Meanwhile, our work exploring the data from our surnames survey continues...watch this space (or see our previous post) for more information!
Thanks to Liz for sharing this piece with us.
She's not my friend anymore
“Those pants suit you” I said to the woman in Athleta on 5th
Avenue, New York. “My friend is in there trying on the same ones”.
Sender would like to recall message. I am appalled at my
betrayal. Hardly has the ink dried on our marriage certificate, and I have
already repudiated my spouse. If discourse brings about identity, then mine is
still stuck in that queer limbo of illegitimacy that she and I have inhabited
for the last 25 years.
Too much information. The woman in the store didn’t need to
know all of this. But then again, why not? How easy it would have been to
announce a husband to the most casual of acquaintances. So why not my, my, my
wwwwww. No. I still can’t say the ‘w’ word. It’s a bit too Susan Calman. She is
my partner in marriage, my trouble-and-strife, her-indoors, my spouse.
Shame is the eternal companion to the queer subject, even decades
after decriminalization. Shame at the non-normativity of being queer. Shame at
never quite fully accepting myself. Shame at finding it so difficult to lay
claim to the legitimacy now offered to me. Because the day before, I had got
married, hitched, wedded, espoused. To my ‘friend’ in the changing booth behind
us. We arrived at City Hall, in Wall Street with our two witnesses. We took a
numbered ticket and sat down to wait on the green benches until we went into
the small chapel, and there, stumbling and trembling on the words, I was
married to the love of my life. I have thought about that moment every day
since.
If you are wondering what all the equivocation is about,
just consider this. Shame is not a singular event; it accrues over a lifetime,
undermining like a degenerative disease. From earliest childhood, all we have
known are anxieties about being feminine enough, straight enough, respectable
enough. As we emerge from the family we encounter an immersive queering as
school firmly establishes our outsider status when we are found desiring sports
or activities deemed the provenance of the so-called opposite ‘sex’. Our world
falls into a preserve of binaries that seems to have forgotten to give us an
entry pass.
So when Section 28 came along in the United Kingdom in 1988,
gay subjectivity was already complicit in its own illegitimacy. Forbidden:
"the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of
homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".
So there you have it. My relationship is a mere simulation
of the real thing. Maybe that is why my marriage seemed rather like a mirage. I
think back to that brief ceremony. Brief, but not perfunctory. The Clerk had it
all right. She must have met bashful queers before. So habitually circumspect
about public displays of affection, we had to be prompted twice to take each
other’s hands. We hesitated on the permissive ‘you may kiss your spouse’.
So it is still sinking in, what marriage means to someone
who has never thought it would be a possibility. What it will mean for us as a
couple. But now that we have done it, I need to step up and take a stand of
visibility. No more covering with euphemisms, or letting false assumptions
persist. I am claiming the right that heterosexuals have to ‘flaunt it’ in the
simple avowal of their relationships. I’m going to celebrate the joy that has
come in the authoring, and authorisation of our new connection. She’s not ‘my
friend’ anymore.
Liz Morrish
January, 2015
