There is an op-ed today in the Globe chastising Democrats for abandoning their gay friends, which also recirculates the noxious myth that marriage equality essentially must be tied to monogamy.  The op-ed implies that gay couples, in order to show that they deserve marriage equality, must convince straight people that we adhere to an Ozzie and Harriet standard of sexual ethics and practices. 

It echoes decades of popular culture in which gay people could be present and even visible, but only if they betrayed no hint of sexuality or a full and robust intimate life.  The asexual "gay best friend" has been a staple of chick flicks since the Golden Age of Hollywood. Only very recently have media portrayals of gays begun to resemble actual multifaceted people, with their everyday flaws and foibles. 

The core of the argument in the op-ed, which was written by a lesbian, is also eerily reminiscent of the Catholic Church's approach to homosexuality, in which the only way for gays to gain acceptance is to repudiate sex and become celibate.  This approach has always dehumanized gays, so when you find a gay person hewing to it in an attempt to gain acceptance for gays, it's especially jarring. 

The author of the op-ed, while seemingly pleading for a place at the table, takes it too far when she assumes equal rights must be tied to what is already a specious standard of sexual behavior in marriage, and not simply to the constitutional standard of equal protection. 

I think she may be a little confused about perceptions of marriage, too.  While calling for greater nuance in the national debate on equality, she still manages to reduce marriage to a bizarre 1950s TV version that never existed in reality.  "We have seen that public opinion shifts with greater nuance," she writes.

That the gay lifestyle isn't so much a hedonistic orgiastic cult as "Leave it to Beaver" where June and June swap wearing the apron and Ward and Ward take turns dropping Wally and Beaver at football and soccer.

Talk about Lesbian Bed Death. 

So this is nuance?  It looks more to me like shifting generalizations — "the gay lifestyle"? — and competing stereotypes.  Where is the nuance in characterizing "the gay lifestyle" as either something out of Queer As Folk on the one hand or Leave it to Beaver on the other?  Please.  If anything, it's both.  Drop off the Beave at soccer practice, pop into that rest stop on Route 1 with the glory hole, get a little action, and be back in time to take the boys to meet hubby for burritos at El Pelon.  After the kids are tucked in, pop in a porno, and log onto Manhunt to find a third before bed.

And how patronizing to think that straight people suffering through marriages of their own would believe that gay people's marriages would be even more sexless than theirs are.  Truth is, framing marriage equality as an issue of sexual ethics is not very nuanced at all. 

It may seem politically expedient to those arguing for marriage equality to reduce marriage to this stereotype centered around sexless adults whose only wish is to serve their children, but that's really not what marriage is, and I think most everybody knows it. 

If you want to argue that gays are essentially the same as straights where marriage is concerned, I'm all for it.  But to go the next step, and argue that marriages are the same from one to the next, and that they all look like some Wonder Bread version of a 1950s sitcom... well, you lost me there. 

I find the argument pathetic on the one hand, patronizing on the other. "Please, please let us marry!  We promise we'll be just like Ward and June!  Even better!"

Marriage equality is not about how gay or straight people negotiate their sexual desires, or their relationships once they are in them.  It is fundamentally, and I would argue more or less exclusively, about hypocrisy in public policy.  Gay people do not have to meet an impossible 1950s standard of marital bliss any more than straight people do.  They do not have to justify the nature and scope of their sexual activities in or outside of their marriages to anyone but their partners, any more than straight people do.

So, if you're inclined to speak for gay people everywhere in your quest for marriage equality, please at least try not to pigeonhole us into some sexless stereotype that relies on the acknowledged hypocrisy of the McCarthy Era.  Gay couples are no more like the Cleavers than straight couples are.  Nor do they have to be in order to merit equal rights.