Gays Against Gay Marriage

Suzanne Fields describes how many gays are uncomfortable with gay marriage because they don't think they need it and they don't want it.

In the sexual revolution begun in the 1960s, gays were the winners because they didn't feel compelled to apologize to anybody for their promiscuity. It came with the territory. Now these gays worry that they will become the supersized fries of the larger culture, forced to downsize their lives if they don't marry. "It used to be that the whole point of coming out," says Michael Musto, columnist for the Village Voice, "was to stop people asking when are you going to get married and have children."

When gays split up their partnerships, they suffer the emotional pain of all broken relationships, but they don't have to fight it out in the courts and give their life's savings to lawyers and mediators. Some gays worry that the marriage license will deprive them of their avant-garde status. Instead they'll become retrograde, tarnished imitations of the bourgeois coupling they hold in contempt.