Heart’s desire
If you’ve lost faith in the idea of gay love, think again
by Bert Archer
Photo Pedro Stephan

It’s been 10 years since Andrew Sullivan wrote Love Undetectable. Though he’s now known as everyone’s favourite Anglo-American blogger, back then he used to be the one voice on gay issues that everyone took more or less seriously. As the former editor of The New Republic, he was conservative enough not to be written off as a gayrights freak by those who thought gay-rights advocates were freaky, but unapologetically vocal enough to be considered acceptable company for actual gay-rights freaks. He was an important voice—a representative and articulator of his era. But when it came to love, he was also its victim. Listen to this, from Love Undetectable:

The great modern enemy of friendship is love....I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.

Sullivan’s smart and articulate and well read. He quotes Aristotle all over the place. But the last section of this book, dedicated to the superiority of friendship over love, is full of sound and fury, signifying the poor guy was in desperate need of a little gay marriage.

It’s amazing how normal the whole marriage thing has come to seem to us in the Great Right North—and so quickly. For ages, it seemed like it would never happen. Same-sex marriage remained, for most people interested in it, a goal that the next generation or two of activists would be able to activate around, the last great hurdle to attaining that big yellow equal sign the Americans had adopted as their gay-rights symbol.

And then it happened. There was dancing in the streets, briefly, and a wash of marriages between people who had waited a lifetime to be able to call each other husband or wife. And then...not much. The fact that something as monumental as winning the right to marry has become so taken for granted so quickly, when it might so easily have been a sticking point for conservatives and the cause for increased gaybashing, both verbal and physical, is a reason to celebrate. But it won’t do to ignore the effects this victory has had and will continue to have on us. We’ve spent so much time—at least a century, depending on how you count it, fighting for the right to fuck, often veiling it in terms of love so we could get quoted during prime time— that discussions of simple, normal love may have seemed a little, to use the schoolyard sense of the word, gay.

But look at that Sullivan passage again. He concludes that portion of his screed, a couple of pages later (after making fun of Romeo and Juliet), by saying of love that, “It is, at its root, meaningless and random.” Just like the millions of men forced into truck stops to get off who then go on to say that sex is way hotter that way, Sullivan is twisting himself into a conservative gay pretzel to justify his inability to find enduring love in a world that made it next to impossible for him. Sullivan’s strength has always been rhetorical rather than logical but this, even for him, was silly. Sex is great, friendship can be the seedbed of grand projects and grander conversations, but love, to quote Ewan McGregor quoting Baz Luhrman quoting and misquoting everyone else, “Love is a many splendored thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love.”

There was a lot of debate about same-sex marriage before it became a reality. I found myself, on several occasions, not defending the idea so much as opposing those who opposed it. Marriage is outmoded, I’d say, we are moving “beyond conjugality,” I’d add, quoting the title of a pretty radical Law Commission report. I’d read Sullivan’s book when it came out but that venomous, confused last section hadn’t stuck with me for some reason. Maybe because it seemed reasonable at the time. What a difference a decade makes.

It’s dangerous, or at least precarious, to make epochal statements but I think I’m on pretty solid ground here. John Boswell and his Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe notwithstanding, two people of the same sex have never before, in the recorded history of the world, been able to marry each other using the same system opposite-sex couples do. This changes things a lot.

Love, in addition to requiring an object, needs structure. Unlike a friendship, which you can drift into and out of over decades, loveship—to use Alice Munro’s typically crystalline term for it—requires all sorts of practical buttresses to keep it from evaporating or running off the rails in a flight of passion. I’ve always admired the various alternatives same-sex folks have come up with over the years—away games, bathhouse rules, playful Wednesdays—and have thought they should be more widely considered. But these are all makeshift things— good, but more codicils than contracts. There’s a narrative people in love with someone of the same sex have always been left out of. Some of us have been proud of our outsider status but, if it’s happiness you’re after, being an outsider only takes you so far.

When Parliament approved same-sex marriage in July 2005— a time I’d like to see referred to, at least occasionally, as the real summer of love—that narrative was opened up to us. Now when we meet-cute fondling cucumbers at Fiesta Farms or hook up with someone from Manline’s relationship section, we can see where things might go, from meeting to kissing to sex to dating to loving to engagement to marriage and, maybe, divorce.

There have been brilliant long-term relationships between men and between women before, of course. But they were always exceptional. We’d celebrate somebody’s grandparents’ 50th anniversary, but two men or two women together that long has, so far, been something more akin to awe-inspiring. Friendships can get better with time but love is actually fulfilled by it, its experience between two 80-year-olds as much a resolution of that first, blind plunging passion as the final gathering in the drawing room is of those shots in the dark that start an Agatha Christie book.

There are people who worry that marriage will ultimately homogenize us, assimilate us, make our outlaw love less exciting, less our own. For those of us who are outlaws and exciting, nothing as voluntary and as malleable as marriage will ever be able to rob us of our individuality. And for the rest of us, it gives us a roadmap, a lexicon, a way to navigate between concepts like friendship and love and to squirrel out for ourselves something like the loving lives we’ve been reading about since we were kids.


Bert Archer, who wrote The End of Gay, is a journalist with Toronto Life and The Globe and Mail.