There might be a gay wedding, or two, in the Double Dare trilogy, a legal possibility that is relatively recent, as you no doubt know. A conservative commentator, Michael Knowles, recently claimed gay marriage doesn’t exist because ‘it’s not possible … it’s not what marriage is.” He goes on to say that marriage “derives not from some thought in that guy’s head, but from nature.” The ‘guy’ he references here is one of the judges on the Supreme Court which ruled, long after many other countries and few US states had already done so, that disallowing loving gay couples to wed while heterosexual couples could was a denial of full civil rights. In truth, marriage is a civil construct. It is a legal contract, one that for centuries was entered into primarily for economic and political reasons. Marrying for love, for romance, did not become common until the 18th Century. Marriage is sanctioned in very different ways to this day. There is no age limit in Islam and some countries allow women as young as fourteen to marry. Some states allow cousins to marry. And some states still recognize common law marriage. Committed, life-long loving gay relationships have always existed, as far back as Alexander and Hephaestion, and long before that. According to historic texts, it has been documented over thousands of years, long before any marriages of any kind were sanctioned by the state. Love, with or without a legal sanction, derives not from some guy’s head. It come from the heart. Knowles was maybe half right. Whether between a man and a woman or between two men or two women, cis or trans, love between two people is totally natural and always has been. The only thing that has changed are laws sanctioning or preventing legal recognition of what already exists in nature.
