by E. J. Graff
Ah, that terrible little word, obedience. Although essential to the monastic life, it can backfire spectacularly. Everyone who has ever worked with a visionary organization knows how easily it eats its own, how the demand for religious or moral or political conformity can become a kind of cannibalism. For the Shakers, this implosion came during a tumultuous few years around 1845, when some left or were purged, and the flow of new members slowed to a trickle. Outside, mainstream Christianity was making its peace with sexuality and individual love—with individual courtship and contraceptive use both on the rise. The Shakers could not, and so left us mainly their beautiful songs, chairs, and fertile material for graduate theses.
The pluralists The Shakers were merely the most successful and consistent of the nineteenth century’s celibate utopians: others who attempted the celibate approach to heaven include the Rappites and the Zoarites. The flip side of this impulse moved the sexual pluralists, who believed that restraining sex caused sin—and yet who agreed with their fellow utopians that the goal was to love all, equally and transparently, holding nothing back for self or partner.
The most successful pluralist was John Humphrey Noyes, who called his system “complex marriage”—as if marriage were not complex enough already. Noyes preached that “communism in love” would be superior to “egotism for two,” that “in a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restricted by law, than why eating and drinking should be.” Marriage, in his mind, was the source of all sexual evil. “It provokes to secret adultery, actual or of the heart. It ties together unmatched natures. . . . It gives to sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces the natural vices.” And so Noyes founded a community in Putney, Vermont, then fled after being charged with adultery, only to reorganize and expand in Oneida, New York.
“Oneida” became a nineteenth-century American synonym for a snakes’ nest of immorality, a Sodom of illicit and unnatural sex—because every man and woman within the community was considered the heterosexual partner of every other woman or man. Noyes and his followers tried earnestly to explain that their community was not a bacchanal: “Free love with us does not mean freedom to love to-day and leave tomorrow. . . . We receive no members . . . who do not give their heart and hand to the family interest for life and forever.” It couldn’t be adultery, in other words, because they were all married to each other for life—not just sexually but emotionally and financially as well.
How in the world could such a system—at its height, more than three hundred people belonged to the Oneida communities, which lasted from its founding in 1843 to 1879—not collapse in a hysteria of mutual jealousies and accusations? There were quite a number of rules to keep the community functioning. Noyes and a committee of elders had to approve or decline every proposed sexual coupling. When concerned that a particular pair was getting too close, the committee would separate the pair or even assign them to other partners. Then there was that very necessary element, group crit. The inverse of confession, mutual criticism put each Oneida member successively in the hotseat to have her character flaws and behavior aired by her fellows. There was a complex rule of “ascending” and “descending” fellowship, which meant in practice that the male elders got the young women (as early as age thirteen) while female elders trained the young men. But the most startling rule, to contemporary minds, was Oneida’s special contraceptive practice, which Noyes called “male continence” or coitus reservatus. Men were never—never—to ejaculate, not before, during, or after sex. It’s hard to imagine, but historians seem to think that dedicated believers really followed the rule almost all the time. “Between 1848 and 1869,” writes one, there were “at most 31 accidental births in a community of 200 adults having frequent sexual congress with a variety of partners . . . fewer pregnancies . . . than there would have been with the pill.” But “complex marriage” depended on the benign oversight of its philosopher-king John Humphrey Noyes. When an aging Noyes’s authority was challenged (a disgruntled follower went to the police and charged Noyes with statutory rape), he fled—and Oneida dissolved.
The socialists A variation on the sexual pluralists would be the sexual socialists. Marx, Engels, and their followers offered their revelations not in the fading language of religion, as did the Shakers, Mormons, and the Oneida community, but in the up-and-coming language of economics and politics. And yet their goal was also that of Plato and Paul: replace the selfishness of individual love with the utopian love of all for all.
The need to transform marriage was a socialist given. Many believed with the anarchist Michael Bakunin that “in abolishing . . . civil and juridical marriage, we restore life, reality, and morality to natural marriage based solely upon human respect and the freedom of two persons . . . who love each other. . . . rejecting in general the interference of any authority with that union—we make them more closely united to each other.” A commonplace among nineteenth-century leftists was the idea that a wife was just a legitimized prostitute, except that, in Engels’s words, “she does not let out her body in piecework as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.” This was an especially piercing truth in an era when a wife actually had fewer rights and less legal personhood than a single working woman, when she could not say “no” in bed and had almost no legal way to leave her husband, when for a man to beat his wife (within reason, of course) was still considered not just acceptable but at times necessary for discipline.
But the passionate utopians who founded the U.S.S.R. would never have been satisfied with the private solutions, the limited-membership communities, of the nineteenth-century sex-and-marriage experimenters like Oneida or the Shakers. They believed profoundly that marriage and the family would wither away with the state, leaving behind a purer and entirely voluntary “sex relation,” “based solely on mutual affection” and to “be dissolved if that affection cools.” Because everyone would take care of everyone else—child, woman, man—according to each individual’s needs, marriage would fade as an unnecessary obligation that perverted both individual integrity and collective responsibility.
Or that, at least, was the ideal that revolutionaries tried to embed in the 1919 Soviet Civil Code. Alexandra Kollantai and others began by writing revolutionary feminism into the proposed Soviet marriage code: civil instead of religious registration of marriages; equal rights for both women and men to child custody, name, inheritance, property ownership, and divorce; and no distinctions between children who were legitimate and il-. None of this—now standard in Western law—shocked the socialists. What did: recognizing marriage at all. Wrote one, “They screamed at us, registration of marriage, formal marriage, what kind of socialism is this? . . . the interference of the state in the business of marriage . . . is completely incomprehensible.” And so early Soviet marriage was stripped down even further, so that almost any sexual involvement was equivalent to almost any other, with divorce and alimony freely dispensed.
We all know that this particular utopian vision quickly became a totalitarian juggernaut: collectivized freedom scarcely went as planned, resulting in millions upon millions of deaths from famine, civil war, and the Stalinist terror. Among the many sources of misery was the newly enlightened marriage and family code, as local tribunals, courts, and administrations tried desperately to figure out how to apply the elegant free-love theorem to practical social engineering. What should happen to women who were abandoned as soon as they became pregnant, who still couldn’t find work in male-run industries? Did they count as “wives” and therefore get alimony or child support from their deserter, or did that allow some brazen adventurer to unfairly thin out the alimony of a once-committed ex-wife? What happened when families who owned nothing but a cow were ordered to sell it to pay alimony when their son threw his wife out? What happened to the millions of children abandoned and stealing on the street? In fact, people did not behave as if, stripped of individual bonds, they were committed to all: rather, they be
haved as if they were committed to none.
When, in the 1920s, writers of a new Family Code wanted to eliminate marriage registration entirely, one member of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Court asked, “Then who will decide what is marriage?” How will serious sexual commitments be separated from frivolous ones? Given that some unions—some with children, some without—did in fact involve mutual reliance and obligations, given that the penurious State could not in fact take care of everyone’s bed and board, how could a court decide which sexual unions gave rise to whose obligations to whom? Within two decades, of course, Soviet social chaos was being cleaned up by the twentieth century’s chief totalitarian, albeit one who saw marriage from a right-wing rather than a left-wing extreme. Stalin re-inscribed marriage and the family as pillars of the Soviet collective and mothers as heroes of the state—leaving the West to carry out the more necessary feminist reforms.
The imposed and contradictory “freedoms” of a totalitarian state are, perhaps, unfair examples of utopia gone wrong. The antimarriage utopia that has the best reputation might be that of the early Israeli kibbutzim. In the kibbutzniks’ early years in the 1940s and 1950s, no pair registered their marriage with the state; spouses depended on the group instead of each other for financial support; children were raised in shared dorms; everyone ate in a collective dining hall rather than privately, freeing individuals from nightly kitchen duties. And yet marriage never did wither away. Even during the earliest years of the kibbutz, a couple was recognized as such by the group, expected to be faithful, and given private living quarters—basic aspects of marriage. And after a few decades, marriage returned in full force, with elements the socialist pioneers would have considered abominable: big celebratory weddings; couples who live, eat, and watch TV privately with their children; and the end of the group dining hall.
The more things change . . . And these were the successful utopian sex-and-marriage experiments, the ones that lasted long enough to make it into the history books. However wildly different their diagnoses, remedies, and aims, they all set out to eliminate the evils of private love and marriage—and succeeded, for a time. Yet all disappeared within a generation—except the Mormons, who actually inscribed marriage as more honorable than did the outside world. Writes Amos Oz, “the human condition in its continuity and its perversity is complex enough to shatter any scheme and to confound any ‘systematic’ system.” Except for the chosen and dedicated few, most human beings seem to have an inability— or lack of desire—to live up to utopian visions of the withering away of individual love. Nor, given the hundreds of ways in which a couple’s commitment to and behavior toward each other affects society’s life, has it appeared practical for society’s interest in that love and its social consequences to wither away: whenever a utopian society attempts to banish rules, the human tendency toward disagreement once again bursts through and makes marriage rules necessary.
Or to put it differently, there’s a very good reason that most people have not embraced such visions, so that the Shakers, Oneida, and the kibbutz all faded back into privacy. The history of utopia—in marriage as in everything else—is the history of dystopia: the two are the same. And most people can smell that before they step too far in, like those who described their disillusionment with nineteenth-century utopian communities in words like these:
After some years of quiet householding in the Connecticut countryside we suddenly found ourselves forced to sit down to three meals a day with eighty-five to a hundred people . . . we had to live, eat, sleep, and work in the midst of all those people and we even had to be polite to them before breakfast. The result was that we lost our appetites, slept badly, and did no work at all. The baby caught our jitters like a disease and filled with her screams the only hours we had alone. . . . We stayed only because we were too broke to move. Every morning we walked up the mountain—the only escape from the people who seemed to have no understanding of two unregenerate individualists—and desperately discussed a way out of this mess.
You could look at this as a failure in changing consciousness, or simply as human reality. Living up to a communal ideal is too much for most of us: we do end up being individuals, sticky and particular, hard enough to love individually, much less en masse. Considering how painfully hard it is simply to thrash out a commitment to one peculiar other—not to mention one’s children, or parents, or intimate friends—how could any but the most dedicated and saintly human beings actually expect to become intimate with two hundred or two million? And even were it possible, who would have the time?
Some lesbians and gay men are still attempting to fit within this utopian tradition. I understand their impulse: I’m an apostate from the utopian faction, someone who grew up hoping for a perfect communal world. Having seen what the 1950s version of marriage did to my mother, I announced at age ten to her and the neighborhood moms that I would never get married; my first love was a girl with whom I excitedly invented socialist worlds at the edge of a lake. Although I was never actively antimonogamy like some of my 1970s contemporaries, my younger self would have been horrified to imagine writing a book in favor of marriage. But the more carefully I’ve examined marriage’s practical purposes— combined with utopia’s tendency to leave the weaker to be exploited by the worst—the clearer it is that marriage rules are necessary to bring justice to human commitments. Those marriage rules often need improvement—but the fact of marriage and its ever-shifting rules seems to be an eternal social necessity.
So I am a bit startled by those who can still write that “the desire to marry in the lesbian and gay community is an attempt to mimic the worst of mainstream society, an effort to fit into an inherently problematic institution that betrays the promise of both lesbian and gay liberation and radical feminism.” Sometimes such rhetoric treats those who want to marry as if they weren’t “really” part of the lesbian and gay community, interlopers who didn’t pass the political science section of the homosexuality entrance exam. It’s easy to see why the right wing would pretend that being lesbian or gay makes one “naturally” a radical outlaw, innately interested in forging a new social, sexual, and political world: it’s much easier to marginalize people you portray as innately strange. But why would lesbians and gay men promote such a fiction? Simple: those who get involved in public lesbian or gay politics are often those who are also critical of conventional social forms. But not every lesbian or gay man comes out in a radical immersion, or believes that marriage is “an inherently problematic institution”: most stay home in Omaha or Spokane rather than move to Boston’s lesbian-feminist political hotbed or San Francisco’s gay male sexual frontier. And so antimarriage rhetoric wrongly groups lesbian and gay liberationists with other lesbians and gay men—when really they belong with other sexual utopians in history, or with the heterosexual cultural-leftists of their era who have also been trying to invent new, alternative kinds of families.
A variant of this vision comes from another group: those who believe that being gay means endorsing an endless bacchanalia. Queer-studies academic Michael Warner, for instance, writes that “the appeal of queer sex, for many, lies in its ability to violate the responsibilizing frames of good, right-thinking people.” Novelist Edmund White echoes this sentiment when he writes that marriage is “hopelessly dreary,” a “monogamous air lock” that stands in utter opposition to his very definition of gay life, since, as he writes, “being gay seemed at first like another way of being a bohemian,” freed from “the most narrow, creepy, selfish sort of conformism.” Often, these sexual “radicals” can believe such drivel because they’ve moved away from their hometowns into a highly sexual gay subculture, and so they never see those lesbians and gay men who do live in the “middle-class respectability” that White pshaws, the long-monogamous couples whose lives never touch the urban party.
More important, these professors and bohemians willfully ignore their heterosexual siblings’ comparable urban party. Have they never noticed the (straight) men who spend al
l their money with the local red-light district’s prostitutes and peep shows and porno stores, the high-heeled (straight) women hunting for a pickup at the single bar’s closing time, the Madonnas and Courtney Loves making careers off their bad-girl reputations? Neither het nor homo has a lock on either urban “bohemian” or ranch-house “respectable.” Lesbians and gay men come from every background, impulse, religion, class, race, ethnicity, and profession in the West. We have far less in common with each other than either queer-theorists or radical rightists like to pretend. Why should lesbians’ and gay men’s sexual choices—our individual decisions about what counts as good and what counts as chaos—be any more similar than those of the rest of the country, of our parents and high school peers, our pub mates and politicians?
I’m baffled by those who think living a bacchanalian life is in any way politically defiant, since it so obviously endorses our era’s reigning corporate theology, the one sold by every sponsor from MTV to Pepsi: consume, consume, consume. With Westerners’ personal integrity under attack by the selling of desire, the worm of dissatisfaction constantly wriggles within us, wanting us to want everything, wanting us to refuse to choose. We can declare our resistance by announcing a commitment to something beyond temporary pleasure—such as caring for another human being. That declaration can be conservative in the best sense: conserving the limited energy in one or two hearts.
But even for those who disagree, opening marriage to same-sex couples would scarcely force marriage on all lesbians and gay men. “I advocate complete freedom for sexuality the same as for religion,” declared the infamous free-lover and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull in 1874. “I advocate sexual freedom for all people—freedom for the monogamist to practice monogamy, for the varietist to be a varietist still, for the promiscuous to remain promiscuous. Am I, therefore, an advocate of promiscuousness, variety, or monogamy? Not necessarily either. I might do all this and be myself a celibate and an advocate of celibacy.” Woodhull’s theology of sexual freedom (preached, may I add, to heterosexuals) shocked her contemporaries—and reigns in our country today. Twenty-five percent of today’s American households are single individuals (surely not all celibate)—the same percentage as the mom + dad + kids households. The 1950s marriage that rightly stands like a nightmare in White’s and others’ memories has lost its stranglehold on the majority. Why would it suddenly sink its talons only into lesbians and gay men? Opening marriage to same-sex couples would leave alone those who prefer their leather bars—while allowing the home-and-hearth couples to have their gold rings. It would thus expose that lesbians and gay men are just as various as our heterosexual sibs. No wonder it’s a vision disliked by liberationists, queer-theorists, and the right wing alike.