Love-Politics: Lesbian Wedding Practices in Canada and the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s

Abstract

I n 1972 t h e B r o o k l y n B a s e d lesbian feminist periodical Echo of Sappho profiled Sandy and June, a white butch and femme couple, on the occasion of their recent wedding ceremony. Sandy and June were one among hundreds of same-sex couples who had exchanged vows at Father Robert Mary Clement’s Church of the Beloved Disciple, which opened in 1970 to cater to the spiritual needs of lesbians and gays. When asked how they felt about their wedding “in relationship to the women’s movement,” Sandy and June did not respond directly, describing instead what their marriage meant to them: it was “a holy union and very beautiful,” they said. “This church makes you feel as normal as anyone could be.” Sandy and June’s embrace of normal seems to anticipate the queer Left critique of the marriage equality movement that dominated American lesbian and gay politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Where once one’s outsider status provided a perch from which to critique how capitalism and liberal democratic states worked hand in hand to privatize sexuality and to advocate for collectivist responses to social inequalities and injustices, Lisa Duggan argues, the modern marriage equality movement “upholds, sustains, and seeks inclusion within . . . heterosexist institutions . . . while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” June and Sandy’s seeming inability to draw a connection