Pendleton, M. and Serisier, Tanya (2012) Some Gays and the Queers. M/C Journal 15 (6), ISSN 1441-2616.
Abstract
Gore Vidal, the famous writer and literary critic, was recently buried next to his long-term partner, Howard Austen. The couple, who met in the 1950s, had lived together happily for decades. They were in many ways the kind of same-sex couple frequently valorised in contemporary gay marriage campaigns. Vidal and Austen, however, could not serve as emblematic figures for this campaign, and not only because the two men had no interest in marriage. Vidal, who reportedly had over a hundred lovers, both male and female, once attributed the longevity of their relationship to its platonic nature; both men continued to sleep with other people, and they reportedly stopped having sex with each other after they moved in together (Vidal, Palimpsest, 131–32). A relationship that decoupled monogamy, romance, companionship, and sexuality, and reconnected them in a way that challenged the accepted truths of institutionalised marriage, stands as an implicit questioning of the way in which gay marriage campaigns construct the possibilities for life, love, and sex. It is this questioning that we draw out in this article.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | marriage, history, critique, feminism, queer |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Tanya Serisier |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Nov 2020 13:44 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 18:04 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/41100 |
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