First Comes Love: On Marriage and Other Ways of Being Together PDF
Preview First Comes Love: On Marriage and Other Ways of Being Together
FIRST COMES LOVE by the same author Diary of a Drag Queen F I R ST CO M E S LOV E On Marriage and Other Ways of Being Together TOM RASMUSSEN BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, wc1b 3dp, uk 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Tom Rasmussen, 2021 Tom Rasmussen has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn: hb: 978-1-5266-2687-5; ebook: 978-1-5266-2686-8; epdf: 978-1-5266-4532-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters For Shugs – who I would marry, if we believed in that sort of thing. For Mum and Dad – whose marriage taught me to believe in that sort of thing. Contents Introduction: Every Second Someone in the World Gets Married 1 1. A Classy Wedding 7 2. Not All Marriage is Created Equal 29 3. The Queer Opiate? 61 4. Married to Freedom 83 5. Ghosts 115 6. The Business of Dreams 153 7. The Holy Trinity 183 8. Forever, Over 213 9. Audiences 241 Acknowledgements 271 Introduction: Every Second Someone in the World Gets Married It’s a Sunday afternoon in May, and it’s excruciatingly hot on the Central Line. I’m offensively hungover, rolled in half on the tube after a very late night at a friend’s wedding at which a group of us sat drinking neat vodka (why?), espousing the idiocy, the sheer lunacy, of marriage. We’re the guests people dread at their own weddings: the queers, the non-conformers, the eye-rollers, the critics, the bitchers, the moaners. I don’t know why we’re invited. And I don’t know why we go. We love our friends who got married: we love their love, and appreciate their right to marry, but we can’t quite understand what the point of all this is.
The list of books you might like
