Sealed with a kiss

Like most gay couples, my wife and I are careful about when we kiss in public.  On the lips or not?  Long enough to make it clear that we are a couple?  Fortunately we live in an urban area that is fairly friendly, but still, we are cautious.  If we're in the gayborhood, it's different than if we're downtown.

Frank Bruni has a column this weekend about That Kiss:  the full on joyful kiss between NFL draftee Michael Sam and his slim swimmer boyfriend.  Not just a kiss between two men, but an inter-racial kiss as well.  Freighted with meaning, that exchange.  Bruni writes, 

From NBC news

And they’re still rare enough that the initial, internal reaction that I and many other gay people had to the way Sam clutched and kissed his boyfriend on national TV wasn’t exultation. It was alarm. Had he gone too far? Asked too much? 

.... I still sometimes feel panic when my partner, meeting me in a restaurant, gives me a perfunctory kiss on the lips. And yet I feel robbed — wronged — if I sense that an awareness of other people’s gazes and a fear of their judgment are preventing him from doing that. 

We shouldn’t be bound that way, and on the day of the pro football draft, in front of the cameras, Sam rightly declared that he wasn’t. He did so with a gesture at once humdrum and heroic, a gesture that connects everyone who has been in love and affirms what every love shares: physical tenderness, eye-to-eye togetherness. It was something to behold. It was something to hold on to.

Just "friends"....?

It's very clear that the opposition to marriage in part comes from the unwillingness of the anti's to admit that we are the same as they are, that we feel the same as they do, and that there is nothing really and substantively different in the emotions of love. This is why they try to reduce our relationships to mere sex, which they can cast as icky, rather than acknowledging the depth and meaning of real relationship.

David Link writes,

Those who argue that homosexuality is a choice view us, and view our relationships, as friendships either perverted or at best gone wrong. ...

You don’t hear that kind of language from our supporters any more. Only our opponents are clinging to that outmoded notion of choice. They think the whole debate over same-sex relationships is about our choice of friends. They still can’t, or won’t, imagine that the flood of emotions and connections that they recognize as love can occur between two people of the same sex. I’m sure that a lot of them don’t even think it’s demeaning to our relationships to view them as falling within the kind of choices we make about our friends. They want us to have friends. They just refuse to believe that the powerful and mysterious forces they remember and/or experience with love can happen, for some people, with members of their own sex, and are every bit as gratifying and amazing — are, in fact, the same thing they know so well.

And Andrew Sullivan follows up,

This reminds me of a social occasion when Aaron and I bumped into former Senator George Allen. I introduced Aaron (not without extreme pleasure) as my husband. Allen asked where we had gotten married. When I said Massachusetts, he said: "So you all are trying to export marriage from Massachusetts to here." Nope, I said, because we cannot (this was before DC's marriage law came into effect). I then asked Allen why he would object to a committed, legally protected relationship in the first place. He answered, memorably, "I just want you to be friends."

Can you imagine anyone saying that a straight married couple?

But really, it all comes back to the "ickiness" that straight people feel about gay sex. Because they can't imagine wanting to do that, they assume that who we are is somehow defined by that. And at times I despair. Even though marriage equality has been the law in the Netherlands for 10 years, about half of the Dutch still are bothered by two men kissing in public.

And i don't understand it. If I see two people kissing, whether two men, or two women, or a straight couple, I think it's sweet.

Great Gay (and Gay Friendly) Kiss-in, Aug 15th

We ... believe that there's not enough love and affection in the world, because most people are afraid to show it. We should never be afraid of brief, unimposing displays of affection. There is nothing wrong with a hug, a kiss on the mouth, a kiss on the cheek.

Our friends at Join the Impact are joining the New Civil Rights Movement and calling for a kiss-in, to protest the arrests of gay people who dare exchange a kiss in public. More background here.

Check out the Facebook Group for a city near you, find a friend, a spouse, or a partner, and pucker up!