Summary of Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of The Trouble with Normal continues Warner’s discussion of the “official” gay rights movement, which he thinks has become too obsessed with becoming normal instead of changing society. In this chapter, Warner explores the contrast between a queer politics and an official gay politics by discussing at length the movement for gay marriage. This is a completely new movement in the 1990s. Prior to this decade, no one in the gay community prioritized marriage as a political goal; they were more focused on issues like job discrimination or access to healthcare in the face of AIDS in the 1980s. Warner wants to know what is behind the sudden rise of gay marriage as the primary gay rights issue, and what the effect is in terms of thinking about gay sex and sexuality more broadly.
According to Warner, gay rights activists tend to cast the turn to marriage as a sort of “growing up” of the gay movement. That means that marriage is a more mature goal that gays and lesbians can fight for compared to previous goals like the ones associated with the AIDS crisis. To Warner, this normalizes a rejection of anyone in the queer community who does not have sex that is of the “married” type, in other words, monogamous and in a committed relationship. The diversity within the queer community is sacrificed in order to support a sense of gays and lesbians having “grown up”; anyone who doesn’t want to get married is by extension treated as a regressive child who is stuck in the past.
Implicit in treating marriage as a “grown up” issue is a regulation of respectability within the gay community. Marriage is always about a sexual hierarchy, according to Warner. He begins the chapter by discussing the testimony of Henry Hyde, a politician who advocated for the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal benefits to gay couples. Hyde argued that he was against gay marriage because it would demean his own (straight) marriage. Letting gays marry would make the institution of marriage trivial. To Warner, this is proof that marriage as an institution is always about being the opposite of trivial: serious. Marriage makes some relationships look more serious and deserving of respect than others.
This means that as long as there is marriage, there is a regulation of relationships. In a society in which marriage exists, some relationships are sanctioned and others are not. In saying this, Warner provides a counterargument to the claim that marriage is a personal choice, and just one choice among others. People can choose to marry, but they don’t have to, others argue, so it doesn’t hurt to have marriage as a choice. But Warner says that it’s not a neutral choice, because marriage comes with benefits and not marrying comes with shame. Having marriage as an institution in a society coerces people into the relationship form that marriage sanctions.
Warner also says that it is therefore naïve to think marriage is just above love. In the United States, marriage is a bundle of rights and economic benefits, such as tax breaks and the ability to inherit a spouse’s fortune after death. So long as these rights and benefits are attached to marriage, marriage isn’t just about love. Often, these rights and benefits also have no logical relationship to marriage. For instance, marriage comes with tax breaks because the idea is that married people will have children, and they should have extra money to raise their children. But many married people don’t have children; marriage is also legal for people who are too old to procreate. If the state wanted to incentivize childrearing, it should provide tax breaks for childbirth or adoption, not marriage.
In other words, marriage is a gatekeeper to certain privileges in our society. Warner argues that the goal, for queer politics, should not be simply letting more people get married so that they can access these privileges. Rather, those privileges should be made available independent of marriage. For instance, the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows people to take off time from work to care for a sick spouse or child. But caregiving should be supported outside of these relationships, too. Why not let your best friend take off time to see you through cancer treatment, for instance?
Gay marriage, Warner argues, only further entrenches the way in which marriage is unfairly a gatekeeper to rights and benefits in our society. Instead of letting more people marry, we should be fighting the undue significance marriage has. Moreover, Warner says, gay marriage will be bad for gay people. That’s because it will again create a hierarchy between the “Good Gays” and the “Bad Queers.” Once allowed to marry, gay people will have to get married in order to appear respectable, just like straight people are pressured to marry in order to have a “proper” life trajectory. This will further stigmatize those who do not get married. Gay marriage may end up increasing stigma rather than changing the society that creates stigma.
Analysis of Chapter 3
This chapter is often seen as the bread and butter of The Trouble with Normal, because it makes an extended argument against the most visible gay rights platform position: advocacy for same-sex marriage. Warner is not, of course, against gay marriage for the same reason that other Americans are usually against gay marriage: homophobia. In other words, most people have a problem with the “gay” part of gay marriage. But Warner actually has a problem with the “marriage” part of gay marriage. He thinks marriage as an institution is unfair. It supports some forms of families and not others. Letting gays get married only further entrenches the inequality of the institution, because it makes it look like it’s fair when it still continues not to be.
Other writers have argued against marriage as well, making more explicit the economic terms of Warner’s argument. Nancy D. Polikoff and Michael Bronski, for instance, wrote a book titled Beyond (Gay and Straight) Marriage, which is similar in title to Warner’s chapter. Polikoff and Bronski argued that the state supports marriage because it is trying to support families. We give tax breaks to married couple on the assumption that they will have children and use the extra money to raise them. But a lot of families aren’t organized by the married couple. What about the single mother, for instance? Why doesn’t she get extra assistance? And what about married people who don’t have families? Should they get benefits? Channeling benefits through marriage doesn’t make sense for supporting a diversity of family types. Moreover, the people most likely to be hurt by a system in which marriage is a gatekeeper will be poor people who need assistance the most. Thus, opposing marriage is a platform for class equality in addition to family assistance.
Warner is less explicitly pro-family than this line of economic argument tends to be. But he agrees that marriage tends to entrench inequality, which is why it is ironic, according to Warner, that gays and lesbians would treat same-sex marriage as a matter of equality. But Warner’s other concern is that marriage will transform the gay community in harmful ways. According to Warner, queer people have developed creative ways of building community and relationships. They have wider and more robust friendship networks, because they don’t have to channel all their intimacy into a spouse. Warner worries that kind of creative kinship will go away once gays and lesbians can marry. The right to marry is coercive, to Warner: once people can get married, they have to get married, in order to be respectable.
In arguing that marriage will be bad for the queer community, Warner also addresses another counterargument from within queer theory. This is the idea that institutions can be transformed from within. In this view, the meaning of marriage will change once queers can marry, and marriage will change for the better. Rather than being changed by marriage, queers will transform what marriage means. Warner is skeptical of this argument, because he sees within straight culture how marriage has more power over people than people have over marriage.
It should be noted, again, that Warner is writing in 1999, before marriage really started to look like an option on a national scale for same-sex couples. The first state to legalize same-sex marriage was Massachusetts, and that didn’t happen until 2003; the Supreme Court decision that would finally legalize same-sex marriage nationwide didn’t come until 2015. Meanwhile, in 1999, it was still illegal in many states for gay people even to have sex. The Supreme Court decision that decriminalized sodomy didn’t come until 2003 as well. Warner would note that in a society in which gay people can’t even have sex in some states, it is ironic that gays are fighting for the right to get married, which he sees as further evidence of the de-sexualization of gay rights in the United States. People don’t want to talk about sex; they want to talk about love. This is how shame gets moved around and managed.
