In a moment of clarity, driving past the mall on our western side of town today, I realized something. I may have figured out why so many people are so sincerely opposed to allowing gay people to marry, and it's both sad and understandable at the same time.
This sort of thing happens often in music and fashion. It happened somewhere in the '80's to the punks. It happened when The Cure's Just Like Heaven hit it big and again when Green Day released their album Dookie.
I remember time it happened to me, shortly after Nirvana's debut as a band with a hit song. I fell in love with it and was soon to purchase what I could of their earlier releases. I was into that kind of thing then, and I felt it went well with the Fastbacks and Mudhoney I was discovering.
Suddenly the music I felt was so much a part of me was huge and everywhere. Everyone had that same album and was wearing short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts. The flannels I'd grown up wearing were suddenly cool, and I was suddenly seen as one more person buying into this thing that someone decided to call grunge.
And I didn't like it. I was the cool one. I was the one that really liked it. This was my music and the damned usurpers didn't get it, only liked it because it was suddenly cool. All they were really doing was ruining what was once a great scene by making my fashion sense available at the mall.
Perhaps that's an unsaid reason for the anti-gay marriage revolt. We gays are diluting their thing. The straight people have been working on this marriage thing without us for so long that they feel some connection, that they are known by this thing. The goths wear black and the straights marry.
What if suddenly the gays start marrying each other? Before long it won't have the same value, the same street cred. It will be like anything else, and then everyone will start doing it. Before you know it Abercrombie and Fitch will start selling marriage at the mall and white boy vanilla rappers will write family friendly tunes about weddings. Soon enough it will become so passe' that, like random metal-ish riffs in a Food Network show about making Smarties candies, it will be safe and bland, will lose its power to shock.
Maybe it's not that, and I'm more than willing to admit that I could be wrong. There could be other reasons to keep us from marrying people we love, but I'd kind of like it to be my reason. Seriously, there really is only one other reason I can think of but would prefer it not be true. That reason is that they are just douche bags, and I don't want to imagine that all those people are just douche bags. It's better to think of them as Cure fans or late '70's punks. They don't want their scene watered down and usurped.
