In Slang, to “Gay Marry” Is Legal
- Posted by: Mark Peters
- on July 4, 2009 at 8:44 am
Accepting gay marriage in language is more than just wordplay.
Eventually, according to my crystal ball, gay marriage will be legal everywhere. I predict that opposition to the civil right of marriage will be looked back at as vicious, repressive, dark-ages nonsense by our enlightened successors.
But that golden age may be far off; we’re still living in a time when batty objections to gay marriage flourish. Witness, for example, the idea that if we expand marriage beyond man-and-woman nuptials, anything could happen. Polygamy running amuck! Men marrying cats! Cat ladies marrying dogs! In short, marriage-pocalypse now.
Well, the nutjobbers and bigots were right. Gay marriage does allow for unnatural unions undreamt of by the stars above or the giant spitting earthworms below—but only in the playful world of slang, where to gay marry has become an amusing idiom indeed. Check these examples out:
“I going [sic] to do unspeakable things to this sandwich. Like gay-marry it.”
June 23, 2009, Alison Agosti, Twitter
“gaston213 @everythingpre I’m so in love with Universal Search I might just try to gay marry it. Sigh.”
June 9, 2009, Gary Gaston, Twitter
“Had to waylay. See, I’m a dirty whore for salsa. I’d gay-marry salsa if it was legal. When I run out of chips, I resort to drinking it.”
May 15, 2009, Andrew Kiraly, Las Vegas CityLife Blogs
It’s the nature of language to colloquialize everything—look how fast hiking the Appalachian trail got picked up as a euphemism for infidelity—but this particular development is interesting both linguistically and culturally. The linguistic part was commented on last year by Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky on Language Log, where he noted that gay-marry is a two-part back-formed verb (more on what that means here), spun off of gay marriage, just as free associate and bartend developed from free association and bartender. Zwicky found the new verb being used literally (“That’s 41 states’ worth of gays that need a place to gay marry and settle down.”) as well as more fancifully (“Here are the best and worst of the week that was: the ideas, goods and people we want to gay marry … and the ones John McCain would appoint strict constitutionalist jurists to restrict our access to.”). The earliest example of the second category I can find is from 2005: “I love football. If I could, I would gay marry it.” (Sept. 11, 2005, Evan Kessler.)
Gay-marrying football would make for quite a Sportscenter moment, but for even more fun with the term, Pinko Magazine gives the tired “What’s Hot/What’s Not?” feature a liberal-heathen spin: “Gay Marry It…or Abort It?” In a similar vein, “Marry, Boff, or Kill?” gets a makeover in Tres Sugar as “Do, Dump, or Gay Marry?” These variations are in the spirit of the familiar childhood taunt, “If you like X so much, why don’t you marry it?” 30 Rock fanatics will recognize that the Tracy Jordan expression “I love X so much, I want to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant” serves the same function.
A few years ago, the movie Brokeback Mountain gave rise to new common slang for all things homosexual. Gay-marry, interestingly, is pretty close to the opposite. The Brokeback trend inspired expressions like go all Brokeback and Brokeback marriage, which The Word Spy defines as “A current or former marriage in which one partner is gay or has had a gay affair.” Brokeback alluded to gayness and came to mean it literally, often in an insulting way.
On the other hand, while gay marry literally means to marry someone of the same sex, it now also means to have an exaggerated enthusiasm for anything, with little implication of homosexuality, and no insult either. By email, linguist Zwicky agreed, saying, “gay marry seems to have picked up the positive connotations associated with weddings, especially the same-sex weddings that have gotten so much good press coverage (with people as pleased as anything to be getting married).”
Underneath the slangy silliness, there is a significance to this trend: the colloquializing of gay marriage is one more sign of how comfortable many people are with the concept. Non-gay people (many of us, anyway) want to support gay marriage, and besides showing support in serious ways like voting, we can accept it in our slang. I may not want to marry a fellow dude, but I do want other dudes to be able to marry. It’s on my mind enough that, like others, I might say I want to gay-marry the Three Floyd’s Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout. Or the fifth season of The Shield. I’d gay-marry them both at once, if I could. Such linguistic innovation is small, but it might show our collective heart is in the right place.
DISCUSSION: 17 Comments
I don’t get who says they would “gay marry” something. That doesn’t make any sense. To gay marry something you must ascribe a gender to it, and that gender must be the same as your own gender. I love my iPhone, and I’ve even joked that if it were legal I would MARRY my iPhone. But I would NEVER say I would “gay marry” my iPhone, because my iPhone doesn’t have a gender. And, even if it DID have a gender, it would be female since you plug an adapter INTO its data port, and put data ONTO the device rather than taking data strictly FROM the device. Since I’m a male, I can’t “gay marry” a theoretically female device.
My thoughts exactly, AshePerry. How can you “gay marry” something that does not have a gender? Without gender how can a relation be “gay” or “straight”? Odd. This just seems like a grammatically incorrect variation of that dumb schoolyard joke “if you love pizza so much why don’t you marry it?” etc. Goes to show that a meme doesn’t have to make sense to spread, I guess.
This actually seems the opposite of supportive to me. Lumping the desire to ‘gay marry’ an inanimate object in with actual love and commitment between two men or two women reduces the latter to a level of absurdity. Sorry, but my love for my partner is not anything like your love for the fifth season of a television show, and to say it is does not do us any favors. What am I missing here?
The point is not that you’re ascribing gender to anything, or equating gay love with inanimate love. The metaphor merely says “I love X so much that I would gay-marry it.” My analysis is that this is a derivative of “I love (person of my same sex) so much that I would gay-marry him/her,” as said by a heterosexual person who would of course need to love someone very much to go to the lengths of switching their sexual preference. It’s similar to a straight guy saying “I would totally go homo for Hugh Jackman.” Fuse this with “I love (inanimate object) so much that I would marry it,” and, voila, you get gay-marrying an inanimate object.It’s not that a meme gets spread despite making sense. It’s because it doesn’t make sense on the surface that it is funny, and so people say it, and it gets spread.
Maybe to Gay Marry something brings attention to how badly you actually want it?
you have to want something bad enough, to fight for it, rally in the streets, and even oppose constitutional amendments for it!
I agree sheepless, it does reduce it to absurdity. but the same can be said about wanting to (straight)marry objects. I dont think its about equating love of ones partner to love of one’s iphone ( which im sure is a rising issue in many relationships..) so maybe its not just about applying gender to objects, or having anything to do with homosexuality at all – but about wanting something bad enough, you’d fight the law/government/anyone who opposes you, in order to do it. maybe its slang is used to highlight the intensity of that love! you’d have to want something pretty bad to gay marry it.
thats what I love about gay marriage/gay adoption – they arent gonna wake up in vegas with a hangover and a wedding band, or get pregnant by accident. or take any of it for granted. When you go through so much for the right to have it, you REALLY want it.
Great point, Tali. Perhaps this is how people mean it – or how some people mean it – when they use the term “gay marry” in a non-literal way, to show enthusiasm. Perhaps they are saying their level of enthusiasm goes beyond general liking and into revolutionary areas of love. My realism tells me no, though, probably not, and this new “gay marry” slang seems more like unacceptance to me – because if same-sex marriage was truly acceptable, even in the murky sub-culture of Western slang, then there would be no need for distinction – it would simply be “marry”, and no qualifier would be needed because people would consider same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage to be the same thing. Like if there truly was no racism in this country and African-Americans were really equal by societal standards, then we would have no need for a Black History Month because Black History would be considered an integral part of American History (which it is). The very fact that we insert that qualifying word – “gay” – instead of simply saying “marry”, tells me that despite some level of acceptance, it is still considered separate, as if it were not the same thing as “regular” marry. There is “marriage” which normal people do, and then “gay marriage” which gays do. Of course, equal marriage rights for all gender combinations will continue to be viewed through a back-of-the bus/separate-water-fountain paradigm until our federal government decides to take a stand on the side of civil rights. This division of relationshp labels invalidates same-sex relationships the way that Jim Crow segregation laws invalidated the black community in the U.S. for so long, like how our government’s refusal to pass the ERA and include women under the protection of the Bill of Rights helps to invalidate the role of women in society even now. At this point in the strggle for equal rights, the qualifier is necessary because we are treated as seperate, so saying “gay marriage” and “gay adoption” is needed in order to ask for these equal rights we desire. But I definately look forward to a time when kids in the playground go back to saying “If you like the slide so much, why don’t you marry it?” Because hopefully one day “marry” won’t need the gender distinction and gay and straight relationships will be considered the same thing – just another adult relationship.
I’m a lesbian and I find this idea slightly offensive. I’m sure it comes from a good place, but the message is missed entirely. It ends up sounding like a joke. I would just like to caution you against using this term as I imagine most of the LGBT community wouldn’t find it helpful or heartwarming.
@jjamerson:See and I’m the opposite. I’m gay and not only don’t have a problem with it, but find the term hilarious and heartwarming.I’d totally gay marry this blog.
I agree with the above. I adore my boyfriend, but I also have a similar passion for many other elements of my life. And I would definitely gay marry them!
I’m with Jack as well.It just emphasizes the asininity of those opposed to gay marriage and the ‘marriage-apocalypse’ (as Mark mentioned in his post) notion.To speak for myself, as a member of the LGBT community, I love it.
me too Jack, totally.
I too am gay, and I pay my electric AND gas bills by performing/writing comedy
(geriatric medicine is just
a daytime gig)–and I don’t find the verb “gay marry” offensive; it all comes down to tone and context!
I’m partially saddened that
I no longer can blame the law for not being married to my
guy, and have to get weekly phone calls from Mom with suggestions on themes for the eventual wedding (this week she’s into the “carribean vibe” nuptuals! Oy!)
I too am gay, and I pay my electric AND gas bills by performing/writing comedy
(geriatric medicine is just
a daytime gig)–and I don’t find the verb “gay marry” offensive; it all comes down to tone and context!
I’m partially saddened that
I no longer can blame the law for not being married to my
guy, and have to get weekly phone calls from Mom with suggestions on themes for the eventual wedding (this week she’s into the “carribean vibe” nuptuals! Oy!)
Not it God’s eyes — it’s is “detestable” — read the Bible.
there is no God, silly!
Hello My Dear, How are you doing?i hope you are doing well…Well my name is call Mugis and i am 20 years old student and i am a gay i love having sex with man and i will like to be a very good friend of you..hope to hear from you and i will tell you more about mu self in my next massage…Hope you will accept me as your friend.Your Newly Friend,Mugis.
now that this blog has deteriorated into religulous dribble, let’s get back to the point…sociologically speaking, the language of “gay-marry” does little else in itself but bring the issue of same-sex marriage to the forefront of people’s minds. This can only have one outcome – the eventual normalcy of same-sex marriage. maybe my glass is half full, but why shouldn’t it be? the term “interracial marriage” was once a common, albeit negative, qualifier and now doesn’t mean much else but to describe the parties involved in an absolutely valid legal contract. i can only expect that this will be the outcome of our struggle. i expect to one day gay-marry my boyfriend, and it doesn’t bother me one bit to say that, so long as it is a simple linguistic qualifier and not separate-and-unequal legislative jargon.