Working and living in San Francisco, having a gay housemate and gay co-workers and gay neighbors and gay local business owners--it gives me the benefit of seeing how boringly normal gay people actually are. They're happy, sad, talkative, quiet, artistic, scientific, brave, cowardly, thin, fat, yadda yadda. Some have "femenine" tendencies towards cleanliness and courtesy, others have "masculine" tendencies towards beer and football, male or female.
I think it's this switch of gender expectations that throws most people off, of course. You don't expect a man to want to vacuum several times a week, dust, go shopping, have good taste in clothing and interior decoration (all stereotypes, of course, it's always more subtle than that). You don't expect a woman to hoot and whistle at other girls, use lots of salty language, swagger, and chuckle. This strikes a bad chord deep inside a lot of people.
But that chord strikes not because what you're seeing is wrong. It's because you're simply not used to seeing it.
And if anything is statistically more rare than a gay person, it's two gay people getting married to each other. So it's no wonder that entire communities feel this chord struck as a group, like a church bell between their ears. It's no wonder that people recoil at the thought of two women or two men at the altar and go running to religious or political explanations of why it's Not Right.
But the answer isn't inside a religious text or a civil code book. It's inside each and every one of you. That's where the chord is striking from. It's not striking from the bully pulpit or the governor's office.
That sound is just someone else's confusion and rhetoric. That sense of rightness you may feel in agreeing with their emotions is just you verifying that someone else feels just as wierd about it as you do.
But you don't get any closer to the truth.
The truth is in
pictures like this.