While the passage of gay marriage has been a long, slow battle, and one that deserves all the attention it’s getting, one has to wonder if this recent addition of rights will quell the neverendingly loud declarations about being gay and “what it means.” And furthermore, if the amount of ardor surrounding gayness will persist, or rather, die down now that homosexuals are permitted the courtesy of becoming legal monogamist sticks in the mud.
Naturally, this viewpoint will, of course, be taken in homophobic stride, though it is not meant to come across that way. It’s simply that the outpouring of pride doesn’t seem to need half as much enthusiasm now that homosexuals have achieved their ultimate goal. Tantamount to the civil rights movement of the 1960s (except with a bit less violence and more colorful parades), the gay community has struggled for so many decades, wielding their gayness like armor against those who would deign to tell them they don’t have a right to bone someone of the same sex. Least of all marry someone of the same sex.
So where does that leave them now? What reason could they possibly have to persist in their flamboyance and rage against straights trying to keep them down? Granted, it’s going to be a glacial crawl toward mass acceptance of this new law in the United States, particularly in that foreign country known as the South, however, homosexuals are facing a serious lack in reasons to be so, shall we say, hostilely bombastic, about “who they are.”
Historically speaking, people only tend to be proud of their identity when it is something the culture at large maligns. It is a method of defiance. The Jewish and black population, for example. You’ll never encounter a pair of ethnic groups more passionate about their background, especially when they want to speak to where the culture as a whole would be without them. But with gay men and lesbians being lent the same common courtesies as the hetero set, will they have as much reason to stand up for their collective environment and renege on their former fervor? And, perhaps even more interestingly, will religion amend its tenets to continue to attract a huge enough pool of people from which to extract money?
