The phone was ringing as I walked in the door from my friend Jenny's wedding shower. My head was foggy from the few beers I had while watching a few dozen Crate and Barrel boxes torn open, and mediating the quandary of two friends who had given the same glass pitcher as a gift. So I wanted to fall in bed and ignore the phone by my typical extroversion rendered such relaxation unrealistic. Within a minute I was awake as ever, transported in consciousness a thousand miles away. It was Dan on the line, my best friend from high school. He was calling to tell me that he too would soon host a wedding shower, as he and his girlfriend's wedding plans had become public information the previous weekend. "Fuckin' A, congratulations," I stuttered.

I was instantly entangled in the image of he and I at 17, sitting in front of a campfire in the northern Minnesota woods, debating our favorite masturbation techniques and whether it felt better to come from a hand job or a blow job. I've never had more psychosexually intense seconds than those nine-month pregnant conversations with boys in my teens, when I was battling simply to keep my beer from sliding out of my hand or from spontaneously ejaculating due to overstimulation. Ten years later on the phone I was still struggling just to hold it together. My heart was plummeting as the memories of sexual arousal burned away. For the next time I'd see him wouldn't be around a post skinny-dipping campfire, but with a set of faux crystal goblets in hand, plane tickets and rental car policy in pocket, spending a fortune in a 5000 year old ritual of emotional, erotic, and capital regulation.

Dan's wedding proclamation was about the 10th I've received from a high school or college friend. In two years I've watched half a million dollars be signed over to invitations, flowers, cakes, food, and booze. I've seen the last names of so many women disappear from the historical record in a stunning embodiment of the social structure my Mother's generation of second-wave feminists and sex radicals fought to dismantle. And as I try to be happy for friends who embark on this journey, I try to put my finger on the reasons for the frustration, disillusionment, and rejection I can't help feeling sitting in the audience.

My first instinct when analyzing my distaste for the cultural machinery of the wedding and marriage is to be critical of myself. Maybe I an just another queen who can't get over growing old, and hate seeing friends from younger days turn into middle aged people. Maybe marriage vows sound like a bank vault slamming shut, putting an impenetrable barrier between me and the excitement of sexual possibility. Or maybe I impose my own rejection of the consumerist cultural aspects of capitalism on the aesthetic choices my friends make for their ceremonies.

But as I sit here in a coffee shop trying to ponder the broader meaning of the situation, I feel that there are social, economic, and political reasons for my own refusal to be complicit with this process. For I think it is important not to glance over the connections between marriage and the heterosexual nuclear family and the gender, class, and racially polarized society that we live in.

My Mother, the second wave feminist activist I referred to earlier, got married in 1967, a time when marriage, name change, and child rearing were compulsory for middle class white women. Mandatory marriage for my Mother, however, was a structure with roots much deeper than the cultural tastes of Midwesterners. My Mother was raised in the 1950s, during the most significant economic boom in the history of the United States. A population spike occurred as one of the results of this new found wealth, and American cities began to build to house their thousands of new citizens. But instead of building more rowhouses and subway lines to service them, American cities binged on suburban development immediately after the war. In a dramatic departure from the dense city building strategy that had been the only way feasible before the widespread use of the automobile, new subdivisions featured large lots, single-family homes, wide streets, and private shopping malls in a conscious strategy to depart from the cacophony of diverse voices that a street in an urban metropolis is. Implicit in this transition were government loan policies that explicitly allowed only white families to build in these areas, legally excluding people of color, single working poor people, and the crime and chaos all these groups were blamed and stereotyped as being responsible for.

This new private, controlled, safe community system coincided with and reinforced the cultural meaning of marriage, a bond between one man and one woman that no one else is allowed to be a part of. The couple and their children would live only among people to whom they were racially and economically similar. Time was spent in the car, at the mall, or at home. There would be no interaction with people of diverse age, social, and economic locations that urban street culture or transit riding requires. Additionally, independent social interaction with other sexually available adults was nearly non-existent, simplifying the heterosexual monogamous relationship and creating a sociosexual link between the new suburban geography and the marriage institution.

This analysis is not meant to assert that marriage has only occurred in white suburban social locations. Of course poor people, immigrants, artists, and day laborers married alongside their suburban baby-booming counterparts. However this story of the American family is the one most deeply enshrouded in privilege and therefore has become the media popularized narrative of what all Americans regardless of their social location want to achieve. And it is this all-mighty nuclear family, to which marriage is regarded as a first step, whose validity must be questioned in today's world.

In a most hopeful sense, family should be an amalgamation of all the elements that bring us energy and hope in a world that is often unfair and brutal, whether they are friends, coworkers, sex partners, artists, musicians, or neighbors. Yes those of us who have an intimate relationship with a primary sex partner value that situation immensely, but we are not happy in a vacuum. To expect friends and family to spend hundreds of dollars and travel thousands of miles to celebrate that one part of my personal, social, and political life, would feel profoundly odd. Further, the assumption that this ceremony would catapult me into a new social location fundamentally separated from the diverse social web of urban life would be a devastating rebuke of the social progress our society has made in a hundred years.

These reflections on the marriage process are not meant to be a universal condemnation. One of the values of queer culture I find most empowering is that your personal, emotional, and sexual life can be innovative and defy tradition regardless of any category one may fit into on the surface. I simply mean to question the obvious exercise of social and economic privilege involved in getting married, and to ask for an answer couched in something other than assumptions as to why the entire practice of marriage and weddings continues to be relevant.

I see a lot of young people working for major corporations, entities that skim money off the labor of poor people and dump it in the coffers of executives and shareholders. They do this to at least some extent because the narrative of their life they see on MTV or read about in the New York Times says they should. Getting married seems to be part of the same process. And I expect more of my friends than flying through life on autopilot. And it is this very process, the evolution of boys around a campfire to men in designer suits with beautiful dates that makes the world feel like an inevitable distopia. I can't help but pose this series of questions, for in the hellish age of Pacific Heights mansions and homelessness, US warplanes and Afghan refugees, we must not assume that any of our cultural practices add value to the world, and understand that all things personal influence the way we build or prevent democracy, vibrancy, and justice in our world.