Why The M Word Matters To Me by Andrew Sullivan

Only marriage can bring a gay person home

As a child, I had no idea what homosexuality was. I grew up in a traditional home - Catholic, conservative, middle class. Life was relatively simple: education, work, family. I was raised to aim high in life, even though my parents hadn't gone to college. But one thing was instilled in me. What mattered was not how far you went in life, how much money you earned, how big a name you made for yourself. What really mattered was family and the love you had for one another. The most important day of your life was not graduation from college or your first day at work or a raise or even your first house. The most important day of your life was when you got married. It was on that day that all your friends and all your family got together to celebrate the most important thing in life: your happiness - your ability to make a new home, to form a new but connected family, to find love that put everything else into perspective.

But as I grew older, I found that this was somehow not available to me. I didn't feel the things for girls that my peers did. All the emotions and social rituals and bonding of teenage heterosexual life eluded me. I didn't know why. No one explained it. My emotional bonds to other boys were one-sided; each time I felt myself falling in love, they sensed it, pushed it away. I didn't and couldn't blame them. I got along fine with my buds in a nonemotional context, but something was awry, something not right. I came to know almost instinctively that I would never be a part of my family the way my siblings might one day be. The love I had inside me was unmentionable, anathema. I remember writing in my teenage journal one day, "I'm a professional human being. But what do I do in my private life?"

I never discussed my real life. I couldn't date girls and so immersed myself in schoolwork, the debate team, school plays, anything to give me an excuse not to confront reality. When I looked toward the years ahead, I couldn't see a future. There was just a void. Was I going to be alone my whole life? Would I ever have a most important day in my life? It seemed impossible, a negation, an undoing. To be a full part of my family, I had to somehow not be me. So, like many other gay teens, I withdrew, became neurotic, depressed, at times close to suicidal. I shut myself in my room with my books night after night while my peers developed the skills needed to form real relationships and loves. In wounded pride, I even voiced a rejection of family and marriage. It was the only way I could explain my isolation.

It took years for me to realize that I was gay, years more to tell others and more time yet to form any kind of stable emotional bond with another man. Because my sexuality had emerged in solitude - and without any link to the idea of an actual relationship - it was hard later to reconnect sex to love and self-esteem. It still is. But I persevered, each relationship slowly growing longer than the last, learning in my 20s and 30s what my straight friends had found out in their teens. But even then my parents and friends never asked the question they would have asked automatically if I were straight: So, when are you going to get married? When will we be able to celebrate it and affirm it and support it? In fact, no one - no one - has yet asked me that question.

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn't about gay marriage. It's about marriage. It's about family. It's about love. It isn't about religion. It's about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category - civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever - may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

It's too late for me to undo my past. But I want above everything else to remember a young kid out there who may even be reading this now. I want to let him know that he doesn't have to choose between himself and his family anymore. I want him to know that his love has dignity, that he does indeed have a future as a full and equal part of the human race. Only marriage will do that. Only marriage can bring him home.

Essay from TIME.

While I was reading this last night, I felt a part of me die. I felt my heart break in two again. I was reminded why do the things I do, why I play video games, why I bitch and complain, why I blog. I was reminded why this entire week has been so hard for me to deal with and why this weekend, namely tomorrow, is always the hardest day of the year for me next to Christmas.

It's too late for me too. I am growing up apart of a group of people that is hated. If that 62% have their way of which 52% are Democrats, I won't be able to get married. My attraction to me is seen as morally wrong by 51% of the country! With all the lifestyles that everyone leads in the world, mine is not acceptable to 38% of the people while 49% say that they do not accept my lifestyle, but others can. Just not themselves. And it is not likely that while I'm still a young, and thereby powerful, voter that there will ever be a candidate that will favor gay marriages ever! At least one that public would vote for.

Back in second grade, I made a stupid comment about how I hate blacks. I was still a single digit kid back then, so stupidity was my excuse. My teacher at the time got so mad at me, that she made me cry by saying things like "How would you like it if someone said that I don't like you because you have brown eyes?!" and "I don't like people with black hair! How does that make you feel?" Looking back that far twelve years later, I cannot help but wonder if this is some kind of punishment for my ignorance as a child. It may not be the same thing, because, let's face it, only the most flamboyant and fabulous gay people are easier to spot than your average gay Joe. It isn't like we have a different skin tone, but we are different. People do not like different, especially when they are totting around the Bible saying that God doesn't want me to be this way and I'm going to Hell because of it unless I change my lifestyle.

Sometimes I wish God would just come down to Earth and set us back on the right path. I wish He would just come down and say to everyone in all His various forms so that all religions would be able to listen to Him, "Look, my children. What you are doing is wrong. You are all my children. No one is better than the other. I hate no one. I love all of my children of the world. Why can you not do the same? Why must you kill your brothers and sisters in the name of what you believe is just and good? Why do you fear your brothers and sisters because they are different in their emotional attractions? Why must you define My holy ritual of marriage so that it is exclusive to what you want it to be? Have I taught you nothing? Have you forgotten My teachings? No, you have merely misinterpreted them. Let me teach you once again that which you should have already known..."

I deserve a slap for that last paragraph. I know that will never happen. Asking for God coming down to Earth and setting us down the right path is asking too much of a higher being. Still, a part of me thinks that is the only thing that will make this world better. It is this part that also believes that only by the power of God will I ever find true happiness...

...because I'm sure as hell not going to find it here on this rock!