The Dutch do it. The Belgians do it. Now the Canadians are doing it, too. When will Americans join the modern world and start legally recognizing same-sex marriages? This month, both Brussels and Ottawa threw open marriage’s legal doors to same-sex couples. But it was Canada’s newly gender-neutral marriage law that set American lesbian and […]
E.J. Graff
E.J. Graff writes on social-justice and human-rights issues, particularly discrimination and violence against women and children; marriage and family policy; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and the author of What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999, 2004).
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In the Bedroom
You’re making love. Suddenly the police burst into your apartment, arrest you for engaging in “deviate sexual intercourse” and haul you off to jail in your underpants. Are you in: a) Afghanistan; b) Saudi Arabia; c) Cuba; or d) Texas? Yes, it’s Texas. On Sept. 17, 1998, the Harris County sheriff’s office got a complaint […]
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Bring Me Women
At least Pfc. Jessica Lynch got her wounds on the battlefront. Back on the home front, Air Force Academy women have been taking friendly fire. Rape, it seems, is the price of graduation. To many civilians, that news from the Air Force Academy sounds like déjà vu all over again. Didn’t the military — the […]
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Real Marriage, Real Life
Laughing at marriage, that age-old comedy staple, is trendy once again. The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire and the “reality” genre’s latest entry, Married by America: Watching what fools these mortals be is setting Nielsen records. And why not? Unlike the terrifyingly high-stakes disputes over Iraq, smallpox vaccinations, airport security and secret detentions, marriage has […]
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How the Culture War Was Won
Imagine for a moment that we live in an alternate universe where the United States is openly hostile to lesbians and gay men. How hostile? Well, in this world, the liberal state of Massachusetts bans lesbians and gay men from being foster parents. The only gay person you might find on TV — and you’d […]
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The Other Marriage War
Imagine waking up one morning to the news that because of a recent court decision, you may no longer be your child’s legal parent. Forget all those times you’ve read Goodnight Moon, those long nights you spent in a steam-filled bathroom trying to keep your sick child breathing. In the eyes of the law, you […]
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The Feminist Mistake?
Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight about Gender and Power, Benjamin DeMott. Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $26.00. What do we talk about when we talk about feminism? That depends on what we think about women in general and contemporary culture in particular. Are we talking about makeup-free women with long, gray braids who, […]
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Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
Shouldn’t it be enough of a task in life to find meaningful work and love, those north and south poles of happiness? No: The human animal, like so many of its two- and four- and many-legged kin, also has an enduring need to establish social hierarchies. And that job–figuring out your rank and edging it […]
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Wedding March
Marriage is between one man and one woman: 30 states and the federal government have passed laws insisting that it’s so–and on March 7, Californians will vote whether to join them. As a result–or, more accurately, because of the money, rhetoric, and time the American right wing has spent ringing alarums about same-sex marriage and […]
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Being Black and White
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He WasBlack By Gregory Howard Williams. Plume (1996), 285 pages, $13.95 paperback The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother By James McBride. Riverhead Books (1996), 297 pages, $12.95 paperback Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a […]
