By Doug Strassler

Photo by Ayumi Sakamoto

Real-life married couple Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughn conceived of A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia), an integrated work of performance art about the trials and tribulations of marriage. The show utilizes the entirety of HERE Arts Center – including hallways, dressing rooms, even restrooms – and such forms as video, sculpture, and drawings to document modern married life as they know it. New York Press discussed this irreverent show with the two.

How and how long ago did you two meet?

JM and NV: We met in 2006, working when Nick started working with the TEAM as a designer and Jake as a performer/writer. We still both work with the TEAM but we started making our own work together in the fall of 2007. Our first installation, at Pittsburgh’s Future Tenant Gallery, was created as a partner piece to the environment that we co-designed for (S)even, choreographed by Pavel Zustiak (Palissimo) for Pittsburgh’s LABCO Dance. That was where we started laying the groundwork for the collaboration that has continued until now.

What led you to determine to do a multimedia performance about marriage?

JM and NV: It’s sort of a two-part question, so . . . addressing the second part first, I don’t think we initially set out to make a piece about ‘marriage.’ When we actually started this project it was called Vietnam, Texas, and was about the oddity of the suburbs, of these strange isolated enclaves that are so deeply tied to the American Dream. And the deeper we got in the project, the more we realized that essentially we were trying to understand our place within that iconography, and that our ‘frame’ on the whole thing, as a same-sex married couple was really at the core of the work. Since then, the project has continued to develop and we’ve sketched out the beginnings of A Marriage: 2 (West-er) and A Marriage: 3 (50 States), each of which take on other particularly American iconographies.

As for the multi-media performance, I think all of our work develops in some way tangentially. We’ll start working within a given form, say, cut paper or print making, and as we work through ideas, suddenly we’ll find something that doesn’t fit anymore, and really demands to be handled as a video piece. Then working through that idea we’ll stumble across something else that really works better as a live performance, or a sculpture. Ultimately, we’re trying to make material/media decisions based on the content, which by its very nature ends up as a multimedia performance.

Could you explain a bit more about what HEREart does, and how you have found the many artists with whom you have worked?

JM and NV: We should differentiate between HERE, HEREart and HARP. HERE is this amazing arts center with a mission to commission, develop and produce hybrid performance work (theater/music/dance etc.). HEREart refers to the visual arts programming at HERE (including a stand-alone program of gallery exhibitions) and HARP is the HERE Artist Residency Program, which is a 1-3 year residency that supports the development of new hybrid work.

A Marriage: 1 (Suburbia) is a confluence of both the performance and the gallery programming. As HARP artists for the last three years we’ve been surrounded with a community of some of the most adventurous, exciting, and boundary pushing artists in New York, and that community and the feedback we’ve gotten from being a part of it has had a tremendous influence on our work.

How much of the “story” of the performance is autobiographical, and how much is fictional?

JM and NV: It’s handy that you put “story” in quotation marks, because there is no traditional narrative in the performance events that go along with the exhibition. There are several narrative strands in the rest of the installation (video works, some sound installations) which are mostly derived from the writing of Jessica Almasy and collectively paint a portrait of one fictional cul-de-sac, and in one video piece in particular you’ll see Jake and I trying on these identities, sort-of wearing them like clothing. There are also some documentary elements in the piece, including a series of interviews we conducted with some seminal queer performance artists and active participants in queer issues, as well as an accumulative sculpture created by reading the entire 13 days of testimony from Perry v. Schwarzenegger into plastic bags.

That said, the performance work while non-narrative is autobiographical in that (while abstract) it attempts to invite viewers to look through our eyes at the iconography of the traditional “American Dream” and it’s our hope that we present ourselves in a very direct and honest way. We like to talk about it as if we’re inviting the audience into our ‘workshop’ as we attempt to figure out how we fit into the American Dream.

Do you find there are specific challenges to same-sex marriage that differ from male-female marriage? What might they be?

JM and NV: I don’t know exactly if ‘challenges’ is the right word, but there seems to be a difference. One point of discussion that’s come up multiple times with multiple people is that same-sex marriage is (or could be positioned as) a direct attack on ‘traditional’ marriage, in that it suggests a partnership that is, by it’s very nature, free of the baggage of gender roles, resulting power structures, property implications and all the other questionable aspects of ‘traditional’ marriage. That queer marriage actually has the potential to reinvigorate and redefine straight marriage for the better.

Having just written that, there is a danger (challenge?) in the Marriage Equality debate though. There’s a danger in (and I/we say this as a married couple) buying into a system blindly. As Lisa Kron so eloquently says in the interviews section of the piece, (and we paraphrase here) it is a cause of concern when right wing politicians are suddenly jumping on the bandwagon of Marriage Equality as a sort-of token while simultaneously trying to dismantle the voting rights act. I think we have to remain vigilant to keep marriage equality from subsuming/coopting broader human rights issues.

Further information can be found at http://here.org/shows/detail/1165/.

by Alan Chartock

Conservative predictions about gay marriage haven’t come true

What was all the fuss about? Gays and lesbians wanted to marry. You’d have thought the world was going to explode. Nothing made for better news copy. Some evangelicals literally raised hell; we were Sodom and Gomorrah. God would punish us. Leviticus in the Bible was quoted again and again: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” We were about to revisit Jonah’s Nineveh. The cry urging repentance was heard throughout the land.

Incredibly, an awful lot of people went along with the bigotry and nonsense and more than a few still do. But, as so often happens, an oppressed group followed Joe Hill’s advice and went on to organize. Since the Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, gays have been turning on their oppressors and saying “Enough.”

From then until now, tremendous strides have been made. Our politicians have eschewed the old safe road that condoned bigotry; kicking and screaming, they have been turned around. Sure, some have done so for so-called “political reasons,” but that’s OK. It is classic Americana that getting politicians to have some guts is always helped along by the old labor leader Samuel Gompers’ message that we reward our friends and punish our enemies.

No one likes to recognize it, but even President Barack Obama was late to the marriage equality party. That’s OK; at least he seems to have gotten there. In New York State, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is portrayed as a hero for kicking legislators in both parties until they did the right thing. That may be true, or perhaps he saw a wonderful opportunity to cover his blue dog conservative Democratic tracks by supporting a gay rights campaign.

Frankly I don’t give a damn, since he did the right thing. His father, Mario, found a lot of similar traction in his stance on the death penalty. They both did what was right and were rewarded for it.

I love the fact that what started as one of the biggest political battles in New York is already being taken for granted. There will be no retreat. There will be no return to the bad old days. The same thing happened with abortion, and many of the same political forces and coalitions were behind the rear guard there, too. One can only wonder what in the world the conservatives see in this, as they always push to stay in office and to survive.

I have talked to many of these politicians and they always tell me the same thing: The most important thing is “the sanctity of the family.” I often ask them how gay marriage desanctifies marriage or goes against natural law. They always mumble and repeat themselves. At that point, there is little you can do. When asked why two people who love each other shouldn’t be allowed to marry, they come back with all that mumbling again.

This brings us back to Chartock’s first law of politics. It’s called political saliency. That means that many folks vote based on a single overriding concern. In some cases, the issue is a woman’s right to choose. In others, it’s the political survival of Israel. Here, it’s a gay or lesbian couple’s right to marry, to have families, to be able to visit a loved one in the hospital.

So gays and lesbians and their allies got together and, like the little engine that could, they began to climb that mountain very slowly. But when they reached the top, they picked up speed. They’re not there yet. Not in places like North Carolina, where people get behind that voting curtain and let all their bigotry hang out. But in New York, in Massachusetts and in so many other states, it turns out, it’s no big deal.

So what was all that fuss about, anyway?

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christie Quinn announced on Tuesday that a study by the City Clerk’s office  and NYC & Company, the city’s tourism agency, estimated that same sex-marriages have contributed $259 million to the city’s economy since New York passed the Marriage Equality Act one year ago on July 24.

“Marriage equality has made our City more open, inclusive and free – and it has also helped to create jobs and support our economy,” Bloomberg said in the statement. “New York has always been a great place to get married and since the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, we’re welcoming more and more couples, their families and friends from around the country and the world.”

According to the survey, over 201,000 same-sex wedding guests visited from outside the city. They booked over 235,000 hotel rooms at an average rate of $275 a day, as well as paid for dining, celebrations, gifts and various other wedding-related purchases. Add this income to at least 8,200 gay-marriage licenses that were purchased in the last year (couples are not required to disclose their sexes) and $16 million in tax revenue from the marriages, and you start to get a sense of the same-sex wedding business’s size.

“Thirteen months ago our legislators did the right thing and voted to make same-sex marriage a reality, ensuring that New York State was among the leaders in equality,” said City Comptroller John Liu in a statement. “Today’s announcement is simply the icing on the wedding cake.”

In addition to New York, same-sex marriage is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Massachusetts led the charge in 2004, and found similar economic growth: gay marriage added an estimated $111 million to the state’s economy in five years.

But it’s not for the reasons you may think. I envy married people because they have a built-in excuse to get out of absolutely anything.

The other day, I was caught unawares by someone asking me to do something I did not particularly want to do. I hemmed and I hawed, I prevaricated and stalled, but in the end I ended up just doing it because I could not figure out how to get out of it. That very same week, I called up a married neighbor who had borrowed my best ice bucket weeks before but had never returned it.

“F-ing Jim,” she swore. “I told him you needed that back! Without asking me, he took it to the office for a party they were having. I’ll bug him about it again this weekend.” That’s when it hit me what was missing from my life: a built-in, ready-made scapegoat.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that one of the main duties of a spouse is to be a scapegoat. (I believe promising to serve in this capacity is in the marriage contract). For example: “Sorry I’m late—my wife had a horrible sinus infection and I had to take her to the doctor.” Or “Oh dear! I would have so loved to come but Joe forced me to stay home to help him with this work thing.”

Or “Darn, it turns out Sue made another date for us Saturday and neglected to tell me, as usual.” Or “My better half says I have to be home by 6 p.m.—or else.” Or “I can’t be on your fundraising committee because my spouse has me signed up for so many other things.” And the most common one of all: “He/she never gave me your message.”

When your spouse is the scapegoat, the only blame that can be leveled at you is that you married the wrong person.

Couples have a decided advantage when it comes to the social arena. Let’s face it: When you are single and you feel like staying home alone rather than accept an invitation to a social event, you really can’t use that as your excuse. After all, “I have to wash my hair tonight,” does not really fly, while “I have to wash my wife’s hair”—well, that’s a whole different story.

Often, we’re not even sure we want to get out of whatever it is. We merely want to hedge our bets, to delay committing to whatever it is. Couples can easily make use of the handiest of all staving-off techniques, commonly known as the Spousal Consult, or the I-Have-To-Check-With-My-Wife ploy. Perfect for pop invitations, this dodge was ingrained in most of us as children (“I have to ask my mother.”) The beauty of the Spousal Consult is that it allows for the possibility that you may eventually accept the invitation—or that you will “forget” to check with your spouse at all, thereby letting the whole thing dissipate.

Last but not least, there’s the good old good cop/bad cop. A great ruse for married couples, but also quite doable with roommates or siblings, this dodge was custom-built for two. Let’s say you have guests who won’t leave your house. Dinner and coffee are long over. When you can’t stand it anymore and you are beginning to fear these people will never leave, the person cast as the bad cop yawns, stands up and excuses himself with, “I’m afraid I’ve got to hit the hay—I’m dead on my feet. Good night, Mr. and Ms. Guest. Don’t forget to let in the cat, sweetheart.”

After the bad cop has disappeared, the good cop apologizes for her partner while emphasizing how much it really is past his customary bedtime. Even a braindead guest gets the message at this point and packs it in. Good cop/bad cop also works like a charm for quick exits: “I would love to stay at your wonderful party, but Charlie is falling asleep on his feet.” Or “I have to hang up now—my wife is standing over me with a rolling pin in her hand and the children are screaming.”

I don’t even want to get into how handy kids can be as excuses. Suffice it to say, once you are a parent, you have a get-out-of-it-free card for, like, the rest of your life.

Jeanne Martinet, aka Miss Mingle, is the author of seven books on social interaction. Her latest book is a novel, Etiquette for the End of the World. You can reach her at JeanneMartinet.com.

By Bette Dewing

Weddings—ah, but what’s needed is a great revival of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wedding message to Diana and Charles; it applies to our culture’s hyper-individualism too:

“Any marriage which is turned in upon itself, in which the bride and groom gaze obsessively at one another, goes sour after a time. A marriage which really works is one which works for others: marriage has both a private and a public face and a public importance. If we solved all our economic problems and failed to build loving families, it would profit us nothing, because the family is the place where the future is created good and full of love—or deformed.”

Put that last line to music and play it again and again! Family and friendship love songs and themes are what the world needs most. Lust and violence and the “can’t live without you” kind have got to go. Tipper Gore, take note! There’s pounds of prevention for every kind of human dilemma and woe.

Failing to build loving families—well, reportedly a family estrangement kept the groom’s only uncle from being invited. But who knew until now? The “not knowing,” in general, prevents intervention, mediation, yes, even in major social policy-makers’ lives. And for the rest of us, secrets, silence, about whatever’s wrong in the family, and the work, school, civic, faith or other significant place, erodes the overall health of life—and societies.

In the extreme, secrets and silence can lead to a distraught mother taking the life of her four children before killing herself. A New York Times’ full page story did not much stress this financially-strapped 30-year-old Staten Island mother’s “going it alone” situation, or ask enough about nearby family or faith group connections. There was no mention of the children’s father in Jamaica. So much is untold—untold suffering.

Surely the First Family and The Clintons read this story. But we hear nothing about Chelsea’s grandmother, or even the First Granddaughters’ primary caregiver. The latter grandmother may now be vacationing in her Chicago hometown and attending the south side church of Father Michael Pflager, whose 1995 sermon made national news. He called the 700-plus heat-related Chicago deaths “a man-made disaster caused by a society that has become disconnected, where people don’t look after each other… and many living alone, usually the old, are made to feel a burden to society so they don’t ask for help.” New York University sociologist, Dr. Eric Klinenberg’s book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, says it’s “every city.” And not only cities.

Middle and upscale income co-ops and condos are not immune to disconnects. And why, in this extreme summer, are the Times and other mediums’ daily “heat and photo stories” so disconnected to New Yorkers living in stifling, often isolated conditions, and for whom even a short walk can endanger?

It’s not only the old; a Daily News piece reports the heat-related death of a 22-year-old man and a 46-year-old woman on a 93-degree Sunday when the Fire Department received more than 36,000 heat-related emergency calls. A 70-year-old man “with health problems” died on another day.

But who knows how many suffer, sicken and die, because it’s just not a hot topic?

And the hot topic obsession, in general, is a big part of a major unchallenged social disconnect. That belongs in the wedding talk too—and heard big time in the pulpits, which profess the “love one another” creed. And bring back The Waltons!

In order to maintain power, the clique that is running the State Senate acceded to Sen. Ruben Diaz’s demand that the equality in marriage bill never reach the Senate floor. That type of unprincipled blackmail can only lead to more of the same. When the lust for power overcomes doing what is right, the acquisition of power becomes far more important.

Of course, if it is true that something like one out of every 10 Americans is gay or lesbian, this is risky business for this unprincipled crew. I once worked at a TV station where they polled and decided that only 12 percent of the people wanted sports. They cancelled regular sports in favor of something else and soon learned that the “only 12 percent” were passionate about sports and switched the channel. If all of the gay people were willing to a) turn out for the election and b) vote out the scoundrels who had deprived them of their civil liberties, it could be “bye-bye” for the fear mongers.

To cut to the chase, why would any of us want to deprive anyone else the right to enter into a loving marriage with another person? Hey, you don’t want to marry someone of the same sex, don’t do it. But why take the civil rights of another away? We know that some of these very politicians who voted against the bill have gay relatives who will be terribly hurt by all of this. As always, there will be that moment when they have to look in a mirror and say, “What have I done?”

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette .