Douglas Messerli | Gay Marriage [Introduction]

gay marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

As homosexual marriage increasing becomes the subject of gay films, it seems inevitable that the topic will gradually shift from being simply a delightful desire or the end-all of any gay relationship, but will be more and more critically evaluated. Are the patterns of centuries embedded through church and state into the contract of most heterosexual relationship the best for gay people? Is monogamy the best paradigm for gay men and women whose lives are been far more historically involved with multiple sex partners and within whose lives sex as seemed to be a central component, in part because their very same-sex activities were at the heart of their ostracization from the so-called normalized world? Is marriage even a necessary ritual for gay couples who, as in my and my husband’s own case, have lived together many years before marriage?

     And, of course, all couples, straight and gay, have fears of suddenly locking themselves into a kind of institutionalized decree that changes their social, financial, political, and often religious interrelationships. What is marriage and is it the best solution for all couples. If it is, as we often argue, simply a sign of commitment to others, why does it often made to feel like such a significant event that it will utterly change the couple’s lives and behavior?

     The two films I discuss in this cinema gathering, Michael Saul’s The Best Man (2013) and Jordan Rennick’s Cold Feet (2016) represent two of the earliest LGBTQ US films to begin to actually question the issue of gay marriage and reveal second thoughts about entering into such a ritual.

        If both of these films feel to be somewhat slight, certainly not up the complexity of these issues as discussed in Brazilian director Felipe Cabrals’ Aceito (I Do) of 2014, for example, perhaps we can forgive them in light of all the hundreds of such comic films we’ve had to sit through in which heterosexual characters get nervous about their wedding days, as when Kay calls the complex and increasingly expensive wedding off in Father of the Bride (1950), or the long scene in the musical Company (1970, brought to film in 2008) in which Amy breaks down before her marriage to Paul singing the nearly impossible tongue twister, “Getting Married Today,” or the acclaimed playwright Neil Simon’s third act of Plaza Suite (1971) when Missy locks herself in the bathroom and refuses to come out, and, finally, the utter disaster of Robert Altman’s The Wedding (1978). None of these primarily straight films truly bothers to thoroughly explore the validity of marriage as an institution, which both Saul’s and Rennick’s films at least point toward.

       Indeed, given that marriage or at least long-term relationships since 2000 have now come to dominate the concerns of gay couples in LGBTQ+ cinema, it seems strange that more queer films haven’t specifically discussed marriage itself. Perhaps I have simply not come across such films yet among my vast list of works I still have to see.

       I should admit that I have written a full pamphlet about the very subject, On Marriage: The Imagination of Being (Los Angeles, Magra Books, 2018).

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).