What Love Won

On June 26, 2015, we became legal. I have mixed feelings about it.

By now, you have heard the news. We can marry. We can be like them, our overlords, the straights. We can have all the legal rights and freedoms of real married couples, should we want them.

This is great, but I can't help but feel a bit patronized. They deigned to let us marry, and just barely. They gave the fags and dykes something to celebrate so they could keep killing us.

Don't misunderstand me: I am happy it happened. I am glad gay men can legally be with each other at their deathbeds. That is right. That is just. We have been dying together a long time, and living together too, and it is a wonder that it took until 2015 for the most powerful government on Earth to acknowledge that, just maybe, we deserve to be real in the eyes of the law — as if we ever cared about being legal, as if we ever needed their legitimization. More than a victory, it feels like a crumb, not even a gesture of goodwill. We had to fight for it. But here it is, ours, and now people will say things like, "I guess the gay movement won". As if it was ever about marriage.

It is privilege for me, sitting on this side of AIDS history, to say all this, but my version of gay love is something rogue, something that cannot be officiated. It does not fit the monogamous, heterosexual paradigm of husband and wife. It never will. All the most interesting homosexuals I know can say the same. This is a win over something we did not want, and I wonder what we will lose with it.

Still, it was a nice day. A beautiful one.

Jose and I spent most of it together. After San Francisco spectacularly failed, he took me back. For some reason, ever after I abandoned him, he found it in himself to keep loving me, and we picked each other back up. Because, in our verison of gay — the weird, queer, nonlinear one — breakups don't seem to mean the same as they do for straights. We are wild. Sometimes we take adventures, take breaks, then wander back together when it feels right. On the morning of the ruling, as the news hit our phones, Savannah's gay scene erupted. Homos hugged and kissed in the street. By evening, I was in the town's lone gay club, tossing back drinks, when a drag queen I knew sauntered up to the bar in her signature red dress and kissed me on the cheek. I could smell her makeup, that synthetic kiss of drag and plastic hair I knew so well.

It is a beautiful thing to celebrate with one's people. Regardless of my feelings on the ruling, I hoped I would remember, more than anything, what the day felt like. It was a day I knew I would look back on and try to recall, try to understand. I hoped I would remember the electricity in the air and the feeling of being united with those I love.

I was tired. There was a celebration rally that afternoon and a dance party after that. Then the club. After living in Savannah some years, I was now a familiar face. I met many men at the club, most I'd never see again. They were visitors passing through town, vacationers going to Florida. Some became friends, some lovers. The queen who kissed me performed at my first drag show when I was 19 after I slipped into the bar with a fake ID. She watched me grow up through college, and now, here I was, graduated, back in town after a failed try at California. She knew my name and my drama. I knew hers. We loved each other the way one loves the faces that only exist in a gay bar.

Somehow we started talking about blowjobs in the bathroom. I'd given a few. She had too. I said, "I'm still surprised there's not a backroom here."

She rolled her eyes. "Honey, there was one. Once upon a time."

She pointed a jeweled finger across the empty dance floor to the far wall. "This entrance to the bathroom is new. Years ago, when I first started coming here, you went into a door on that side of the room, and you took this long, dark hallway all the way around to the bathrooms here. Down that hallway was one red light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Use your imagination."

The club, she said, was redesigned to be more "community-friendly" — to be safer for bachelorettes and straight tourists. When I heard this, it broke my heart. This scrubbing of gay spaces was exactly the thing I feared and hated most, and I knew in a profound way — in a way I could not articulate then — that this shift had come arm-in-arm with the Supreme Court ruling that day. They were the same stuff.

With this shift would come change, and I wasn't sure I would like that change. I didn't want my culture to be scrubbed or my backrooms to vanish, but they were — they had. And the generation of men who enjoyed backrooms was not mine. My generation ushered in social media and hookup apps. I was too young to know what earlier gay life was like, but I dreamed of it: cruising Central Park in the 1980s, fucking at clubs like The Saint and Mineshaft. I wanted that. Maybe that's a privilege to be on this side of so much loss, young and ignorant enough to romanticize it, and maybe that's naive, but that is how I felt. With marriage equality, we were facing a new stage of gay life, and I wished, however foolishly, that the rest of the world could go forward and I back. I wanted to go back to Fire Island and easy sex. I wanted to live dangerously, outside the law, not in it. That fantasy, more than anything, felt like the clearest description of my gay life.

"Let me buy you a drink," I said. And I did. We raised our glasses. We were in sacred space — a ratty club with a disco ball over the dance floor, mirror walls, a pool table, kitschy Christmas lights, and sleazy urinals. How long would this place last? The bar was dead, but she said it would pick up with the night crowd. But we knew it was also empty because gay men now had apps to meet on, and because they could go home to husbands and boyfriends and lovers. I would not stay for the night crowd: I would go home to Jose. Who needs a sanctuary when you are no longer forbidden?

The day ended in bed with him. We didn't have much money, but we had a window that looked out over a courtyard. In the courtyard was an oak tree and potted lilies and a rhododendron and ferns. Every night, a bird came to a branch outside the window and sang. That night, we listened to it, drunk, naked in the dark. We fucked and fucked and fucked.

Faggots will replace the zealots and die-hard conservatives. When their children rise again to fight us — and they will — people like me will still be here, ready to hit back. We must never forget what they have done. They have dragged us from our beds and beaten us in the yards of America. They have beaten us in the streets, stabbed us with knives, and set us on fire. All for love.

That's how much our love scares them. That is why they fought to keep us from their sacred, stupid institution: because we are still so ugly to them. We pervert their world. And we must keep perverting it and never give them a foothold, because they will never stop.

"Love wins" is a common pride slogan, but I've always had mixed thoughts on it. Throughout history, there were many times when love did not win. The slogan presents love's power as a fact, not "love wins if we keep it alive" but just it wins, period. That is a lie. If love was strong enough to win, we would have won everything long ago. We have loved so deeply, loved in the face of annihilation, and it was not enough to save those who should have been alive to see this.

The love felt by our enemies is fueled by faith and an antiquated view of America — love of the nation-state, love of power, love of comfort and tradition. They see my love as a soft, limp-wristed thing. Or they see it as a disease, a sin, a recruitment tool to steal their kids, or all the above. But here's the truth about my love, and I'll say it directly to all the believers, all the pious heterosexuals and angry moms: My love is a beast, sharp-clawed, insatiable, and it's coming for you.

Love, Beastly