Marriage doesn't define my relationship

The gay drug of choice isn't Ecstasy, it's equality, and lots of it. This choice has been confirmed in the last couple of years with the battle over marriage rights. \nI missed my mailing from Queer headquarters, lost somewhere among the HH Gregg advertisements and the weekly offer of platinum credit cards. The one that said, "We must be married! Now!" \nSo when the news stories of legal challenges to the marriageless state of gay men and lesbians in Hawaii and Vermont, of Canadian legal battles and full, "real" marriage in the Netherlands came to my attention, I was taken aback. \nI wonder if I've been silently told I'm lost among the issues. That HIV isn't a defining status for gay men, and needs to be replaced at the center of the movement. Usually it's written "The Movement," though that indicates regularity more than the actual constipation of new ideas. \nAlthough death precedes rebirth in most major religions, for the secular worshipper of the religion of pride, it is the story of continuous life. Mardi Gras alongside coffins, banquets sampled among corpses, the gay story of history (and herstory) is one of survival versus daunting odds. It can be inspirational, and it can be filled with amazing self-pity. \nWe've replaced talk of Leonardo, Edward II, Richard the Lion-Hearted and Gertrude Stein with the antics of Melissa and Ellen, and the bathroom sex of George Michael. Seeing ourselves within a progression of history (and herstory -- last time I'll do that, I promise), was a balm. No matter how bad the cocktails, we survived. \nWe replaced basic human dignity within our rainbow by knocked-up families on the cover of "Rolling Stone," and waifish winks from the cover of "People." If it's good to be gay (and it is), then it's good to be married, too. \nI may be too sarcastic when I suggest that such an idea is a bit over the top. I wear a wedding band, though Charles and I adopted it as a conscious symbol. I consider myself more than partnered, and better than married. \nI dislike the implicit idea that marriage legitimizes someone. That rogue lives become better lives by promising to do something that in a majority of cases will not be done -- to stay together, to only have sex with the spouse, to only build that which two can share. How could anyone in his or her right mind ever agree to be defined like this? \nWe opened ourselves up to the harangues of right-wing fundamentalist lawmakers, often divorced, who have no hypocrisy-meter by which to judge the color of their language. We scared the straights again, at least the skittish ones who have no real problem with gay people, but are damn sure nervous about the gay monolithic agenda. \nWell Buffy, well Chip, sometimes so am I. \nI see the last two years as a fiscal waste on Millennium Marches and court test cases, while real people led real lives behind the glamour of being the new lesbian on a magazine cover, the next to out themselves as gay, the next to out themselves as experimental, the next to out themselves as blessedly free of prejudice. As a boy, I indulged the fantasy that Burt Reynolds was gay (he used to be very hot); now, I just don't care.\nInstead, I care about something that is so 1981. I reached 21 years old just as HIV got its ID and hit the clubs. I've been dancing with death to crooning Donna Summer, New Order and Everything But The Girl for too long to simply cast it aside. Beyond the personal angle, the wasted potential of HIV annoys me.\nIn every other event where large numbers of people have died, we claimed they did not die in vain. WWII, the Civil War, the Holocaust -- we claim a collective memory that seals all attempts to repeat these tragedies. The fact that our sealants have proven imperfect bothers us not a bit. It's a cultural thing. \nEven after HIV escaped its gay ghetto stereotype, gay men still led the way to faster drug approval, the addition of the word to political lexicon. Yet, grousing all the way, we offered photos of the dead not as testimony but as bartering chips. While you hated us, this is what happened. Instead of MLK we had HIV -- lynching by retrovirus. \nPeople who don't die quickly offer no soundbites that can match the gasp of an emaciated corpse. They do not advance political ideas that basic unfairness is just wrong. They aren't too helpful on Capitol Hill. They certainly aren't badges of merit. Reminders of an agenda gone wrong, a decade lost, the drag queen rock throwers of Christopher Street. We survivors are part of the old conversation, the old examples -- the Michelangelos of our day. \nMeanwhile, it is of greater virtue to be post-AIDS, a recognition that life must go on, and battles still await an army. For example: Heather has two mommies and they are divorced! Hollywood Star Outed in Palimony Panic! Such headlines as these await the next generation to carry on the fight.\nIt isn't any easier to disillusion oneself than to pry a tooth out by tying a string and slamming a door. Without exquisite engineering, the result in either case will not be justified by the pain. I didn't imagine when I started writing this column, first for a gay newspaper, I would see for myself any role outside of being a gay man with AIDS. That alone, I thought, would be convincing enough.\nConvincing enough to be testimony, that is, to be considered as part of the ongoing conversation about being gay the past twenty years of AIDS, about the equivalency of HIV, the final proof of shared humanity between hetero and homo. Instead I'm supposed to be hitting Vermont for a long weekend, wearing a matching tuxedo and grinning about the most fulfilling day of my life. \nA white cake with two grooms on top? No thanks, I'd rather be gay.