marriage is so gay

I would like to make sure everyone is familiar with my favorite t-shirt.  It displays the eye-catching statement, "marriage is so gay", and is a product of the Human Rights Campaign, an organization committed to equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.  If you are into social experiments and supporting marriage equality, this shirt's for you.  But be forewarned, it's for a lot of other people too.

My boyfriend worked a beer festival this summer (yea!) in Colorado Springs (booo!!) and decided to wear this shirt.  Maybe you've never been to the Springs, so I'll orient you.  The Ronald Reagan Highway runs straight through it, past the Air Force Academy and Focus on the Family headquarters (they're not together, they're just friends).  Then there's New Life Church (whose pastor, you might remember, stepped down after being outed by a male prostitute).  NORAD defense command hums away inside the mountain west of town and Fort Carson Army Base is due south.  Oh, and keep your eyes open for billboards leased by an organization called Prolife Across America.  One of their most recent pictures a cheerful baby explaining that the fetus you might be carrying in your (potentially selfish) uterus has "Eyes, Ears, and even my Tongue!", just 28 days after the dirty little miracle called conception.

Back to the beer festival.  What types of reactions are you expecting from the shirt experiment, now that you know your way around town?  What if I told you that man after man approached my boyfriend saying the same thing?  Well, they did, and it goes like this:

"Dude!!  I love your shirt!!  I've been married for 4 years, and it is SO GAY!"  Or, "I just got married, and it is completely gay!" (that's my favorite).  This went on all night.  Guys came back with their friends, to buy beers from the man who understood their plight.  Everyone wanted the t-shirt.  I hope they are unwittingly supporting the cause with a purchase.

So I guess there are people who, first of all, don't realize a debate about gay marriage is going on.  They also don't realize that a sentence with the words "gay" and "marriage" in it has something to do with a non-heterosexual lifestyle.  And, they are so accustomed to substituting "gay" for "lame" in conversation, that they would wear this shirt and not realize their own interpretation of it is offensive.  Also, and here's the gem, they all think marriage sucks.

I grew up here (not at the beer festival, although that would have helped).  Abstinence-only-until-marriage-sex-education has found a happy home in the Springs, and I probably sat through it right alongside these festival goers.  We never discussed sexual identity, and if it was brought up, we intuited from teachers' reactions that being gay was definitely bad.  Or we didn't have to intuit, they told us.  We learned that marriage is THE place to express yourself; a simple, blissful and blessed union.  All of these things were misleading at best.  Everyone benefits from learning about sexual identity, even if it just saves them from being clueless about national debates.  And these men might be more satisfied if anyone had told them how hard marriage can be.

I'm certainly not saying this is all we need to accomplish, instead illustrating how far we are from the bare minimum in helpful sex talk.  Even the priviliged groups who do not have their safety and way of life undermined by the abstinence approach still end up ill-prepared and disgruntled.  That's the common ground shared by abstinence students from all walks of life.  However unevenly, we've all been let down.  Is there anyone who benefits from this lack of knowledge?