COLUMN: "Love in the Long Haul"

From Tim Farrell's "Speaking Strictly For Myself," Spring '92 Before he knows it, he has a wife, in-laws, an office job in a corporate bureaucracy, a mortgage, and, overwhelmingly, a baby on the way. He struggles with his passing youth and worries about whether or not he has become an old man before his time. The movie demonstrated that while giving up one's youth and carefree existence can indeed be painful, with the added responsibility come deeper rewards. It emphasized that adulthood begins when you realize you have to start sacrificing the short term for the sake of the long haul, and when you start to see the bigger picture beyond the flux of the day-to-day. These lessons are not something that can be taught. They are something you have to figure out for yourself. Like anyone else, I've been slowly finding out for myself that creating lasting happiness is going to take commitment and hard work -- although one thing the movie made me think of is that, unlike heterosexuals, I don't really have much of a map to go by after graduation. Like the young couple in the movie, I too will contend with the challenges of becoming a fully responsible adult, although I expect that for me it's going to require a bit more creativity: our society doesn't seem to have very many positive expectations for gay people -- such as marriage -- so it is up to gay people to determine for themselves what will be a positive, value-creating, productive way of life. In some ways I'm glad I don't have to think about what's socially expected of me, but on the other hand, I'm aware that the sense of freedom can be deceiving. A life that is full of frivolity, ungrounded and without commitment to some higher principle, will surely lead to emptiness. As an aging (straight) Manhattan playboy looking back on his life once lamented, "What I once thought was glamour has really turned out to be tinsel." Watching straight couples for as long as I have, I've come to realize how much marriage and the family add structure to people's lives. Life would be chaotic without such institutions. While they require dedication and commitment, they reward the individual by introducing meaning and quality into his or her existence. She's Having a Baby implies that it's usually women who intuitively understand family values, whereas men have to swallow their egos and learn them. It follows, then, that a relationship between two women is likely to contain a doubly strong orientation toward home and family values. Indeed, this is true: lesbians are by far the most committed practitioners of the family/home/community commitment. They work extremely hard at their relationships -- which consequently last practically forever -- and they are very good at creating their own families with lovers, friends and perhaps children. They don't just live, they build. At the very least they should let lesbians wed; they're often better at marriage than straight people are. Gay men have a harder time in the relationship department because they're men. In a straight relationship it's usually the man who hunts and strays. Try two men. Nonetheless, a lot of male couples have enjoyed decades of meaningful existence together. Americans prohibit gay marriage because they think homosexuality is immoral. But the reason we gays seek legal recognition of our relationships in the first place is because marriage is a powerful structure that is useful as a foundation for positive, life-affirming commitments -- the very essence of morality. It really bothers me the way the Christian right-wing arrogantly claims the family to be "their" cause -- as if they're the only ones who know and appreciate its value, and as if their idea of what a family is about is somehow better than anyone else's. We gays know perfectly well what "family values" are all about. We desire homes and spouses and sometimes children -- many of us already have them -- and we deserve the right to have these things legally affirmed and protected, just like anyone else. I know two lesbians who have been together for 26 years. They have a kid, live in the suburbs, rake leaves in their back yard on Sundays, and are planning for their retirement and their kid's college education. They're productive, valuable members of our society. They love each other and their child very much. Their lives are as "moral" as those of any other family. Yet legally they're single. They pay separate taxes, they have separate insurance policies; after 26 years together, they can't even get a family rate when they go on vacation. This is because Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms and all the other bigoted Jesus-fascists on the political landscape think what these women are doing is so horrible and wrong that they constantly try to intervene and invalidate their union any way they can. And they've been successful at it. The Christian right wing has prevented gays from having our relationships legally recognized. Why should the integrity of our relationships be degraded just because these pathologically religious bigots who claim to speak for God think we're living in sin? What sin? Whose sin? What is sinful about wanting to live a committed life together with someone you love? Gays are often accused -- again, by the Christian right -- of being anti-family. We are not anti-family -- on the contrary, we cherish whatever sort of family we can create for ourselves, and we never take it for granted. We are looking for the same things in life that straights are -- direction, coherence and commitments that lead to meaning and fulfillment. Institutional recognition and affirmation of our relationships would make achieving these things a lot easier for us. Until then, we must constantly fight to defend the integrity of our relationships against that destructive bunch whose "Christian love" compels them to interfere with gays' lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness. Tim Farrell is a senior American Civilization and Religious Studies major from Boston, Massachusetts. "Speaking Strictly For Myself" appears alternate Thursdays.