No aspect of our 21st-century lives is more parched of gayness than weddings. They are desperate for a fairy makeover. We heteros should be begging gays to come and give the best day of our lives a dressing-down by joining in. Weddings are a kitsch style crash of appalling taste, snotty tissues, blisters, lip gloss, dads dancing, and hypoglycemia. A wedding is like porn in that it promises far more than it’s ever going to deliver; unlike porn, we witness this scene with our grandparents and our kids.
“The Wedding” is supposed to be a peak moment in our lives. Small children are encouraged to look forward to theirs with a fairy-tale longing. Little girls plan theirs before they’ve ever said a civil word to a boy, let alone kissed one. Then some tongue-tied, giddy swain slumps to one knee and tugs a velveteen box from his pocket, and his sweetheart, who up to this very moment has quite liked him, is more acutely embarrassed than she ever thought humanly possible. She stares at the pitiful diamond. The engagement ring is the ugliest, gaudiest piece of jewelry most women will ever wear. It sets in motion the most stressful and tearful year of their lives, one that will culminate in a day only heterosexuals could come up with. (...)
Viewed from the pews, weddings are theater produced by straight amateurs using their own money. The resulting spectacle is what a dog show would be like if it were organized by the dogs. When gays remake weddings, the lighting will be the first thing to improve. Secondly, no one’s going to think that a fatless steak fryer is a suitable present, and the flowers won’t look ordered for a clown’s funeral. The music will also be classier; you won’t have to walk down the aisle to Meatloaf singing, “I would do anything for love / But I won’t do that.”
The history of queer culture shows us that gay men are the trailblazers. Where they go, heterosexual women follow, dragging reluctant straight men behind them, who in turn bring Texans. That’s how civilization and musical theater evolve. Not to mention catering. The cake has got to go. The original wedding cake was a biscuit broken over the bride’s head to represent what was about to happen to her hymen. But that’s vulgar. Today the happy couple jointly hold a very phallic knife and together force it through the virginal white icing into the soft, moist sweetness, and in America, for those who are slow at symbolism, they then push cake into each other’s face as a sort of cakealingus.
I understand that the bureaucratic holdup in allowing gays to have weddings like the rest of us is a problem with the exclusivity rules of the club. I thought that marriage was supposed to be a basic building block of society, that marriages come together to give the nation-state its tensile strength. Marriages make families, and families marry one another, creating a web of security and morality. Surely the right thing, the conservative thing, would be to get as many people into marriages as possible. The really radical-right, hair-shirt-and-burning-torches thing would be to insist that gays get married because, without wanting to be indelicate, all the stuff that gets the religiously intense so book-thumpingly incandescent about homosexuality is all the stuff that goes on before you’re married. If you want to stop them having fun up against walls and behind sofas, just let them get married. They’ll soon learn there’s precious little cake in the face after the wedding.
by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Photo: Classicstock/Alamy; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark
