Queer Activism Does Not Mean Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage
I feel like it’s difficult to talk about gay rights without at least mentioning gay marriage. (I’m saving my issues with “gay” being synonymous with all things queer for another post; there’s simply not enough room here.) It sometimes feels as though the only issues that the mainstream gay rights movement (for example, the HRC--Human Rights Campaign) wants to address are gay marriage, ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and passing ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act). I’m going to focus on gay marriage in this post; I’ll save DADT and ENDA for another post later.

I’m of two minds when it comes to gay marriage because I’m not actually against gay marriage. It’s certainly not as though I think it should be illegal. I was crushed when Prop 8 passed (even though I’m not from California, so it doesn’t really legally affect me); I actually stayed up until about 4 in the morning November 5th, willing the numbers to change and Prop 8 to fail. It didn’t, as I assume we all know, and I lost some of the hope and optimism I’d gained from Obama being elected president. However, I feel strongly that the emphasis on gay marriage takes attention, support, and money away from a lot of issues that LGBT/queer people face and causes those other issues to become invisible.

Gay marriage should be legalized.
I think it’s ridiculous that so many people are so against gay marriage. To me, it seems like it should be the easiest problem for the LGBT community to deal with (and given how many issues there are with having gay marriage stick, perhaps that’s saying something about the issues the LGBTQ community is facing). Pass legislation that allows people of the same sex to get married (and the same gender and really, any sex and any gender). Enforce it--make justices, etc, fill out the paperwork. And, for the love of Athena, don’t let people vote on it! You don’t let people vote about whether to take away people’s civil rights. Really, now. (Or, rather, you shouldn’t let people vote about civil rights because apparently, people are being allowed to vote on them.) The US is not a country of majority rule--there are important things in place to protect the rights of the few from the wishes of the many. (I learned that in my philosophy of law class--I’m aware I’m being rather vague; the class was a while ago.)

I’m not trying to say that legalizing gay marriage is easy, just that it should be. It can be changed with legislation. Other things can’t be--parents disowning their children for being queer or trans, kids bullying other kids for being (or appearing to be) gay or not following gender norms well enough, people being murdered because of their sexual orientation or gender expression--these things can’t be changed with a simple piece of legislation. We can’t simply change people’s minds and hearts through passing a law. That is far more complicated.

Gay marriage is important to a lot of people, both symbolically and practically. As a symbol, it is one more way to bring the queer community a step further from second-class citizenship, and it legitimizes people’s relationships in society’s eyes. That’s powerful. Legally, there are over one thousand rights and privileges that married people have and often take for granted. Gay marriage would make many people’s lives better.

I can understand the desire for gay marriage to be legalized. All of my life, I sort of assumed that one day, I’d grow up and get married to the person I loved. I understand the desire to have the rights that straight people have. I understand the desire to have my relationship be recognized. I understand the desire to have all of those rights and legal protections. I understand the desire to not be treated like a second-class citizen.

Gay marriage is not the right goal.
Or perhaps I should say, gay marriage should not be the only goal. Gay marriage--whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing--is not the magic solution. Making gay marriage legal--even on a federal level--will not make things “happily ever after” for all queers. That might be my biggest problem with how much money, energy, and attention is devoted to the gay marriage cause. Gay rights is now synonymous with gay marriage. And while gay marriage is important, it appears to affect a group of people who are relatively privileged to begin with (mainly white, upper/middle-class gay cispeople who express themselves in a way that is gender-normal) the most. I’m not saying that their lives are all sunshine and rainbows to begin with. I’m not saying that the legalization of gay marriage won’t affect queers of color, lower-income queers, transfolk, gender-nonconforming people, etc. I’m just saying that they (the second category) are facing other issues as well, whereas (in what I believe are the words Felice Picano, an influential gay author and publisher) gay marriage is one of the only big issues facing the more privileged group of gays.

But there are so many other issues that affect other queers’ lives. The facebook group “I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal” states in its description, “We still demand a queer political agenda that centralizes the experiences of prisoners, poor people, immigrants, trans people, and people with disabilities. We reject a gay agenda that pours millions of dollars into campaigns for access to oppressive institutions for a few that stand to benefit."

In a May 28, 2008, article titled “Why One Queer Person Is Not Celebrating California's Historic Gay Marriage Decision,” Mattilda Berstein Sycamore writes, “the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care -- all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be."

In the same article, Berstein also writes, “the gay marriage movement is busy fighting for a 1950s model of white-picket fence "we're just like you" normalcy. And that's no reason to celebrate." In Queer Theory, Gender Theory, Riki Wilchins writes, “gay activists have continued to fight for mainstream acceptance by pointedly comparing gayness to straightness--by arguing that gay people also are monogamous, raise families, and look gender-normal. While this has been politically affective, it has also made fidelity to sexual and romantic norms the basis for demanding social recognition” (126-127). In a way, the message it’s sending is that only the queers who want to be like straight people (except, y’know, for the whole same-sex love/attraction thing)--only the ones who want to fit into the happy family model and blend in with everyone else--only the ones who are cisgendered/cissexual and don’t make waves--deserve to have equal rights. Everyone else doesn’t matter. Trannies and genderqueers and queers who don’t buy into the mainstream ideal, and queers who don’t want to get married, and queers who are polyamorous (because it’s still all about marriage to one person), and everyone else--they’re all left out of the gay rights movement (or, if you want to be more politically correct and also possibly less accurate, the LGBT movement) when the movement focuses so exclusively on gay marriage.

And anyway, legalizing gay marriage won’t automatically make life better for people--maybe those who want to get married. But those who don’t want to get married, queer kids whose parents have kicked them out, kids who are bullied and beat up for being/looking gay, victims of hate crimes, gender-nonconforming people (including, by the way, butch lesbians and flamboyant gay men, not just genderqueers and transfolk) who are harassed on a daily basis, transfolk who can’t get adequate health care because their health care providers cannot handle their transgressions of the gender and sex binaries, etc, etc--gay marriage won’t do a damn thing for them.


On a related note, I thought I’d add a few quotes from, and a link to, a really (I thought) thought-provoking essay I found:

Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!
By queerkidssaynomarriage

“Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed black men and bashing queers, and gays want more policing. More and more Americans are suffering and dying because they can’t get decent health care, and gays want weddings.
“Marriage is an institution used primarily to consolidate privilege, and we think real change will only come from getting rid of a system that continually doles out privilege to a few more, rather than trying to reform it. We know that most families, straight or gay, don’t fit in with the standards for marriage, and see many straight families being penalized for not conforming to the standard the government has set: single moms trying to get on welfare, extended family members trying to gain custody, friends kept from being each other’s legal representatives. We have far more in common with those straight families than we do with the kinds of gay families that would benefit from marriage. We are seeing a gay political agenda become single-issue to focus on marriage and leave behind many very serious issues such as social, economic, and racial justice.”