I was filling out a registration form for an online parenting community the other day. One of the questions was “Marital status?” Being an accepting sort of site, they gave the choices “Married, Partnered, Single.”
My cursor went automatically to “Partnered,” since that’s what I had called myself for thirteen-plus years. “Wait,” I thought. “I’m now legally married. I can check the ‘Married’ box without a second thought.”
“Not so fast,” said the other voice in my head. “If you do that, the site may never know you’re a lesbian parent. Visibility matters. Yes,” it added, “there are opposite-sex couples who never marry and call themselves ‘partners.’ But statistically, I have to think same-sex couples who use the term greatly outnumber opposite-sex ones. And yes, I’m sure you’ll leave lesbian-related posts in the site’s forums. But if the site owners are looking at membership stats, they’ll likely just compile registration-form data.”
I sighed, checked “Partnered,” and went on to the question about how many children I have.
There’s a saying, often attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that “No one is free until everyone is free.” Until same-sex couples can legally marry anywhere they choose, and no longer need to make a point of being so deliberately visible, many of us will find it hard to check the “Married” box, Commonwealth of Massachusetts notwithstanding.
This raises the question, however, of whether LGBT visbility, and with it, LGBT culture, will fade once we all have equal rights. Will homogenization outweigh homosexuality? A couple of weeks ago, for example, Queerty reported on the closing of Out in the Mountains, Vermont’s LGBT newspaper. They quote a former editor of the paper, who also noted that the state’s last gay bar closed earlier in the year, and asked, “Is this the price of assimilation?” Vermont, of course, was the first state to offer civil unions for same-sex couples.
Without knowing the specifics of each closing, my response is that neither event necessarily foretells the demise of queer culture in the Green Mountain State. Small-scale newspapers (there were three paid employees) are subject to the vagaries of their staff’s personal lives in a way that large ones aren’t. More and more people are getting their LGBT news from the Internet, but feeling no less connected to the community than when they had newsprint stains on their fingers. The bar’s closing is a shame, too, but again, small businesses can be transient. This is not to say that LGBT culture in Vermont isn’t waning, but these events don’t prove it one way or another.
Even when all LGBT people can marry, and when there are also more legal, non-marital relationships for both straight and LGBT couples, I don’t believe we’ll lose the distinctiveness that comprises LGBT culture. We will no longer be separated from the mainstream by our lack of rights, but our community will remain united by a common history, by the struggle that gave us those rights. We will continue to pursue different paths to parenthood than most opposite-sex parents. We will continue to question and challenge traditional gender roles more than the straight population. We may check the same boxes on a form as our straight counterparts, but we will refuse to be boxed in.