The Dictionary of Homophobia (94 page)

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—Gender Differences; Heterosexism; Islam; Middle East, the; Police; Violence.

MARRIAGE

During the 1990s in many European countries, from Scandinavia to Spain by way of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, as well as North America and elsewhere, the almost simultaneous emergence of the demand for “gay marriage” presents a new step in the logistics of freedom. It is true that this policy has encountered setbacks, particularly in the United States and there is no doubt that its successes are partial, as in France. Nonetheless, the leap from
tolerance
to recognition may be of an historical importance comparable to that which, in many countries, led from repression to tolerance.

However, this moral progress has coincided, paradoxically, with a spectacular resurgence of intolerance in France, the United States, and elsewhere. We wanted to believe that homophobia would vanish with legal liberalization, to exist more as a relic of the past, an obscurant image projected by distant cultures, all the more reassuring due to its exoticness. Some doom-sayers based their opposition to liberalization on our enlightened societies’ newfound tolerance as a way to discourage any gay policies. According to these well-meaning conservatives, any demands seemed not only contradictory, but useless (what’s the use of fighting a homophobia that has reached the terminal stage?) and dangerous (why take the risk of awakening a dormant homophobia?).

By exposing this contradiction, the debates on gay marriage proved the minstrels of apathy to be both wrong and right. Wrong because homophobia had never vanished; it had only changed faces,
rhetoric
and logic, but not its target. In reality, homophobia is like racism: it has no consistent face, it is better to pursue its incarnations. Racism can define a race, as homophobia does homosexuality, by way of
biology
, or contrarily, by culture. Whether black or gay, both groups can be criticized for their acceptance of assimilation or their desire for segregation, their policies of integration or their
communitarianism
.Throughout its transformations, homophobia, like racism, has only one constant, its reactionary opposition to progressive policies pertaining to minorities, and in this case, gays and lesbians.

It must be recognized that the doomsayers were also somewhat correct: the demand for gay and lesbian marriage effectively generated a revival in homophobia. The example of France is illuminating: during an
anti-PaCS
demonstration in January 1999, there were cries to “Burn the fags.” And we know the litany of such slogans isn’t limited to the streets. Unsurprisingly, PaCS (Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil solidarity pact) awoke monsters in the extreme
right-wing
media. On page one of the French newspaper
Présent
, linked to the right-wing National Front, there appeared a cartoon showing two gay men welcoming a child with “open sheets.” Other monsters reared their heads at the Assembly (where one Member of Parliament advocated the signing of a PaCS agreement in a veterinarian’s office), or at the Palais Bourbon (for one senator, the acronym meant “Practice of AIDS Contamination”).

Let’s not for a moment believe that such blunders, frequent in the political setting, do not have their intellectual counterparts; and without mentioning minor figures, such blunders are pronounced by those who we would have hoped were more enlightened. In the pages of Figaro, historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie brandished the specter of
pedophilia
(which, according to him, has risen since 1980, but was absent under the Vichy regime), legal expert Pierre Legendre, in an interview published in
Le Monde
, repeated his condemnation of “homosexualism” (which carries, according to him, a “hedonistic logic inherited from Nazism”). The debate on gay marriage that engenders such symmetrical fantasies from a homophobic revisionism, has, strangely enough, forgotten the
deportation
of gays and lesbians to Nazi concentration camps.

How is it possible to understand such outbreaks and such virulence? How can we analyze homophobia’s fall and rise? Is the debate on registered partnerships nothing more than a factor of homophobia, or is it the catalyst? It could be said that society’s latent homophobia has again found a way to express itself. What is currently being expressed has always been present, of that there is no doubt. However, are we not missing the essential point? In reality, throughout the course of these debates, something quite new is emerging. “Gay marriage” not only reveals homophobia, it creates it. Let’s not reduce homophobia to a non-historical constant, nor relegate contemporary manifestations of homophobia to any universal and timeless psychological trait. This would effectively mean explaining homophobia as the rejection of homosexuality, as part of an unchanging human nature. Such a tautology relies on the historical specificity of the present; it forbids the understanding of change and, by the same token, prevents the imagining of political liberation.

A comparison between two debates, and therefore between two societies, allows us to dispense with the illusion that the same story is always repeating itself. Even when the debates are simultaneous, or nearly so, it’s always a different story being heard. In France, as is well known, the debate regarding PaCS went “beyond PaCS.” The statute only spoke of the couple, but the controversy centered mostly on children. In order to deny same-sex couples the right to
adoption
or medically assisted procreation, certain individuals declared themselves disposed to offer them certain advantages, practical or symbolic—a quasi-marriage.

In contrast, in the United States the battle over gay marriage did not concern offspring and centered on the union itself: the anthropological foundation of culture was marriage. In fact, the law adopted in reaction against a decision by the Supreme Court of Hawaii, which threatened to open the door to same-sex marriage, is called “The Defense of Marriage Act.” In France, the sanctification concerned offspring, while in the United States, it concerned marriage. In other words, in these parallel debates on either side of the Atlantic, homophobia did not crystallize around the same issue.

Considering the diversity of national contexts, is it possible to explain the simultaneous resurgence of homophobia that accompanied the parallel demands for equal status for same-sex couples? If we must abandon the simple explanation of a spontaneous, universal, even natural homophobia, we must therefore ask ourselves what provokes homophobia in such diverse cultures during these controversies. And it is here that we need to specify exactly what it is we are discussing when we speak of “gay marriage.”

At the risk of being paradoxical, let’s first assume that it isn’t (or at least, not exactly) a marriage between two homosexuals. Remember that our societies have always been somewhat accommodating; and let’s put aside the contested historical example of the “same-sex unions” of pre-modern Europe, studied by the historian John Boswell, for it is uncertain whether it is advisable to see this as the ancestor of “gay marriage.” However, many homosexuals have been getting married for a long time in our societies—to someone of the opposite sex. Marriage was, for a man or a woman, at best a hope to reform his or her ways, and at worst, a means to hide them from the world. And this does not even touch upon the question of forced marriages. In English, it is the gay man’s “beard.” As therapy or hypocrisy, this model has its celebrities, starting with André
Gide
. In this model, homosexuality remains outside marriage while homosexuals enter into it.

Let’s suggest, however, that in this context the issue is not really gay marriage. It was evident in France during the debate over PaCS that the counter-proposition of a status reserved for homosexuals provoked less anxiety that the opening of a common status to all couples, be they same-sex or opposite sex. It may not have been by chance that the first legislative successes, in Scandinavia, rested upon the segregation of the sexualities. It was a line of least resistance drawn, first in Denmark, then in Norway and Sweden, by the proponents for homosexual marriage, since it was really a question of a marriage for homosexuals. Even then, what failed in the State of Hawaii succeeded in Vermont: in the first case, the issue was the opening of marriage to homosexuals; in the second case, it was a status equivalent to marriage, reserved for homosexuals.

So it isn’t marriage between homosexuals that sets off homophobic virulence, nor does marriage for homosexuals. The real issue of “gay marriage” is the marriage itself. That is to say, its opening, at the same time to homosexuals, by way of same-sex couples, and to homosexuality. The reason is two-fold: it is based, on the one hand, on the ordering of sexuality and, on the other, by the ordering of sex. And it is precisely the link between the two that is being played out in the issue of marriage. Because, when it comes to marriage, we are tampering with the legitimate standard.

It is, therefore, a question of sexuality. What causes fear isn’t homosexuality itself but rather its normalization. In the United States, the slogan “God hates fags” is not only shouted at the most eccentric of transvestites, but also at the most conventional of couples. In other words, the commonplaceness of homosexuality causes as much fear as do its most radical provocations. Michel Foucault succeeded in surprising by evoking “all that can be disturbing in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, companionship,” whereas the cliché of “two young men who meet in the street, seduce each other with a look, place a hand on each other’s buttocks and have sex in less than fifteen minutes” is reassuring. Homophobia would, therefore, be manifest in reaction to the “lifestyle,” rather than against the “sexual act.” Recent events confirm this: in the television adaptation of
Tales of the City
(1993), it is the chaste kiss between two men, in a very 1950s style, which provoked the most virulent reactions. It is the innocence of Armistead Maupin’s characters that made the American Moral Majority tremble.

If this commonplaceness frightens, it is precisely-because it disrupts the status quo with its obviousness. The heterosexuality of marriage went without saying, but this is no longer the case. Homosexuality forces one to reconsider marriage as a heterosexual institution, if not a heterosexist one. In other words, homosexual marriage imitates heterosexual marriage in order to reform it, to engage it in an egalitarian logic. And it is here that anxieties about the ordering of sex and sexuality cross. Was it not said in France, in opposition to homosexual affiliations, that it is the
difference
between the sexes that needed to be preserved? And in the United States, are not the political movements opposed to abortion the same that are opposed to gay marriage? Did anti-feminists not declare that the amendment to the Constitution regarding the equality of the sexes, if it were adopted, would eventually lead to gay marriage?

In short, gay marriage forces us to rethink the norm. If homosexuality is no longer confined to tolerable subversion, which is ultimately reassuring, then the heterosexuality of marriage can no longer be justified as the norm. The most solid foundation of
heterosexism
, and also of sexism, has been shaken. We have dared touch marriage? No one should be surprised when homophobia rages.
—
Eric Fassin

Andenaes, Mads, and Robert Wintemute, eds.
Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships. A Study of National, European and International Law
. Portland, OR: Hart, 2001.

Baird, Robert M., and Smart E. Rosenblaum, eds.
Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate
. New York: Prometheus Books, 1997.

Borrillo, Daniel, Eric Fassin, and Marcela Iacub, eds.
Au-delà du PaCS. L’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.

———, and Pierre Lascoumes.
Amours égales? Le PaCS, les homosexuels et la gauche
. Paris: La Découverte, 2002.

Fassin, Eric. “Same Sex, Different Politics: Gay Marriage Debates in France and the United States.”
Public Culture
13, no.2 (2001).

———. “L’Inversion de la question homosexuelle.”
Revue française de psychanalyse
1 (2003).

———. “Usages de la science et science des usages. A propos des familles homoparentales,”
L’Homme
. Special edition, “Question de parenté” (2000): 154–155.

Foucault, Michel. “De l’amitié comme mode de vie.” 1981. In
Dits et écrits, 1954–1988
.Vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Gleizes, Henri. “L’Etat de droit et les moeurs, à quand le mariage des homosexuels?”
Permanences, revue mensuelle de formation civique et d’action naturelle selon le droit naturel et chrétien
, no. 340 (1997).

Leroy-Forgeot, Flora, and Caroline Mécary.
Le PaCS
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000.

———.
Le Couple homosexuel et le droit
. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001.

Sullivan, Andrew.
Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con
. New York: Vintage, 1997.

Warner, Michael.
The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999.