Evan Casper-Futterman Columnist

As many national political issues are wont to do, it seems that the debate on gay marriage in the United States has become rather monolithic—as if to suggest that it is the universal and uncontested desire of all gays and lesbians to share equally in the institution of marriage. Last week, the Queer Coalition of Vassar College screened the film Homotopia, which presents a strong critique of the gay marriage movement as it currently manifests itself on the political landscape of the United States.

The film and the filmmakers, who were on hand to answer questions after the screening, encourage us to re-evaluate how we understand gay marriage because of the broad ideological approach they employ. From a post-colonial perspective, they critique the current gay marriage movement for co-opting queer identities into discourses of middle class consumerism and mainstream nationalism. While gay marriage has different meanings for every couple, the filmmakers’ point is timely and deserves broader attention.

In addition to challenging my own views on the issue of gay marriage, the movie went further and challenged my relationship with straight marriage as well. Previously, I had decided to forgo marriage in order to achieve solidarity with gay and lesbian couples that do not have that privilege of choice. Presently, I understand my own choice as one that is also relevant to other heterosexuals. And why not? As the movement for gay marriage brings “the American family” into the political spotlight, would it not behoove straight people, as the principal consumers of marriage, to consider our relationship to it, as well as with each other?

The involvement of those directly implicated in the issue at hand—in this case, heterosexual couples with the privilege of marriage—can provoke rapid and profound changes in any social movement. Other than simply offering themselves as allies of gay activism, heterosexuals would do well to take cues from the creativity that many queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists have brought to the issue of marriage over the past decades in order to push the debate around marriage beyond its current simplicity. The current public discussions surrounding marriage and the family in the United States could allow for significantly broader changes than the simple inclusion of same-sex couples into the institution of marriage—if heterosexuals dared to think as creatively as their homosexual activist counterparts.

It would not be unprecedented, either. Heterosexual couples have historically demonstrated a transformational impulse when it comes to marriage: The realization comes to us that heterosexuals transformed the institution of marriage from one exclusively of economic security and class status into one of two individuals who are in love.

Yet the heterosexual impulse and innovative imagination has been silent for the last few centuries. I fear we have become too complacent with a marred and inferior institution. So as long as we’re on the subject of imagination, there’s this dream that I’ve been having that I can’t shake. I see panic and terror in the American heartland—“family values” country—and Fox News running the emergency broadcast system as the nuclear patriarchal normative “family” threatens collapse.

This crisis of “the American family,” so long a fear of the conservative Christians is, in my dream, brought about not from allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, but rather because marriages have ceased outright. Hundreds of thousands of straight couples across the nation relinquish their privilege to marry because they view their own marriages as less sacred considering the historically violent and presently exclusive boundaries of the institution.

They would not be doing this out of a sense of “guilt.” Rather, quite the opposite: It would be an action taken because of an abundance of innocence. It is innocence that is the driving force allowing a heterosexual couple to accept their privilege of marriage without understanding its direct connection to the exclusion of homosexual couples. The idea that a privilege such as marriage can exist justly for some while being withheld from others is as flawed as those who disputed Lincoln’s claim that our country could not survive half enslaved and half free.

“The harvest is great, but the laborers are few,” as the saying goes. Why, at this crucial moment in the history of the institution of marriage, are heterosexuals leaving the revolution to others, when they could become a juggernaut in the fight for a more just and equitable family life in this country? While I don’t see my dream coming to pass anytime soon, I believe the time has come for heterosexuals to more fully accept, and engage with, the enormous socio-political potential that has languished, inactive, for the last centuries. Heterosexuals must come to grips with their own innocence and re-evaluate their participation in the institution of marriage. At the urging of the queer activist community, it seems that now would be a suitable time to begin just such a re-evaluation.