If it looks like a marriage, then call it a marriage

Talk about a Queen's speech: the next British parliamentary session will include a Bill guaranteeing gay and lesbian couples the same rights as man and wife. I felt an unexpected and total sense of happiness when I read this news. Part of the reason I felt that way as a gay man is that there are plenty of legal and administrative questions that will be mopped up by marriage rights - inheritance, immigration, adoption. But that doesn't explain the intensity of my feelings. I had, without knowing it, absorbed a comment I read about a year ago. Denying gay people the opportunity to marry is uniquely cruel, Andrew Sullivan - the leading US campaigner for gay marriage - argued, because "it attacks the very heart of what makes a human being human: the ability to love and be loved."

Insisting that marriage is solely for straight people is a way of saying that the love I feel for a man is less real and less valuable than the love I would have felt for a woman had I been born straight. It is a constant denigration of an emotion that is as pure and beautiful as anything my straight friends feel, and - I suddenly felt like a light being turned on - it hurts. The denial of my right to marry is a perpetual, needling reminder that our society still doesn't quite consider gays and lesbians to be People Like Us.

It will be shame, then, if the Blair government, while taking such a bold move, shies away from actually calling it marriage. They will take just as much flak from anti-gay right-wingers either way, but gain far more credit with gay people if they have the guts to give these marriages their true name. At last, we would be able to dispense with those hideous, infantilising euphemisms: "partner", "boyfriend" or - worst of all - "long-time companion" (they really do still use that in obituaries). The symbolism of the word "marriage" is in many ways as important as the practical benefits. Inheriting your partner's company pension is great; knowing that your relationship is accepted by society as on a par with, say, your straight sister's, is even better.

But just wait for the backlash. The gangrenous smell of homophobia will pervade the forthcoming polemics on "the death of marriage as we know it", the "threat to the family", and the insidious claim that Blair is "concentrating on minorities" when he should be doing manly things like running the country. Conservative politicians and writers will damn the "mockery of heterosexuality" involved in acknowledging the love between partners who happen to have similar genitals; I could script their tedious, mean-minded little pieces for you now. They will imply that we "militant" gays want to take something away from you, and subtly undermine the fabric of your wholesome, normal lives.

But let's give these bigots the benefit of the doubt and look at some of the arguments they put forward. Firstly, gay marriage, they claim, will undermine the whole point of marriage, which is to provide a family unit for children. A gay couple cannot breed without the intervention of a third party, so they cannot - of course! - have a meaningful marriage. I look forward, then, to these same conservatives - Melanie Phillips and her pack of Salvation Army followers - campaigning for infertile heterosexuals to be forbidden from marrying, since they are obviously undermining the whole point of the family in exactly the same way.

Secondly, they claim, as they bang their tambourines, that gay people are so promiscuous that they will erode the notion of faithfulness in marriage. Andrew Sullivan has countered their abstract "common sense" lies with the real-life experience of Vermont. The state has civil unions - de facto gay marriages - and two thirds of them turn out to be between lesbian couples. Lesbians have repeatedly been shown by social scientists to be more monogamous than straight people, so if anything gay marriage will strengthen the idea of a solid marriage.

More interesting than the horde of anti-gay Puritans are the group of radical gay thinkers - "queer theorists" such as Paula Ettelbrick and Frank Browning - who oppose gay marriage. They fear it will make other forms of gay relationships, such as open networks of friends and lovers, say, or casual sex, seem less legitimate. Gay people will be divided into "acceptable" married gays and "dirty" unmarried gays; marriage just shunts one group up into respectability and leaves the rest to even more rancid homophobia. They also wonder why we want to be part of a restrictive, bourgeois institution at all. Marriage rates are plummeting among straights, so why should we scrabble to get on to a sinking ship?

I cannot agree. I do not want "the right to be different", with distinctively "gay" ways of living. I have that option already, and the right to marriage isn't going to take it away. I simply want the additional right to be the same as straight people, if I choose. Nobody is saying gay people have to get married: plenty will reject the institution, just as many of my straight friends do, and they will continue with the differently-shaped kinship networks that they have always had.

This is a fight Blair can only win. He has an excellent track record on gay issues so far: improved immigration rights, equalising the age of consent, ending the ban on gays in the Army, and the openly first gay cabinet ministers (all four of them). Go on, Tony: you know it's marriage. Call it marriage.

j.hari@independent.co.uk