The bliss-off

While enjoying the beautiful Wedded Bliss exhibit at The Peabody Essex Museum, it is hard not to notice that something is missing. A survey of weddings as artistic inspiration, the exhibit gathers together both art inspired by marriage and objects associated with marriage (such as American wedding dresses and Japanese furoshiki). As the Museum's Education Director, Peggy Fogelman, explained at a panel discussion last week, the exhibition explores courtship and weddings "across cultures, across centuries, and across lifestyles."

Yet same-sex relationships and marriage equality are all but ignored. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot a few gay couples in a video montage of wedding imagery, and a copy of Courting Equality, a chronicle of the journey to the country's first same-sex marriages, on a table with other books about marriage. The biggest innovation in marriage since at least The Divorce Act of 1857 is given less attention than a handful of contemporary critiques of heterosexual marriage, and a couple of humorous nods to divorce. It's a strange omission for an exhibit whose breadth reminds viewers that marriage rituals and traditions are constantly evolving. Never mind the fact that the country's first same-sex civil marriages took place right here in Massachusetts.

On June 26, the Peabody Essex addressed this omission with a screening of the film The Gay Marriage Thing and a panel discussion on same-sex marriage. Director Stephanie Higgins was on hand to answer questions about her documentary on the Massachusetts equal marriage movement. The crowd of about 60 seemed charmed by the movie's central couple, Lorre and Gayle, and their wedding preparations. Higgins received another round of applause when she revealed that the film had changed her own feelings about marriage, an institution she had always assumed was closed to her, and that she is now busy preparing for her own wedding.

Some harder questions were asked during the panel discussion that followed, particularly by panelist Dr. Chrys Ingraham, a professor of Sociology at SUNY Purchase. Ingraham was joined by local authors Patricia Gozemba and Karen Kahn, who collaborated with Bay Windows photographer Marilyn Humphries on Courting Equality, State Rep. Byron Rushing; and moderator Robin Abrahams, a psychologist and writer best known as the Boston Globe's etiquette columnist Miss Conduct.

Abrahams set the tone for the serious but lively panel by warning the audience that, "asking an advice columnist what she thinks about marriage is like asking an emergency room nurse what she thinks about marriage." Nevertheless she praised the Wedded Bliss exhibit for its beauty and breadth, as did the panelists.

Although the panelists had different perspectives on marriage, history was a common theme. Each speaker reminded the audience that same-sex marriage is not just a present reality but also the latest expression of the gay rights movement. Ingraham analyzed the contemporary pieces in the exhibit that offered critiques of marriage - such as E.V. Day's "Bride Fight," which shows two wedding gowns frozen in midair, like a battle captured in bullet-time - connecting same-sex marriage with other critiques of marriage and conventional gender roles. Describing contemporary marriage as rooted in property exchange, and the wedding ritual as increasingly consumerist, Ingraham left the audience with the question of "what it means to achieve equality in this institution."

Gozemba and Kahn took a more celebratory approach. Sharing joyful photos from gay marriages, they noted the positive impact marriage equality has had on gay families, and reflected on the "normalizing" effect of the images, which show gay couples as people in love, like any other couple in love. They also reflected on the gay community's "complicated relationship" with marriage, reminding the crowd of the influence of feminist critiques of marriage on the gay rights movement in the 1970s. Rushing took a more rhetorical approach in his speech, musing on changing ideas about, and legal definitions of, civil rights in America.

During the Q & A session, a comment about the dual nature of wedding ceremonies as private and public events provoked much discussion about the contradictions of marriage, particularly for LGBT people. Ingraham noted that gay people use the private ceremony of marriage to legitimatize their relationships, prompting Rushing to point out the irony that gay marriage is a spectacle that announces its own mundanity.

Wedded Bliss is on exhibit through Sept. 14 at The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.