievement, of intense moral commitment. To get it published in England, he had to stoop to the services of the creepy and swindling professional pornographer Leonard Smithers; judge his standards by his habit, whenever trade fell slack, of slipping a notice into his shop window which read: Smut is Cheap Today.

Of Reading Gaol, Smithers issued a limited and numbered edition, which sold out instantly to a clamorous public demand. Smithers at once issued another “first” and numbered edition, swindling Oscar, but allowing a small printing error to creep in which enabled the two imprints to be distinguished. (My old friend, the writer Cyril Pearl, with his vast mental store of literary byways, identified an authentic first edition copy among a pile of second-hand books in Melbourne, and swiftly bought it for me for (I think) two pounds. I cherish it today, a remembrancer as much of Cyril as of Oscar.)

How immeasurably better off are today’s homosexual writers than Oscar. Their intimate acts in privacy are their own business; no pimping gumshoe perched on their bedroom window sill can menace them. No puritanical prejudice of publishers hinders the ready appearance of their books. The lists of some publishers even suggest that gays may sometimes command an “inside running”, which is no proper concern of ours, who should be evaluating, however critically, the qualities and interest of the writings.

With the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and the succession of her son “Bertie” as King Edward VII, came a general sense of easing in the rigorous and cruel application of the criminal law to private morals. Bertie was hardly the sort of model whom strict Victorian parents would adopt for their sons, for he was an avid haunter of the fleshpots, and almost certainly a cheat at cards. But his easygoingness stood a good deal closer to the realities of ordinary human imperfection here on earth. His reported comment during the Wilde brouhaha bespoke a worldly sophistication rather than a narrow and prescriptive morality: “I don’t care what the people do, so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

That earlier poet, painter and moralist, William Blake, would probably have damned this as “good advice for Satan’s kingdom”. Maybe. But for the vale of tears we actually inhabit, it is probably wisdom.

Right back to my school days, some intuition told me that an invisible and parallel “world of queer” subsisted alongside my own taken-for-granted “world of square”. Then later, as a young man, many gays were deeply valued friends. Two whose names will be recalled by at least some present readers are Brian Finemore, the wonderfully sparkling Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, and Harold Stewart, one half of the hoax poet “Ern Malley” who so alarmed Max Harris and his modernist Angry Penguins. When I was a naive and ignorant young man, such friends culturally covered me, so to speak, from Bach to Braque, and then onwards, to my eternal gain; different “orientations” never created the slightest difference or embarrassment.

Today’s quest for recognition of “gay marriage” seems to have an element both contentious and confused, and even at the semantic level it is exorbitantly framed. No person of good will wants to see gays, simply because of their gayness, set at legal or civic disadvantage, and when this appears to occur, the rules should without hesitation be changed. A status called, perhaps, Gay Union, should be created with full state standing, powers and dignity, as a respected official framework and support under which two loving gays can express and fulfil their attachment. But gay marriage is illogical and impossible.

For starters, what is marriage? The Concise Oxford Dictionary is short and clear: “the formal union of a man and a woman by which they become husband and wife”. Where does a gay fit in there?

The gays seem careless of the fact that millions of other people, married or considering marriage, have a profound cultural and emotional interest in the nature of this ancient and fundamental form of union. Not only Christians, but also Jews and Muslims share the attachment to this “sacrament”, which would be diminished for them by the acceptance of gay practice as “marriage”. As I see it, the gays are in the position of someone who hasn’t paid his subscription to a club; he’s a gatecrasher, so let him stay outside.

Only since starting to write this article have I come to consider gays as a class or a category; till then, I thought of them only as individuals, when I think they all looked much nicer. Their campaign for “gay marriage” is turning them into a “movement on the make”, with all the quirks and crotchets such movements acquire: nutty or factional leaders or spokesmen; needlessly provocative aims; cultivation of grudges; a “hunger for imagined martyrdom”.

The gays own among them such a wealth and variety of talent and strength that they can well stand on their own feet. They have no need to colonise the marriage of others.