Double Portrait with Wine Glass

Wintertime magic can mean many things. For many lovers, it can be an end to the waiting game. During the holiday season, he (or she) popped the question, and now you’re getting married! Let the wedding planning begin!

These (often frenzied) preparations include a determined search for the right location, the right ambiance, the right rings, the right dress. Often a bride already knows exactly how she wants to look on her wedding day, if only she can find that perfect dress and its accessories.

But almost certainly she will not be expecting that her wedding dress will inspire some of the world’s greatest art. Or that her husband will continually re-imagine it as he shares the joy of their marriage in oil paint on canvas.

Yet that is exactly what happened to Russian Bella Rosenfeld-Chagall when, four years after their nuptials on the rainy evening of July 25, 1915, her painter-husband Marc Chagall stunned the art world with his Double Portrait with Wine Glass, a portrait of the couple in wedding garb that, nearly a century later, is considered “the most lyrical representation of connubial bliss ever put to canvas.”

How did Bella’s wedding dress translate onto her husband’s canvases? Double Portrait (1917) makes it long-sleeved and décolleté, worn over purple undergarments that match her fan, while Marc, resplendent in red jacket and green shirt, rides on her shoulders and waves a wine glass.

Wedding (1918)

But in Wedding (1918), Bella’s dress is primly high-collared, her veil long and her hand gloved, in keeping with Marc’s conventional suit and hat. In a distant tree branch, a fiddler plays, while hovering above and embracing the newlyweds is the red-winged figure of Ida, their little daughter, born in 1916.

What kind of wedding united such a blissfully happy couple? What lessons can we draw from the Chagalls?

The first was the depth, strength and confidence of their love. They first met when Bella was fourteen, Marc twenty-one. It was love at first sight, and it lasted forever.

Marc “has come and broken the calmness of my days,” Bella wrote. “His eyes, they were so blue as the sky oblong, like almonds. The face of this boy lives inside me as my second ego, his voice is in my ears.”

Marc rhapsodized, “Her silence is mine. Her eyes, mine. I feel she has known me always, my childhood, my present life, my future; as if she were watching over me, divining my innermost being, though this is the first time I have seen her. I knew this is she, my wife.”

But beautiful Bella was a mere adolescent, Marc a struggling artist, and they came from vastly different social and economic classes. The six years it took them to overcome these problems only deepened their love and strengthened their commitment to each other.

Bella with White Collar (1917)

Marc was the oldest of nine children, whose hardworking father, did “hellish work” as a herring monger while his mother sold groceries from their home. Bella, however, the youngest daughter of a wealthy man who owned three jewellery stores, was well-educated and raised in luxury.

The Rosenfelds, Marc wrote, “prepared enormous cakes, apple, cheese, poppy-seed, at the sight of which I would have fainted. And at breakfast they served mounds of those cakes which everyone fell upon furiously, in a frenzy of gluttony.” The Chagalls, in contrast, made do with “a simple meal like a still life à la Chardin.” And unlike the Rosenfelds, who ate poultry daily, the Chagalls served it only on the eve of the Day of Atonement.

Bella’s mother ridiculed her daughter’s lover. “It looks to me as if he even puts rouge on his cheeks. What sort of a husband will he make, that boy as pink-cheeked as a girl? He’ll never know how to earn his living. You’ll starve with him, my daughter. … And what will everybody say?”

The Rosenfelds’ disapproval reinforced Chagall’s determination to make a name for himself as an artist, so that he could support a family. Thanks to a Russian patron, Chagall spent several years in art-rich Paris, studying and painting until he accumulated an impressive portfolio.

At the same time he thought “night and day” of Bella and, always faithful to her, refrained from sampling Paris’ fleshly delights. Instead, he focused on mastering his art and establishing himself as a painter and selling some paintings.

His persistence and Bella’s loyalty paid off. In 1915, back home in Vitebsk, the Rosenfelds succumbed to his arguments that he would make Bella a good husband.

But the wedding arrangements suited only the Rosenfelds, who planned and paid for it. Marc arrived very late, and overheard guests gossiping about him – “Who is his father?” one snob wondered aloud – and he mocked how gluttonously they eyed the wedding feast.

As for the ceremony, the wise and crafty old rabbi rained down blessings – or “perhaps curses”? – until Chagall nearly fainted. “I became a hero of a traditional wedding ceremony under the wedding canopy exactly as it was in my pictures. I got benediction – all was done according to the traditions despite my objections,” he recalled wryly. He felt resentful, snubbed, yet supremely happy on this, “the most important night of my life.”

The wedding and its accoutrements – including the gown that came to symbolize their marriage – – were unimportant in themselves. What mattered was the romantic love, personal respect, deepest mutual commitment, shared values and unremitting hard work that enabled these extraordinary lovers to unite in an idyllic marriage that endured for twenty-nine years, until Bella’s death.

In the 21st century, egalitarianism reigns: or does it? Why, if a husband can have a mistress, can his wife not have a mister? Not just a “piece on the side,” certainly not a gigolo, but a man with whom she shares a long-term, extramarital romantic and sexual relationship, a mister, the male equivalent to husband’s mistress. (Except that, in these modern times, she should not have to support him.)\

This is by no means a new notion.  In 1778, Lady Julia Stanley, the protagonist of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’s novel, The Sylph, muses that her husband has had a mistress since their wedding day and asks plaintively, “What law excludes a woman from doing the same?”

The simple answer was: the law of the double standard that tolerated adultery in husbands but condemned it in wives, the law of England, indeed, the law of most lands. In an era of marriages contracted as either commercial or family alliances, when (in Lady Julia’s words) “the heart [was] not consulted,” this law was particularly onerous.

Let’s look at how patrician society in England and Italy attempted to assuage the wifely dissatisfaction and unhappiness that marked so many unloving marriages. Julia’s creator, Georgiana, knew the rules. The wife must produce an heir and until then, remain faithful. Afterward, as long as she was discreet, she could become another privileged man’s lover (no mating with the coachman or gardener!) but without conceiving his child. Her husband, who protected and provided for her, could only be clandestinely cuckolded.

Georgiana played by these rules. Whenever she seemed likely to stray, her controlling mother reined her in. It didn’t matter that her husband’s new mistress, Bess Foster, was her closest friend. Only after Georgiana had produced an heir could she decently look outside her marriage for the personal fulfillment so egregiously lacking inside it.

That happy day came when Georgiana delivered William Hartington “Hart” Spencer, her third child and first son, the longed-for heir who (she rejoiced) freed her from marital bondage. She began a passionate love affair with the much younger politician, Charles Grey. But Grey was not her mister. Rather, she had become his mistress.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Then Georgiana broke a cardinal rule – she became pregnant by Grey – and her furious husband forced her to choose. If she did not break off with Grey, she would never again see her children. Georgiana’s capitulation was immediate. Terrified and contrite, she renounced mistressdom and resumed her life as an unloved, cuckolded wife.

In Italy, the talented and beautiful Teresa Guiccioli, teenaged wife of the very wealthy sixty-year-old Count Alessandro Guiccioli, had a similarly difficult marriage. But before she provided the Count with an heir, Teresa fell profoundly in love with the charismatic and equally smitten expatriate English poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron.

They had sex almost immediately. Teresa’s maid helped cover their tracks. A priest acted as their go-between. Their affair invoked the unreality of Italian opera – assignations in gliding gondolas and charming, out-of-the-way villas, and long, long hours in bed. Soon, Byron proposed that they run away together.

Teresa was shocked. Did Byron not know that in Italy, a wife could have both a hus­band and a cavalier servente, an eternally faithful, devoted (though chaste) lover? Teresa could have Byron and Guiccioli together – as long as they pretended that she and Byron were not sexual partners.

Countess Teresa Guiccioli with her cavalier servente, Lord Byron

The institution of cavalier servente did not challenge the husband’s dominance in marriage. As in England, a wife was supposed to produce her husband’s heir. Afterward, she was free to cavort with an amico, a “friend” or soulmate who would accompany her to plays, churches and elsewhere. But unlike his English counterpart, the amico was forbidden to have sex with her.

The supposedly sex-starved amico also had to swear eternal fidelity to his mistress and promise never to marry or to leave Italy. (Priests were a favorite choice, for their vows of celibacy pre­cluded marriage with anyone.) This arrangement also protected the husband: should he die, his merry widow could never marry her amico. Murder, or suspi­cious accidents aka “Divorce, Italian Style” could not change the amico‘s status. A husband’s demise was no reason – or excuse – for his wife’s platonic relationship to become a sexual one.

The wife’s conduct was carefully regulated. She could see her amico in her home but not in his. She could invite him to theatrical pro­ductions in her family’s box but not join him in his. She was bound forever to her husband, and she and her amico had to display admiration and affec­tion for him, and never shame or dishonor him or his family’s name or, for that matter, her father’s.

So how did cavalier servente work for Teresa? First, Guiccioli “borrowed” a large sum of money from Byron, then invited him to move into their palace where eighteen servants spied on the lovers and made sexual trysts nearly impossible. Guiccioli also noisily exercised his husbandly right to sex with Teresa, making Byron intensely jealous.

As the affair deteriorated, Byron complained that a man should not be hobbled to a woman, and that his “ex­istence [as a cavalier servente] is to be condemned.” Weary of the conflict and rancor, and no longer “furiously in love,” Byron left Italy – and Teresa – forever.  Teresa grieved. In breaking the rules that forbid a cavalier servente from abandoning his mis­tress, Byron had broken her heart and humiliated her. Soon after, her unhappy marriage failed.

Georgiana and Teresa were exceptional women in unexceptional marriages, and their experiences were typical of those of legions of dissatisfied and unhappy wives who struggled for a modicum of relief from the constraints of their arranged marriages. The English assumed sex would occur but penalized its consequences; the Italians permitted socializing and companionship couched in terms of medieval courtly love, but forbid sex. Both imposed strict standards of decorum that upheld husbandly authority.  Both systems were, in other words, based on hypocritical premises and for most women, could only work when practiced in the breach.

Yet our egalitarian society has yet to improve on these 18^th century pioneering models by devising a way to respond to today’s realities. The challenge therefore remains: If a husband can have a mistress, why can’t his wife have a mister?

The Skin

From the small, beach-blessed Caribbean island of Antigua comes The Skin, a full-length feature film screened at Toronto’s CaribbeanTales Film Festival as part of its North American/European-wide tour. The fourth film by husband-and-wife team Howard and Mitzi Allen, The Skin is a supernatural thriller steeped in Caribbean folkloric mysticism made doubly eerie by its seemingly normal setting in a fine villa in modern Antigua.

Plot-wise, paying that villa’s mortgage is young couple Lisa and Michael Fenton’s driving concern as the bank moves to foreclose on them. But despite Lisa’s determined efforts to raise money, even a yard sale of all their household belongings added to photographer Michael’s assignments, they always fall short.

Their luck changes (for the scarier!) when Michael happens upon a centuries-old vase buried deep in the ruins of Betty’s Hope, a former sugar estate. (Spoiler alert: he notices it while peeing in the woods after a photo shoot there.) Lisa scrubs the filthy vase clean, rinses out its disgusting and unidentifiable contents, and Michael sells it to Felix, an expatriate antique dealer, for enough money to acquit their mortgage and indulge in a clothes-shopping spree.

Michael and Felix

And that’s when the normalcy of the everyday world spins into the mystery of the demonic past, and the thoroughly modern Fentons make the terrifying acquaintance of a soucayant, an evil spirit disguised by day as an gruesome crone who strips off her skin at night and assumes the form of a fireball to penetrate random victims’ homes in search of blood or a baby she can sacrifice.

Lisa remains sceptical about things supernatural. But when the mystic Vision arrives from Jamaica to work counter-magic, her unbelief is a sharp counterpoint to the escalating nightly terror wrought by the enraged soucayant in an increasingly frenzied search for her skin.

Lisa struggles with belief in the soucayant

The Skin’s special effects are as sophisticated and otherworldly as the dialogue is simple and matter-of-fact. This is a triumph (among many) in a film produced for the stupendously low dollar figure of US $100,000. It is also a tribute to Mitzi Allen’s producer’s genius, who ensured that every dollar earned by product placement, from rolls of Cottonelle in the bathroom to a whirlwind shopping spree and fashion show in Antiguan clothing shops, was stretched to gossamer thinness.

Howard and Mitzi Allen

The characters were ably acted by emerging Antiguan actors (Aisha Ralph as Lisa, Brent Simon as Michael) and renowned Jamaican actors Carl Bradshaw (Vision) and Peter Williams (Detective Morgan). Antiguan dancer and choreographer Veron Stoute Humphreys, who made a sensational acting debut as the soucayant, deserves special mention. All played to the gently sardonic humour – a brief closeup of the supercilious, womanizing detective as he gazed at Lisa’s shapely ass, the big For Sale sign at film’s end – that provoked rollicking belly-laughs from the delighted audience. It served as well to heighten the contrast between the tranquillity of today’s Antigua and the roiling, danger-filled Antigua of yesteryear, when the slavery and brutality of the sugar world ruled the land.

“I wanted,” director Howard Allen explained, “to tell the story of Caribbean folklore and history as simply as possible, without recrimination and retribution.” The post-screening outpouring of applause and congratulations from audience members, men and women who jumped up and declared their pride in his achievements, were proof of his success. By juxtaposing a narrative that was a combination of thriller and supernatural drama, Allen has developed a confident, laconic cinematic style that speaks volumes to his passion and commitment.

The Fancy Woman and her Lover

I grew up hearing about mistresses from my mother. She would tell us about the “fancy women” her grandfather, Stephen Adelbert Griggs, an affluent Detroit brewer and municipal politician, maintained in what she disdainfully referred to as a “love nest.” Why did Great-grandmother Minnie tolerate this? Because in her comfortable 19th century world, the alternative — divorce — was unthinkable. But Minnie put a price on her husband’s philandering.

For every diamond Stephen bought his latest mistress, he had to buy one for her. So his love nest hatched a glittering nest egg of rings, earrings, brooches and uncut gems, which Minnie bequeathed to her female descendants.

My great-grandfather walked a well-trodden path, and that’s why I wrote Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman as the central book in my historical relationship trilogy that includes A History of Celibacy and A History of Marriage. Mistressdom, in fact, has everything to do with marriage. It’s an institution parallel and complementary to marriage, and it evolved to accommodate the sexual double standard that tolerates adultery in husbands but condemns it in wives. Like celibacy, mistressdom offers a fascinating perspective into how women relate to men other than in marriage.

Mistresses, it seems, are everywhere. One U.K. reviewer was startled to find the painful story of the end of her own first marriage on page four of my book. Bel Mooney’s husband, British radio present Jonathan Dimbleby, suddenly plunged into a dramatic and obsessive affair with the magnificent soprano, Susan Chilcott, who was terminally ill with cancer. Against her anguished pleas that her very new lover consider his own well-being and not ruin his life for her, Dimbleby vowed to care for her until she died, and moved in with her and her little son. “I still do not adequately understand the intensity of passion and pity that animated my decision,” he said later. “It felt like an unstoppable force.” Yet he also “felt absolutely torn” about being away from Bel and their decades-long, happy marriage.

Less than three months after her last public performance, playing Desdemona and singing sorrowfully, her voice rising to a crescendo, “Ch’io viva ancor, ch’io viva ancor!” (Let me live longer, let me live longer!) Susan died. But a grieving Jonathan did not return to Bel and their tattered marriage unravelled into divorce.

My retelling of their story, Bel wrote, “was a reminder that there are no easy generalisations about this subject.” But she did offer this perspective: “I admit to a suspicion that most men are susceptible to temptation. Show me a loyal husband and I’ll show you one who’s never had a real opportunity to stray.”

Bel Mooney: "Show me a loyal ­husband and I’ll show you one who’s never had a real opportunity to stray.”

Well, not all loyal husbands lack opportunity, but as Bel Mooney’s personal experience suggests, opportunity is all too often irresistible. Remember when President Clinton was under attack for his relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky? We discovered later that as Reverend Jesse Jackson piously counseled and prayed for Clinton, he was also cheating on his wife with a mistress who was carrying his child. And Clinton’s self-righteous prosecutor, Newt Gingrich, was secretly pursuing a passionate relationship with Callista Bisek, whom he married after divorcing his wife, Marianne.

Rev. Jesse Jackson and Karin Stanford

Newt Gingrich and Callista Bisek

Both Jackson and Gingrich mistook the waning years of the 20th century for an earlier era, when mistressdom was the familiar handmaiden of marriage. That was clear when Jackson’s mistress, lawyer Karin Stanford, successfully sued him for child support. After millennia of protecting marriage by bastardizing the offspring of mistresses, indeed even making it difficult for men to recognize and provide for their “outside” children, our new laws essentially “outlaw” the concept of illegitimacy; they also demand parental accountability. Gingrich made another kind of mistake: he gambled on keeping his affair a secret but six years into it, he got caught. The values of the media world were also changing, and the man who had been angling to run for president on a platform of “family values” had to settle for divorcing his wife so he could marry his mistress.

The values of the media world were also changing, and the man who had been angling to run for president on a platform of “family values” had to settle instead for divorcing his wife so he could become his mistress’s new husband.

Mistresses are not always ruinous to their lovers’ marriages. Some people believe that love affairs enrich and enliven marriage. Frenchmen, for example, can justify the cinq à sept, the after-office-hours rendezvous a man enjoys with his mistress, by quoting French writer Alexandre Dumas’s pithy observation: “The chains of marriage are so heavy that it often takes two people to carry them, and sometimes three.”

The British multibillionaire Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, who died surrounded by his wife, ex-wives and mistresses, had another take on marriage and mistressdom: “When a man marries his mistress,” Goldsmith opined, “he creates an automatic job vacancy.”

Sir Jimmy Goldsmith, a man of many mistresses

In today’s North America, when most marriages are rooted in mutual love and compatibility, mistresses pose a different and often greater threat to marriages. This was not always so. In the days of arranged marriages, when parents selected their children’s spouses for economic reasons or to cement family, business or political alliances, romantic love was considered an irrelevant, self-indulgent and even treacherous foundation for marriage. Husbands and wives were expected to cohabit and operate as an economic unit, and to produce and raise children. They were not expected to adore one another or to fulfill each other’s emotional needs. Though some spouses developed romantic feelings for each other, usually respect and camaraderie were as much as anyone could hope for, and many marriages were desperately unhappy. This was the context that prompted all but the most puritanical societies to tolerate the tradition of mistresses who enabled men to satisfy their romantic and lustful urges.

The times they are a’changing, and so is the nature of marriage and therefore of mistressdom. Laws and institutions are more egalitarian. Birth control is effective and accessible. Modern mistresses are less likely to depend financially on their lovers. Much more often they fall in love, usually with married men unwilling to divorce and regularize the relationship. The alternative to breaking up is the insecurity of the status quo. Many mistresses accept it but hope that somehow, someday, their liaison will be legitimized through marriage. Today as in the past, the two institutions are inextricably linked.

Tent city on the airport road

In the crammed capital of Port-au-Prince that was once my home, I saw the rubble and ruins, and more appalling encampments of tattered tents. Amputees, most victims of the earthquake, hobbled by on crutches or sticks. Streetside vendors crouched beside their wares outside storefronts that ran the gamut from wretchedly battered to freshly painted. Pedestrians hurried through the streets, a melange of humanity: half-naked men straining and sweating under too-heavy loads, smartly-dressed women in high-heels, Madame Sarahs balancing massive baskets on their heads, schoolchildren in neat uniforms. There were also idle loungers, groups of young men gabbing, gesticulating, swigging bottled drinks, sharing Comme Il Faut cigarettes.

Haiti has an extraordinarily high percentage of youth in the population, 35.9% under fourteen (it’s 16.8% in Canada) , with a median age of 21.1 for males, 21.6 for females (38.6 and 40.4 in Canada). The contingent that really caught my eye was the army of young males on motorbikes, riding with the cockiness of immaturity exacerbated by the frustration of travel on Haiti’s miserable roads.

Young man on a motorbike

Many of them operate as unofficial taxis, transporting customers one by one. In a country near infrastructural collapse, they are an important part of the private sector – and only – transportation system. As part of their scramble to pay for and fuel their bikes, they offer an affordable service that on mountainous Haiti’s twisting, gutted roads, is often the only alternative to drudging on foot or mounting the rubbed-raw back of a thirsty, overburdened mule or pony.

A motorbike transports three schoolchildren

Another common sight on Haitian roads

First, some context: motorbikes proliferate throughout the developing world. Price-wise, they clobber all competition from bigger vehicles. They consume much less fuel and are easier to maintain and repair. They can navigate roads impassible in other vehicles and if they encounter unbreachable obstacles, it’s fairly easy to pick them up and haul them to the nearest drivable spot. The earthquake prompted a rush on motorcycle sales and rentals as foreign aid workers thronged Haiti’s roadways. The U.S. Haiti Motorcycle Project was devoted to facilitating aid delivery.

Haiti's "Eagles" provide clean drinking water

But in Haiti as elsewhere, this reliance on motorbikes exacts a terrible toll in the high incidence of traffic accidents. Statistics are unavailable, but anecdotal evidence of carnage is ubiquitous. On a single day, an accident involving two motorcycles occurred before my eyes. Minutes later, a third one crashed into a ditch feet away. On another occasion, an emergency department physician at the Hôpital Saint-Michel, the southeastern city of Jacmel’s sole hospital, confirmed the frequency and severity of these accidents. I was there, as it happened, assisting and translating for my traveling companion, a Canadian doctor summoned by the frantic relative of a young man lying speechless and unmoving hours after a horrific motorbike accident.

Motorized two-wheelers are inherently riskier to drive than larger vehicles, and their young male drivers are disproportionately injured. But in Haiti other factors contribute and they speak to Haiti’s weak government and near-absent infrastructure.

Heavy, congested traffic

First, the condition of the nation’s roads is abysmal and not just because of the earthquake. They are seldom maintained and many lack their asphalt covering. Side streets and rural roads are often beaten earth. Drainage is inadequate and heavy rains transform roads into slippery and muddy tracks. Even main thoroughfares lack lighting. Potholes and fallen trees or rocks obstruct roads for days or longer, forcing traffic to swerve around them.

Road blockages are common

Guard rails, road signs, lane lines and traffic lights are rare. Other hazards are the sheer mass of people who, for want to sidewalks, throng the roads and often dart across them. Goats, dogs and pigs meander up and down.  In the countryside, so do cows and donkeys.

Cows share the roads

Drivers (including motorbikers) do not make things easier. They are lax about observing rules of the road, including speed limits, keeping to the right lane, passing and right of way, which are seldom if ever enforced. Vehicles, many groaning under overload, are not properly maintained and corrupt inspectors issue safety certificates in return for bribes that cost less than repairs. On treacherous mountain roads, brakes fail and vehicles slide backwards, slamming into others or over cliffs unprotected by guard rails. Broken lights and malfunctioning horns are common so that in night-time, which falls early in Haiti, vehicles may be invisible to each other until just before they collide.  In hours-long traffic jams, oil leaks and gas runs out, stalling vehicles. Some drivers forestall gas shortages by carrying containers of sloshing gasoline in their trunks. The appalling roads puncture tires, creating a huge commerce of tire-repairers set up everywhere at roadside stalls.
As if this were not enough, the young drivers have no qualms driving without a license. They seldom wear helmets, those expensive and aesthetically uncool barriers to bashed-in skulls. They speed, listen to loud music through earplugs that mask traffic noises, fail to signal what they intend to do, refuse to cede to other drivers. The first accident I witnessed was caused by a pair of motorbikes slamming into a truck from a side road; the young drivers had not bothered to slow down before racing onto the main road.

Riding gear seldom includes helmets

Motorbikers constitute a minority (albeit a substantial one) of their demographic, and in many ways resemble their counterparts all over the world and participate in delivering the essential service of transportation. But thanks to Haiti’s minimal official oversight or enforcement of what laws and rules of the road do exist, they live on the edge and continually put their own and their passengers’ lives at risk. In a nation whose young people are its greatest resource, how sad that such potential is so recklessly squandered!

Two Daddy family

Legalizing gay marriage has opened the floodgates of impassioned debate about its most contentious sequel: gay parenting. The classic questions – How does their parents’ gayness affect children? Do gay parents “create” homosexuality in their children? – reflect baseless homophobic fears. The children of gay parents are no likelier to be gay than the children of heterosexuals.

The best answer ever to critics of gay marriage!

Other, more child-centered questions include: Is it better to have two parents rather than one, even if both are fathers or mothers? Are gay parents likelier than heterosexuals to abuse their children? Will their children suffer more bullying or ostracism? What happens in case of divorce—which mother or father gets custody, and under what sort of arrangement? Because the nature of gay marriage means that only one—and often neither—spouse is the child’s biological parent, custody disputes are inherently more challenging.

More complicating still can be impregnation by sperm donors whose role the law, if not all the individuals involved, may interpret as fatherhood.  The children may handily navigate their relationships, but defining them within the context of social and legal norms, and without apparent precedent, is not easy.

There’s one thing it’s difficult to dispute: the children of gay parents are not victims. Almost all studies, even those whose authors do not couch their premises in gay-friendly terms, conclude that gay parenting is pretty well comparable to its heterosexual equivalent. A quartet of Brigham Young University scholars, for example, conclude that “adolescents raised by gay and lesbian parents typically behave more like youth in two parent biological families, providing little support for gendered-deficit theories.”[i] Charlotte Patterson’s comprehensive 2005 study for the American Psychological Association interpreted three decades of research comparing lesbian and gay parents to heterosexual parents and concluded:

Lesbian mothers with son

“The results … are quite clear … Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents. … Lesbian mothers’ and gay fathers’ parenting skills may be superior to those of matched heterosexual couples … This was attributed to greater parenting awareness among lesbian nonbiological mothers than among heterosexual fathers. … In contrast to … the majority of American parents, very few lesbian and gay parents reported any use of physical punishment (such as spanking) as a disciplinary technique.[ii]

Good, stable lesbian mothers provide good, stable parenting, and lesbians are happier raising children than gay men or straight couples. Their children seem to establish closer relationships with their non-biological or second mother than stepchildren do with stepmothers in straight marriages. Few are deeply wounded if other children query them about their sexual orientation or tease them for having gay parents. A ten-year study concluded that they ranked “significantly higher in school, social/academic, and social competence… than their age-matched counterparts….” And very few are molested. [iii]

Molestation is a recurrent theme in critiques of gay parenting, and it does happen. But the research shows that most pedophiles—adults who sexually abuse children—are male, and that such behaviour in women is extremely rare. Furthermore, girls are overwhelmingly the victims of male sexual abuse, and gay men are no more likely than heterosexual men to commit it. (There is no association between homosexuality and pedophilia.) One study concluded that “a child’s risk of being molested by his or her relative’s heterosexual partner is over 100 times greater than by someone who might be identifiable as being homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual.”[iv]

As the new culture of gay parenting proliferates, so do physical and online resource centres: a few are Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, Family Equality Council and Gay Dads. Magazines such as Gay Parent and online support communities such as the LGBTQ Parenting Connection continue to mushroom. The focus on gay parenting, rooted in a growing interest in and commitment to children’s welfare and rights, is also an acknowledgment of gay marriage and an attempt to cast it in ways acceptable to North America’s evolving society.

As a fledgling lawyer, Lincoln economized by sharing a bed with Joshua Speed, who became his lifelong friend.

In the past, many gay people did not identify with or even fully understand what homosexuality was, or their relationship to it. In earlier centuries, for example, intense and sustained same-sex relationships were considered unremarkable. And because notions of privacy were still practised largely in the breach, it was customary for friends—even strangers—to save money or make do with limited space by sharing beds and many did so.

At the same time, homosexuals “caught” being homosexual were treated as criminals. In 1953, for example, President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 required all civil and military federal employees guilty of “sexual perversion” to be fired, and thousands were.  As late as 1965, Canada imprisoned a gay mechanic as a “dangerous sexual offender” after he admitted to having consensual sex with other men. He was released only in 1971, when the tide began to change.

The consequence, of course, was that most lesbians and gay men married opposite-gender spouses and tried as best they could to fit into the heterosexual mould their society expected, not infrequently indulging in clandestine gay liaisons.

These are the marriages that the Gay Marriage Act will mostly end. And some of its most fervent supporters have been the heterosexual spouses of closeted homosexuals. These gay husbands and their wives and ex-wives, and lesbian wives and their husbands and ex-husbands number in the millions, and number in the millions – between 1.7 and 3.4 million – and are increasingly speaking out about how their experience has affected them personally. The Straight Spouse Network, for instance, us a virtual community “for all the millions of us who find that we are married or in a long term relationship with someone who we find out is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or just not sure about that.” Television’s Fran Drescher’s show Happily Divorced is inspired by her real-life experience as a straight woman whose husband reveals, post-divorce, that he is gay.

Fran Drescher and gay husband, Peter Marc Jacobson

But the right to gay marriage will reduce but not eliminate these marriages; only eradicating homophobia will do that. There remains a chasm between official policy and the realities of personal and social life: parental rejection, social ostracism or mockery, and physical danger that includes being bashed as a “fag.” Coming out can still be perilous, and many young gays prefer the safety of being closeted. The complexities of gayness are heightened as expatriate gays who once lived clandestinely in their homelands seek to make sense of North American inclusiveness.

For the first time in history, young people are growing up in the presence of legally sanctioned gay marriage (and divorce), an experience that will influence how they shape their lives in a world that is marching away from homophobia and allowing gays and lesbians to unite in marriage, to raise their children, and to expect to receive the same rights and to be subject to the same obligations as heterosexual spouses. As more gay men and women decide to marry, they will shore up the very institution whose decline the wider society mourns.

Tori and Kate Kendell marry, holding infant daughter Tori (left) and Kate Kendall, who already shared the same last name, hold their five-month-old baby, Zadie, during their wedding on June 17, 2008, in West Hollywood, California.

Google “New York Gay Marriage” and 73 million plus stories pop up, explaining, celebrating or lamenting the legalizing of gay marriage in New York. Bridal and tuxedo shops are bracing happily for an onslaught of wedding-minded gay partners. An ever-cautious President Obama praises the process of New York legislature’s democratic debate on the subject. Shocked homophobes and opponents of anti-gay marriage pray hard against it. Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who confessed his disappointment and need for “a good dose of the Lord’s graced and mercy,” adds that despite his pro-(heterosexual)marriage views, he loves gays very much. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls the vote “historic.”

Historic? Very much so, but not in the way that Clinton means. Gay people have always been around, and in eras when homoeroticism was viewed more matter-of-factly, as in ancient Egypt, various Greek city states, and the Roman Empire, there is evidence of same-sex unions, and perhaps marriage. What else to make of the Sifra, a third-century commentary on Leviticus often cited by the Talmud, forbidding the Israelites from copying what they believed to be Egyptian practices:

And what would they do?

A man would marry a man and a woman would marry a woman; a man would marry a woman and her daughter; a woman would be married to two men.

That is why it is said, “nor shall you follow their laws.”

In ancient Greece, some fathers consented to quasi-marital unions between their sons and men who desired them. Similarly, in China’s Fujian province in the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), women ceremoniously bound themselves into intimate unions with girls, and men did the same with boys. These relationships ended years later, and the adult spouses then helped their young partners find and marry opposite-sex spouses.

By the time of the early Roman Empire, there were some references to same-sex marriages. The Roman historian and biographer Suetonius reported that the emperor Nero attempted to transform the youthful Sporus into a woman by castrating him. Then he married the maimed boy in traditional rites, and afterward treated him as his wife. (Nero had previously assumed the role of bride and took his wine steward, the freedman Pythagoras, as his husband.)

The satiric—and probably bisexual—poet and social commentator Martial described how “Bearded Callistratus married the rugged Afer in the usual form in which a virgin marries a husband. The torches shone in front, the wedding veil covered his face. … Even the dowry was declared. Are you still not satisfied, Rome? Are you waiting for him to give birth?”

In 117 ad, the satiric poet Juvenal castigated the aristocrat Gracchus for – well, read on, and see how very “historic” gay marriage, and the response to it, really is:

Gracchus gave a dowry of 400,000 sesterces to a cornet player—or perhaps he’d performed on a straight horn. Marriage documents were signed, felicitations offered, they sat down to a great banquet, and the new bride lay in her husband’s lap. … This very man who now dons flounces and a dress and a bridal veil, he bore the sacred implements swaying on their mystic thong, and he sweated beneath the shields of Mars.

Father of Rome, how came such sacrilege to your Latian shepherds? How is it, Mars, that such an itch possessed your descendants? Just look at it: a man of high birth and estate is given in marriage to a man, yet you do not shake your helmet, nor strike the earth with your spear, nor complain to your father. …

If we live long enough, [homosexual marriage] will happen, and happen openly; they will even want it reported in the city gazette.[i]

The earliest known photograph of a North American berdache is titled “Squaw Jim and his Squaw.” Jim is an enlisted scout honoured for his bravery after he saved the life of a tribesman in the Battle of the Rosebud, June 17, 1876.

Now let’s look closer to home, where early European visitors were astonished (and repelled) by North American native versions of same-sex unions. The Crow people, for example, recognized a third gender, or berdache, understood by natives as “two spirit” people possessed of both maleness and femaleness and, in many tribes, permitted to marry partners of the same sex.

The polygamous Aleut and Cheyenne permitted male berdaches to be co-wives of a man alongside single-spirit women. Whether they married monogamously or polygamously, berdaches had to observe traditional kinship rules for marriage. “Strange country this,” observed fur trader Edwin T. Denig in 1833, “where males assume the dress and perform the duties of females, while women turn men and mate with their own sex!”[ii]

Centuries later, New York has joined the growing number of jurisdictions including Canada, where a 2005 federal law legalized same-sex marriage country-wide. New York’s brand-new law, too, is only historic in that it grants to all interested citizens the right to same-sex marriage once available only in some Native tribes, and in antiquity, to powerful males.

Elizabeth Costello

Literature is rife with naming mysteries, from Dominick Dunne-like romans à clef to Shakespeare’s “Who is Sylvia?” Esteemed poet Ken Babstock has introduced a new twist into the name game, and it’s jarringly personal. In “Russian Doctor,” a poem in his just-released collection, Methodist Hatchet, Babstock concludes that Nobel Literature Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is modeled on … Elizabeth Abbott. That’s right, on me!

Elizabeth Abbott (and Bonzi)

I’m not inventing this. Here, as proof, is the selection Babstock starred as he presented me with an autographed copy of Methodist Hatchet the day before he flew to Berlin for a year’s stint as a visiting scholar. “Thank you for lending your identity,” he’d scrawled. Actually, I can thank the age-old literary device that, in this case, transformed Abbott into Costello. But judge for yourself.

The worst of the glare slid behind the sales lot tinsel

and she wasn’t a stranger at all. No

stranger; my neighbour, Liz. Elizabeth Abbott.

You may know her work: Celibacy

Mistresses, something on Haiti, and recently, Sugar.

Her home a hospice for dying dachshunds

way station for incoming rescues from Serbia (we nearly

took in Dunja last month.) So, animal

rights activist, retired academic, vegan, but here’s where

the Danish gets sticky. Just last week it dawned

on me, in a dinghy adrift on Georgian Bay, while rethinking

the preponderance of pumpkins in The Life

and Times of Michael K, while the sun crested the horizon

over Huron and settled like a South African

in Brisbane, before I’d had either coffee or chance to tally

the consequences, it came to me, Coetzee – J.M. – him –

had modeled Elizabeth Costello on this Elizabeth Abbott.

I know what you’re thinking, but stop. I looked

them up. A conference, Belgrade, ’91, they shared

keynote address three ways with Martha Nussbaum

and must have had, at the very last, lunch, if not more.

I know what you’re thinking. He’d submitted

a paper but was, shocker, turned down: “Paranoia: Can We

Live Among the Animals?” – R. Karadzic.

I’ve read and reread this at least a baker’s dozen of times, with emotions ranging from shock and consternation to resentment and guilt. And comprehension! So that’s why Babstock told poet Karen Solie, interviewing him about Methodist Hatchet, that “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll annoy some people, there’s not much I can do about it. There wasn’t any other way for me to inhabit the world, the poems, this time around….. I think humans, others, even named others, appear at the level of the symbolic in the book and at the level of actuality in the domestic and in love, right up to puppetry. I didn’t know they were going to flood in, I guess, but they have, what am I going to do about it? J. M. Coetzee’s gonna sue me.” [laughter] “Why is J. M. Coetzee in my book?”[laughs][i]

Ken Babstock with Linda, his disabled German Shepherd Dog

I fished Elizabeth Costello from my bookshelf where it had been wedged next to its slim matrix, The Lives of Animals.  Both volumes were gifts from friends who just knew, they told me, that I was Coetzee’s ideal reader. (The Slow Man, Elizabeth Costello’s latest foray, is another story.) But – I saw – I had been critical, and had pocked Elizabeth with citrine Post-Its marking my dismay. How I had wanted Costello and the animals she championed to emerge victorious in her mission to win over her audiences with rigorous logic and learning!

“I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats,” she said in her (too) measured way. I was tense then, and tense again in rereading, because she anticipates the defeat (“the concession of the entire battle”) I felt crushing us both, and the animals with us.

And yet it’s all there, every truth, every righteous notion, every goodness, the heart “the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another.” And in that moment at least, Elizabeth Abbott was indistinguishable from Elizabeth Costello.