Gay Marriage: Choose Your Words Carefully

One of the surprising side-effects of the push for same-sex civil marriage that I’ve found is a revision of the words I have to (or am willing to) use about same-sex relationships.

As I wrote in “Letter of Comment — Spousal Equivalent” on January 21 (and expanded further here), there has long been a list of terms that people would apply to their same-sex relationships: roommate, boyfriend/girlfriend, lover, partner, life partner, longterm companion, fuck buddy, daddy, boy, master, slave, sugar daddy, mate, soulmate, chew toy,…

In particular, we (the gay community) would often in the past use “husband” or “wife” to describe a partner.  Sometimes this was quite serious, with couples who had lived together in a “marriage-like” relationship for several years, possibly including a commitment ceremony and an exchange of rings.  Often, though, this was used as (ironic?) shorthand for a gay or lesbian person’s “boyfriend / girlfriend / lover / partner / whatever he or she is”, so long as it was perceived to be a serious, ongoing relationship.  Except for those who had had actually religious ceremonies, the use of the term was not accurate (and even when accurate, was not “legal”).

Now, though, we have people who hold actual marriage licenses from various jurisdictions, making the use of “husband” or “wife” fully accurate and, to varying degrees in varying places (and hopefully soon less varying and in more places), legal as well.

This makes the use of the terms in non-accurate scenarios distasteful to me.  We are not married, so Rusty is not my “husband”.  I’m not sure what term we should use — we’ve been dating each other exclusively for almost eleven months, using the “L” word (no relation to the TV show) for much of that, and living together for three, including my acting as a step-parent for his teenage daughter — but we’re not married, and we haven’t really discussed getting married beyond that we aren’t ready to do so yet.

If we (as a community) are going to value the actions of same-sex couples who have taken the marriage leap, treating them like the pioneers they are, then I think we have to consciously avoid ironic and joking casual uses of the terms in order to avoid lessening those other relationships.

(Of course, intentional ironic and joking uses are another matter.)

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Updated on January 3, 2011