by Joel Derfner
The trip to Miami was short, and after we boarded the ship the rest of the evening was like an evening on any other vacation—we engaged in the sorts of activities one engages in on one’s wedding evening, to be sure, and they were particularly delightful, but the thing that struck me most, even disappointed me a little, was how ordinary it felt. I don’t know what I’d been expecting: that I would start to sparkle like the vampires in Twilight, perhaps, or that I would actually be levitating a few inches off the ground? But those things didn’t happen, because marriage isn’t magic. It’s about the relationship between a couple and society. It doesn’t change anything within the couple, or within you.
The one wonderful difference was that eating dinner, just like grocery shopping on the day of the California Supreme Court’s ruling in 2008, felt different. I looked around at the other passengers and saw a number of other presumably honeymooning couples. And I felt, to quote the Disney movie, part of their world. Not entirely—I mean, look at what they were wearing—but as I interrupted the waiter to ask him to stop telling me about the wine and just bring me a Diet Coke, as I pushed the potatoes to the side into a pile that I hoped would look like I had eaten some of them, as I savored (and wished the entire meal had been course after course of ) the molten chocolate cake, I did so knowing that the commitment I had made to take care of my spouse was just as firm as theirs, just as deep, just as unshackled.
So I’m lying in a chair on the verandah off cabin 7199, Vista deck, of the Celebrity Millennium cruise ship as it sails toward Aruba.
I’ve never been on a cruise before, and now my only desire is to make enough money somehow never to have to get off this boat. For one thing, the verandah is covered, which means that I can sit here outside in the warm breeze with the smell of the sea all around me but not worry about getting second-degree burns like I did when my middle-school choir went to Miami Beach and I didn’t realize that my sunblock wasn’t waterproof. For another thing, between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. there are exactly thirty minutes during which free food is not being hurled at me from a trebuchet. I also have with me several books I’ve bizarrely managed never to read, including A Tale of Two Cities, which by the way is hilarious, and if I run out there’s a library on board that actually has a quarterway decent collection. The list of movies rentable on our TV is short and the menu corrects the spelling of Inglorious Basterds, but really what is that in the face of an inexhaustible supply of chocolate ice cream?
Over the last week and a half we’ve been to several Caribbean islands, including Grenada, where we ate lunch in a restaurant that served banana catsup as a condiment and had a big sign in front reading absolutely no bareback please, and Dominica, where I accidentally went skinnydipping. But by far my favorite island, leaving Grenada and Dominica in the dust, has been Curaçao, because I went on a shore excursion there to the Dolphin Academy and swam with dolphins.
Mike had no interest whatsoever in swimming with dolphins, which I don’t understand, and I mean really don’t understand, not just fake don’t understand so I can make a joke about it but really, like, why would anybody on earth not seize an opportunity to spend an afternoon playing with the puppies of the sea? But he wanted to take a tour of—I’m not making this up—island vegetation, so I went on my own.
And after the hour and a half I spent at the Dolphin Academy, I don’t know how dolphins have refrained from taking over the earth.
The dolphins at the Dolphin Academy have been trained so that, if you reach out with both hands and tap the water on either side of you, a pair of them will come barreling toward you, catch your hands with their fins, and carry you like a shot to the end of the pool. If somebody tapped his hands on the water and expected me to come barreling toward him and catch his hand, he would be sorely disappointed, not because I’d refuse but because I’d fail. I’d run into the wall of the pool or end up grabbing his elbow or something. If you twirl your hands one way the dolphins will sing; twirl them the other way and they’ll do back flips. These bastards are brilliant. Plus, the academy made us watch a movie about how terrible life is for most dolphins in captivity and then showed us all the measures they had taken to make things different at the Dolphin Academy. And one of the dolphins kissed me. All Mike got was stupid plants.
So now I’m lying, as I say, in a chair on the verandah off cabin 7199, Vista deck, of the Celebrity Millennium cruise ship as it sails toward Aruba. And I’m thinking, in the moments when I’m not wishing I could stay on this ship forever, about marriage equality. And, perhaps because I’m still in such a good mood from the dolphins, I have hope.
There are a few reasons for this. The first is that, as far as same-sexers are concerned, the story of America in the last century has been a tale of expanding freedom, and, despite the hideous direction the country has moved, in so many ways, over the last thirty years, I don’t think there will be a true reversal in that expansion any time soon, because there are too many people keeping vigil too closely. And what this means is that same-sexers aren’t going back into the closet. I suppose that, if the country is ever forced to pay for the greed of the plutocrats who have bought or at least rented its government, that may change—everything may collapse and social standards may all be turned on their heads and it will be a brave new world for everybody, with no iPhones or Lady Gaga or memory foam mattresses—but, barring that, the increase in liberty for same-sexers is going to continue in the foreseeable future. The people working against marriage equality are fighting a losing battle, and I suspect they know it.
But that’s not the only reason I have hope for the future.
The night before the wedding, on CNN or ABC or whatever—at this point television news for me has two channels, Fox and Not Fox, and I can’t stand to watch either one, because if it’s on Not Fox it makes me so angry about what’s going on in the world that I want to slit somebody’s throat and if it’s on Fox it makes me so angry about people lying about what’s going on in the world that I want to slit somebody’s throat twice—there was yet another tedious story about politicians’ views on marriage equality. And there was a reporter at an anti-equality rally and she asked this guy why he didn’t think gay people should be allowed to marry, and he said, “It just makes sense, marriage is about children. It’s biological.”
Well, I thought—and I assume most other same-sexers think something similar when confronted with this sort of rhetoric—that’s bullshit. If you actually thought that marriage was “about children,” whatever that means, and that people who couldn’t procreate shouldn’t be permitted to marry, then you’d be saying that post-menopausal women shouldn’t have the right to marry, you’d be saying—I take this from Jonathan Rauch—that if we allow men who’ve had vasectomies to marry we might as well allow bestiality and incest. The fact that you’re not saying those things means that a belief that “marriage is about children” isn’t the real reason you oppose marriage equality. The real reason you oppose marriage equality is that you just don’t like us. The only reason you’re saying anything about children is that you know it’s socially unacceptable to say you don’t like us.
In other words, as far as I was concerned, not only did this guy oppose marriage equality because he didn’t like same-sexers, but he was arguing in bad faith—he was saying something other than what he believed. What he truly thought was, Faggots getting married—gross. But he knew he wasn’t really allowed to say that, so he had to come up with something else to say that would hide his bigotry from Not Fox News’s audience. So in the end not only was he a bigot, he was also a liar. He wasn’t interested in an honest discussion about the issue.
But I’ve been reading the work of a guy named Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia—like I said, the ship’s library is a quarterway decent, plus there’s the Internet—and I’m beginning to wonder whether things aren’t maybe a little more complicated than that.
Several years ago, it seems, Haidt conducted a
n experiment in which he presented subjects with situations like the following: “Julie and Mark are a sister and brother vacationing in the south of France. They have some wine, one thing leads to another, and they decide they want to have sex. They use two different kinds of contraception and enjoy it, but they decide not to do it again. They find afterward that the experience has brought them closer together.”
Haidt then asked his subjects whether what Julie and Mark did was wrong. In an interview with Tamler Sommers in Believer Magazine, Haidt says:
People almost always start out by saying it’s wrong. Then they start to give reasons. The most common reasons involve genetic abnormalities or that it will somehow damage their relationship. But we say in the story that they use two forms of birth control, and we say in the story that they keep that night as a special secret and that it makes them even closer. When the experimenter points out these facts and says, “Oh, well, sure, if they were going to have kids, that would cause problems, but they are using birth control, so would you say that it’s OK?” And people never say “Ooooh, right, I forgot about the birth control. So then it is OK.” Instead, they say, “Oh, yeah. Huh. Well, OK, let me think.”
So what’s really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason. And it’s only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state we call “moral dumbfounding.” Because they fully expect to find reasons. They’re surprised when they don’t find reasons. And so in some of the videotapes you can see, they start laughing. But it’s not an “it’s so funny” laugh. It’s more of a nervous-embarrassment puzzled laugh. So it’s a cognitive state where you “know” that something is morally wrong, but you can’t find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what’s wrong, you just say, “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it’s wrong.”
One of the conclusions Haidt draws from this is that moral reasoning is less “a judge searching for the truth” than “a lawyer trying to build a case. . . . The reasoning process constructs post-hoc justifications, yet we experience the illusion of objective reasoning.”
As I read it, he’s saying two things here:
The reasons we give for believing something aren’t necessarily the real reasons we believe it.
We are unaware of that fact.
I think the implications of this are staggering.
Because if it’s true, then it means that the guy on Not Fox News who says, “It just makes sense, marriage is about children” isn’t dissembling, he’s not attempting to hide any bigotry. He really does believe that his opposition to marriage equality comes from some notion having to do with procreation rather than from his disgust at the violation of a taboo. In other words: He may not like gay people, but he isn’t necessarily arguing in bad faith. He may be a homophobe, but he may not know it. He’s a bigot, but that doesn’t mean he’s a liar.
And what this means, ladies and germs, is that his mind can be changed.
Morgan Spurlock, best known as the director of Supersize Me, the documentary in which he ate nothing but food from McDonald’s for a month and chronicled the appalling effects on his health, later created and hosted a television show (incredibly, on Fox) called 30 Days, each episode of which plunged a volunteer into a community whose lifestyle he or she found abhorrent. A devout Baptist moved in with a Muslim family. A border-patrolling Minuteman lived with illegal immigrants. And in one episode, an ultra-conservative army reservist from Michigan spent a month as the roommate of a gay guy in the Castro, the gayest neighborhood in San Francisco.
When Ryan, attractive in a fresh, clean-cut, midwestern sort of way, arrives at Ed’s apartment, he’s obviously very uncomfortable and keeps saying things like, “As long as he doesn’t touch me,” and, though he’s perfectly polite, is very clearly on his guard. Over the course of the month he relaxes, though the scenes in which they make him work in a super-gay wine and cheese store are never less than excruciating, not least because he can’t pronounce the names of anything he’s trying to sell. (“Bueno . . . bueno . . . gorno?” he says when asked to repeat the Italian for hello. “Buon jerno?” Buon giorno, his boss offers. “Guong jerno.”) They send him to talk with Reverend Penny Nixon, head of San Francisco’s Metropolitan Community Church, who asks some very smart questions but ultimately makes little headway with him. “To change my interpretation of the Bible,” he says, “isn’t something that somebody can tell me what they believe and have me believe differently.” And it looks like the whole experience isn’t going to make much of an impression on him.
And then he’s talking to Ed after a visit to a gay chapter of the American Legion—this is three weeks or so into his month-long term—and he says, “I still keep my original opinion, that I don’t feel comfortable with gays in the military.”
And Ed says, “So if this war escalates and the draft starts up and I’m suddenly in your unit, how would that be?” And there’s a pause.
“Wow,” says Ryan finally. “That’s a very interesting question, because it actually makes me contradict myself. I think actually—this is very weird to think about, because it wouldn’t really bother me if you, specifically, were in my unit. I think you’d be a great soldier. I think that you could benefit the army. Yes, I’d be comfortable, you know, having you next to me.”
It was an astonishing moment, something I’d never experienced before in my life: I actually saw somebody’s mind open on national television.
Then, at a meeting of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), when a father talks about his hopes for his daughter, Ryan says, “I’ve been kind of one-sided about a lot of things. But being able to sit there and hear Sam say, with such love in his heart, that she should have all the same things, it’s hard to say, I disagree with that. And if my brother or sister wanted to do that, I wouldn’t be able to sit there and say, no, I don’t think you should be able to do that.”
“Why should my daughter be treated differently from her two brothers?” asks Sam.
“You’re right,” says Ryan. “She shouldn’t.” Then he sighs in frustration. “I have some thinking to do.”
Now, I know better than most how little reality there can be in reality television, but in this case I think there was actually a great deal. I detected none of the awkward phrasings involved in parroting something the director has asked for, none of the weird intros that are the signs of answers to questions on Planet Reality. I’m sure Ryan and Ed spent an insane amount of time going through doors on Planet Again, and the narrative has been streamlined—hell, there’s no such thing as narrative in real life; the narrative has been created—for TV, but I think that the month this guy spent in San Francisco really did change his mind about same-sexers.
And this is why I think we’re ill served by things like the NOH8 campaign, for example, in which the wonderful photographer Adam Bouska has taken pictures of all sorts of celebrities with their mouths taped shut. Because sure, seeing Adam Lambert and Kathy Griffin and Cher with duct tape over their mouths is thrilling—how amazing to think that so many of our society’s luminaries, plus the Kardashians, are willing to stand with us!—but I would be willing to bet a great deal of money that NOH8 didn’t change very many people’s minds. The episode of 30 Days I’ve discussed aired in 2006, and Ryan didn’t answer the Facebook message I sent him, so I have no idea how he feels about marriage equality now, but I’m confident that if today a guy with his background—we’ll call him Brian—comes across a photo of Jane Lynch with duct tape over her mouth under a logo that says NOH8, he’s going to dismiss it immediately.
Because Brian doesn’t think he hates gay people. And so from his perspective a sign that says NOH8 is at best made-up nonsense and at worst a lie.
About three-quarters of the way through the 1999 mo
vie The Talented Mr. Ripley comes a monologue in which Matt Damon says, “Whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful—it all makes sense, doesn’t it? In your head. You never meet anybody who thinks they’re a bad person.” (In the book on which the movie is based, his character is nowhere near as charmingly naïve, but that’s neither here nor there.) And, though I doubt that most people who vote against marriage equality are actually lunatic killers, as Matt Damon turns out to be in The Talented Mr. Ripley, I still think same-sexers have to understand the truth of what he says if we’re ever going to change the way people see us.
It’s like when we hear people at a demonstration yelling about how same-sexers want to destroy the family. We think they’re stupid, or insane, or lying. Because we know that whatever changes we want to make to the institution of marriage as America knows it are not to destroy the family but to strengthen it.
But they don’t.
To the people yelling, what we’re doing looks a hell of a lot like an attempt to destroy the family.
Just like what they’re doing looks a hell of a lot like hatred to us.
Let me be clear that I’m not talking about the politicians, most of whom I think are lying sociopaths far more dangerous than the talented Mr. Ripley. When Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or John Boehner says “Marriage is about procreation,” I’m certain he knows perfectly well that isn’t what he thinks. (I’m actually certain Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and John Boehner don’t give a damn about marriage equality one way or another, and they’re just saying what they know will get them votes.) So none of what I’m talking about, unfortunately, applies to the people who are actually running things. But the rest of the country—real America—I believe they can be reached.