Will gay marriage leave relationship radicals in the dust?

A question: How much of the appeal of polyamory actually comes from its stated purpose -- being able to share love among several people -- and how much comes, instead, from the joy of breaking out of old social molds and creating a pioneering way of life?

Right now, it's often hard to separate the two. But they are not the same thing.

Imagine, for a moment, the freedom-seeking pioneers who carved homesteads out of the 19th-century wilderness, and how those same homesteads are now covered with safe, bland suburbs. If, in maybe 50 or 100 years, polyamory becomes similarly commonplace, ordinary, and *normal* -- with legal group weddings happening in churches and courthouses every weekend --  what will poly look like?

Maybe we see a preview in what's happening among gays, at least in liberal places like my home state of Massachusetts. Married gay couples are respected members of my church, with conventional looks and clothes and jobs, and kids, and single-family houses with for all I know picket fences. It suits them well. But is gay culture losing its zing? The annual Pride Parade in Boston has become almost respectable; banks, insurance companies, and mainstream politicians jostle for visibility, while Pride Day outrageousness seems on the decline. Is this a good thing?

I became a relationship radical as a teenager via the science fiction of Robert Heinlein and some of his enthusiasts who inducted me. Much later, in his novel *Friday*, I was interested to see Heinlein's first portrayal of a *dysfunctional* poly family. They lived in New Zealand in the far future when group marriage was routine; they turned out to be, under an attractive surface, as conventional, small-minded, and socially-bound as your Limbaugh-listening relatives in Burned Barn, Kansas.

On Thursday Erwin deLeon, a columnist on the website of the *Houston Voice*, discussed the concerns in the gay world that "the relationships of lesbians and gays who opt to stay in domestic partnerships or in alternative arrangements... such as polyamory... will be deemed inferior to those of married couples." Excerpt:

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“I don’t know about this marriage business,” Dick Leitsch muttered half-jokingly. “I don’t feel so special anymore.” The former Mattachine chief and Stonewall activist was expressing a concern some in our community have about how marriage is beginning to change us -- how we are losing our edge and identity, and becoming “heteronormative.” How we are selling out.

Actor Rupert Everett was far less gracious. “Marriage? Babies? Please. I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream.... These awful middle-class queens -- which is what the gay movement has become -- are so tiresome.”
 
...The time will come when all Americans can marry if they so choose. But how the act and institution will change us is an interesting question.

In her recently published book, *When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage*, economist and LGBT researcher M. V. Lee Badgett asks, “Will marriage change gay people?”

She writes that “Some hope so, arguing that gay men will be more monogamous and gay relationships more stable if same-sex couples can marry, and gays and lesbians will be better assimilated into the larger culture.... Others in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities fear that distinctive features of gay life will be transformed in negative ways.”

At a book reading last week, she added that there are those who fear that the relationships of lesbians and gays who opt to stay in domestic partnerships or in alternative arrangements (such as polyamory) will be deemed inferior to those of married couples....
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DeLeon describes other such discussions (with links), and he concludes, “Perhaps it’s not too bad after all to no longer feel so special. In 'selling out,' we stand to gain a whole lot more. Equality, for one.” Read the whole article here:

http://www.houstonvoice.com/blog/index.cfm?blog_id=27744

Thoughts?

Crossposted from Polyamory in the News: http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com