There’s a telling moment at the out­set of The Mar­ry­ing Kind?: Debat­ing Same-Sex Mar­riage With­in the Les­bian and Gay Move­ment, a recent book from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta Press whose stat­ed aim is ​“to exam­ine same-sex mar­riage debates with­in the LGBT move­ment.” We’re informed, in the acknowl­edg­ments, that Alice Tay­lor Hous­ton, the late moth­er of one of the edi­tors, Ver­ta Tay­lor, ​“whis­pered short­ly before she died that she believed that dur­ing their life­time Ver­ta and Leila [Taylor’s part­ner] would have a chance to marry.”

Gay marriage, writes Arlene Stein,"will benefit some queer people, diminish many of those who cannot and do not wish to marry, and have a negligible impact upon others. It is particularism masquerading as universalism.”

It’s not that such a deeply per­son­al sto­ry shouldn’t have been relat­ed at all. But here, the anec­dote serves to fore­stall any real crit­i­cism of gay mar­riage in the polit­i­cal land­scape, as if to say, Go ahead — deny the wish­es of someone’s dead moth­er. We dare you. The acknowl­edge­ments sec­tion ends with a nod to ​“the activists around the coun­try … who believe that the free­dom to mar­ry must pre­vail over fear and dis­crim­i­na­tion and whose sto­ries we tell here dur­ing an extra­or­di­nary moment in the his­to­ry of mar­riage in the Unit­ed States.”

If I’m dwelling on the acknowl­edg­ments sec­tion, it’s because it fore­casts, unfor­tu­nate­ly, the lie that per­vades the book. While the ques­tion mark in the title of The Mar­ry­ing Kind? sug­gests that a debate is to be found in its pages, the book’s edi­tors and near­ly all of its con­trib­u­tors seem deter­mined to con­vince us that the answer to the ques­tion posed in the book’s title is a decid­ed yes. While it’s true that cer­tain queer cri­tiques of gay mar­riage are pre­sent­ed in the book, in essay after essay we’re informed as to why these argu­ments are in fact mis­guid­ed, mak­ing these cri­tiques lit­tle more than straw men. Dis­ap­point­ing­ly, The Mar­ry­ing Kind? shows that the main­stream gay com­mu­ni­ty has heard the more rad­i­cal cri­tiques of gay mar­riage as a cause célèbre — and, instead of grap­pling with them, has put its ener­gy into dress­ing gay mar­riage in rad­i­cal trappings.

The book starts out well enough, with Arlene Stein’s case study of Newark, N.J. There, the fight for the right to mar­ry isn’t sim­ply off the radar of the city’s Black and Latino/​a queer pop­u­la­tion, but active­ly works against the inter­ests of peo­ple who have big­ger issues to think about, includ­ing safe­ty, job­less­ness, hous­ing and a pre­car­i­ous econ­o­my. Stein con­trasts Newark with the pros­per­ous neigh­bor­ing city of Maple­wood, a sub­ur­ban ​“queer enclave” whose most­ly white gays and les­bians mar­ry and adopt chil­dren from Chi­na or — in a reminder of the inequal­i­ty between the two cities — from Newark’s poor­er fam­i­lies. The tale of two cities shows the dis­con­nect between the main­stream gay community’s invest­ment in the idea that mar­riage will bring both psy­cho­log­i­cal and eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits to gay peo­ple, and the real­i­ty that, as Stein writes, ​“It will ben­e­fit some queer peo­ple, dimin­ish many of those who can­not and do not wish to mar­ry, and have a neg­li­gi­ble impact upon oth­ers. It is par­tic­u­lar­ism mas­querad­ing as uni­ver­sal­ism.” Like many queer crit­ics of gay mar­riage, Stein points to an alter­na­tive by which ​“a trans­for­ma­tion­al queer pol­i­tics would sup­port the diver­si­ty of fam­i­ly struc­tures,” includ­ing peo­ple who don’t mar­ry at all, even when they are rais­ing children.

Stein’s essay is sharp and inci­sive. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it is the only essay in the book that forth­right­ly cri­tiques the gay mar­riage move­ment. Oth­er queer cri­tiques of gay mar­riage, includ­ing but by no means lim­it­ed to those voiced since the ear­ly 1990s by queer the­o­rists like Michael Warn­er and Lisa Dug­gan, are glossed over, defen­sive­ly dis­missed, or not rep­re­sent­ed at all in the book’s remain­ing 10 essays (most of which were writ­ten by sociologists).

That’s a pity, as queer cri­tiques of gay mar­riage are as old as the mar­riage move­ment itself. Warn­er and Dug­gan are only two amongst a vast array of crit­ics (full dis­clo­sure: includ­ing myself and the col­lec­tive I helped to found, Against Equal­i­ty). But only they and the San Fran­cis­co group Gay Shame get more than a pass­ing nod in The Mar­ry­ing Kind?.

Gay-mar­riage crit­ics fall into sev­er­al broad camps. For some, gay mar­riage is prob­lem­at­ic because it rep­re­sents assim­i­la­tion, a veer­ing away from the lib­er­a­tionist impuls­es of queer pol­i­tics, which they most­ly iden­ti­fy in terms of sex­u­al free­dom. For oth­ers, gay mar­riage rep­re­sents the widen­ing of the pri­va­tized, neolib­er­al state, where even life­sav­ing ben­e­fits like health care are now most­ly avail­able through mar­riage. Rather than fight for, say, uni­ver­sal access to health­care — as queers did at the height of the AIDS cri­sis — gay mar­riage pro­po­nents argue that same-sex mar­riage is nec­es­sary because it allows access to such ben­e­fits, and in doing so, they nat­u­ral­ize the neolib­er­al state as a nec­es­sary one.

These argu­ments have been met with resis­tance by well-known gay main­stream groups such as Human Rights Cam­paign and the Nation­al Gay and Les­bian Task Force, which have always unashamed­ly acknowl­edged that they do in fact want to be seen as ​“nor­mal” and want the legal ben­e­fits of mar­riage. But The Mar­ry­ing Kind? rep­re­sents a next gen­er­a­tion of gay-mar­riage sup­port­ers, seem­ing­ly a more ambiva­lent lot, who ulti­mate­ly seek to jus­ti­fy their stance not as a con­ser­v­a­tive but as a pro­gres­sive one. These are more aligned with the likes of Dan Sav­age, whose posi­tion as a pro-gay mar­riage but fierce­ly kink-pos­i­tive sex colum­nist (who also sup­ports non-monogamy) allows straight pro­gres­sives and left­ists to voice their sup­port for an insti­tu­tion they might oth­er­wise abjure as a part of the cap­i­tal­ist scheme.

In that con­text, it’s only nat­ur­al that such sup­port­ers might defend gay mar­riage from the cri­tiques of Warn­er and oth­ers not on polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic grounds, but with an insis­tence that gay mar­riage is in fact real­ly, real­ly trans­gres­sive. To that end, many of the essays in The Mar­ry­ing Kind? try to prove, awk­ward­ly, that those who engage in gay mar­riage are in fact com­plete­ly anti-het­ero­nor­ma­tive, even out­right sub­ver­sive, and that their mar­riages are flip­ping the entire wed­ding cake upside down.

Kat­ri­na Kim­port, for instance, sets out to show that les­bian wed­ding pho­tographs, in their sup­posed recat­e­go­riz­ing of gen­der per­for­mance, ​“dis­rupt nor­ma­tive assump­tions about bod­ies and iden­ti­ty and … pro­vide a com­ple­ment to work that has insist­ed on the nondis­rup­tive con­se­quences of gay mar­riage.” Sim­i­lar­ly, Melanie Heath looks at cou­ples in Okla­homa who sup­pos­ed­ly demon­strate ​“the trans­gres­sive poten­tial of same-sex mar­riage.” She offers as exam­ples the mar­riage of Oscar and Gary, who decid­ed to remain non-monog­a­mous even as they entered into a mar­riage con­tract, and the mar­riage of Don and Fer­nan­do, among the first gay cou­ples to mar­ry in San Fran­cis­co, whose ​“very pub­lic jour­ney to mar­ry offers a chal­lenge to the ​‘nor­mal­i­ty’ of marriage.”

What’s left unex­am­ined is whether the sim­ple pres­ence of gay mar­riages in the pub­lic eye can in any way chal­lenge what mar­riage is—rather than sim­ply expand the idea of what mar­riage looks like. In its worn analy­ses, The Mar­ry­ing Kind? refus­es to grap­ple with the cru­cial fact that what makes mar­riage mar­riage is not the cer­e­monies or the images, or whether or not cou­ples fuck only each oth­er, but the way that mar­riage is still sutured to the state’s dis­pen­sa­tion of vital benefits.There are sug­ges­tions here that the very specter of gay and les­bian and queer sex might trou­ble the nor­mal­i­ty of mar­riage, but sure­ly no amount of fist­ing, fuck­ing, fel­la­tio, cun­ninglus or S/M — all of which are reg­u­lar­ly and copi­ous­ly engaged in by straight cou­ples across the polit­i­cal spec­trum, even if often covert­ly — actu­al­ly shifts the mean­ing of mar­riage with­in the state itself. It might well be that Jane and Sarah and Dick and Robert are mock­ing or in some way sub­vert­ing the con­ven­tion­al take on gen­der roles, but the fact remains that their unmar­ried friend Valerie will still be left to sub­si­dize their lives togeth­er, that she’ll nev­er be able to pass on her Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits to her best friend Kate, and that Kate, faced with a life-threat­en­ing injury, will nev­er be allowed to avail her­self of Val’s health care ben­e­fits unless she lies to the state and declares that the two are roman­tic part­ners. And as Stein’s out­post essay indi­cates, it’s an even more com­pli­cat­ed pic­ture if you’re poor, of col­or, and a sin­gle par­ent who depends on the state to sub­si­dize child­care; being on wel­fare effec­tive­ly means con­ced­ing to the reg­u­la­tion of your sex­u­al­i­ty because every part of your life is scru­ti­nized and mea­sured by a watch­ful state which mon­i­tors you constantly.

By con­trast, mod­er­ate­ly well-off or rel­a­tive­ly wealthy LGBT Amer­i­cans like Dan Sav­age will nev­er have to wor­ry about the state polic­ing their sex­u­al­i­ty. And for the LGBT super-rich, gay mar­riage plays an active role in fur­ther pri­va­tiz­ing and secur­ing wealth by pro­vid­ing tax loop­holes. The case of Edith Wind­sor, at the cen­ter of the Supreme Court’s Defense of Mar­riage Act deci­sion, is symp­to­matic: Every­where, gays and les­bians have cel­e­brat­ed Windsor’s win as one of their own when, in fact, what they’re cel­e­brat­ing is the right of wealthy gay cou­ples to evade the estate tax through mar­riage — a right most cou­ples, gay or straight, will nev­er have the plea­sure of exercising.

Katie Oliviero’s essay in The Mar­ry­ing Kind?, ​“Yes on Propo­si­tion 8,” seems, at first glance, to sup­port a cri­tique of gay marriage’s role with­in neolib­er­al­ism, as Oliviero does note the prob­lem­at­ic nature of con­fer­ring key ben­e­fits such as health care through mar­riage. But through­out the essay, Oliviero acknowl­edges this cri­tique with­out engag­ing with it head-on, choos­ing instead to lump it in with anoth­er queer cri­tique, that gay mar­riage rep­re­sents the ​“assim­i­lat­ing [of] the diver­si­ty of non­nor­ma­tive sex­u­al desire into a rigid mat­ri­mo­ni­al form mim­ic­k­ing het­ero­sex­u­al con­ven­tions.” Ulti­mate­ly, Oliviero con­cludes that ​“queer cri­tiques of same-sex mar­riage over­look the fact that broad­en­ing the scope of civ­il recog­ni­tion is nec­es­sary to sat­is­fy the dis­tinct­ly queer goals of sup­port­ing and cel­e­brat­ing a diverse array of sex­u­al, care­tak­ing, and liv­ing arrange­ments.” But sim­ply rec­og­niz­ing a diver­si­ty of kin­ship struc­tures does not end the larg­er project of pri­va­ti­za­tion that the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage enables. And on that point, Oliviero offers lit­tle more than the sun­ny but uncon­vinc­ing asser­tions that the gay mar­riage move­ment ​“highlight[s] the neolib­er­al state’s with­draw­al from pub­lic wel­fare respon­si­bil­i­ties” and that ​“by decen­ter­ing the het­ero­sex­u­al nature of mar­riage, same-sex mar­riage is one step toward a broad­er social jus­tice vision that democ­ra­tizes access to key resources such as health care and social secu­ri­ty beyond (gay or straight) nuptials.”

That’s a nice idea, but it’s hard to see how fight­ing for inclu­sion in the ben­e­fits-dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem that is mar­riage will in any way chal­lenge the legit­i­ma­cy of that sys­tem rather than just rein­force it. Under the guise of social pro­gres­sivism, gay mar­riage is the ulti­mate neolib­er­al shell game, a sleight of hand that obscures the real inequal­i­ties faced by those who won’t or can’t mar­ry into eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty or wealth. The Mar­ry­ing Kind? should have held to the promise of the ques­tion mark in its title and allowed for a more com­bat­ive debate. Instead, what we get is a pal­lid and rep­e­ti­tious col­lec­tion of essays that seem aimed to fend off cri­tiques the edi­tors and con­trib­u­tors have no inter­est in engaging.