Shit List Day 4: Family Values

Rather than go in to a critique of patriarchy, or the potential damage of bad families, I want to look at the idea of family as an exclusionary anti/social unit. Patriarchal families have been extremely bad for women and children, and that should always be named because it is infuriating and unacceptable. However right now I am primarily interested in having some conversations about how the family itself serves to obstruct a more supportive social system overall.

Families function to favor the set of people who are Blood Relations over the set of people who are Others. From the healthiest to the most oppressive, families all share a relationship to the question of who counts as family and who doesn’t. This way of dividing up the world has been completely exploited in the everyone-for-themselves capitalist system.  Economic oppression thrives in part on the idea that I don’t owe anything to anyone except my own flesh and blood. We can all do better. Queer people are here to do better. We are here to destroy family values.

When it comes to providing empathy and taking responsibility, our culture teaches us to prioritize family members over all the other humans to whom we are not related. Of course empathy and responsibility are not actually limited resources. But that is another conversation, because in our consumer culture we behave as though everything were a limited resource. So the idea of family enshrines care for a tiny set of people and diminishes responsibility for the rest. This fundamental aspect of family values is considered admirable because it is usually described as a form of loyalty.

The underside of family loyalty is a social order that lacks care for many, many, many, many people who need it. The system is set up to create a no-win situation where struggling families are simply not up to the multitude of challenges facing them, including emotional, economic, health challenges. Then the state and the community get to evade responsibility by pointing to some imagined moral failing of those same families.

In my birth family, two of the four of us were periodically hospitalized for mental illnesses and we certainly could have used some support from outside. But there we were, closed up in our suburban house, a family that offered little to its members and was unknown to others. We were not Family to anyone else. In other words, we were not in the set of cared-for people belonging to anyone capable of providing actual care.

So you say some families value empathy, healing, service, and caring for others? They are on their way to destroying family values and building new ones. Your family is a big household full of friends who chose to be together? Your family is tiny but made up of people who consider the babysitter a sister? You are building new family values. The old and the new live together side-by-side today, and sometimes you can feel the conflict happening. It doesn’t exactly help that we use the same word for both more open and more closed family systems. We all need a new normal. The default cannot remain the family that excludes. Right now many families straddle two worlds, waiting for the new to begin as the old passes away. We need to think carefully about what we wish to preserve from this contested territory.

On one hand, I want the new normal to question the ethics of valuing some people over others. The concept of family hinges on who is in and who is out. The conventional idea of family is based on the exclusion of the immoral, unwholesome other, in other words, the queer, the person who is with somebody the others do not approve of, the "illegitimate" child, etc. We have all had enough of that!

On the other hand, I want to note even the most loving family as currently constructed is still isolated and very often not up to all the work we expect from it. The family is inadequate to provide individuals with all the social, emotional and economic support that would make for healthier, flourishing human beings.

So the family is failing those it excludes, then under pressure it is failing those included as well. The family is failing, failing, failing. Can gay marriage be part of both the old and the new? It seems to me to hold too fast to the old. In the wrong hands, gay marriage serves to further de-legitimize our tribes and families of choice. NPR has provided some minimal coverage of conscientious objectors to gay marriage by inviting Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on as a guest on at least 2 occasions. Recently there was coverage of the NY marriage decision, and the same interviewer who has spoken with Mattilda awkwardly brought up the fact that some gays think there is something “special” to preserve about gayness, separate and apart from marriage. A guy about to marry his long-time boyfriend responded, “Yes but we are tired of being second-class citizens.” Was he referring to the ability to marry, or is that what single people and unmarried lovers are? Or is that what people in relationships outside monogamy are? I found his response illuminating because it spoke on many levels regardless of whether the speaker would deny or confirm my reading. If anything, it is heterosupremacism that makes us second-class citizens, not the law in isolation and not the status of being unmarried. I wonder how single straight people felt hearing that interview.

The meaning of family may be contested but real families in the real world still kick out queer children and sometimes drive them to suicide. Real families still struggle and implode under pressures that are simply too great. We cannot rehabilitate that shit by simply demanding a place within it. Our presence alone will not do the trick. We need better values where care includes people who are neither your relatives nor connected to you by the rule of the state, and where a variety of relationships are respected. Before we jump to perpetuate a system that exists at our expense, we might consider whether we want to continue to even use the word “family.” But in the meantime, let’s preserve a practice well embedded in the queer community’s history and in our best present moments: caring for one another regardless of blood or law.

Shit List Day 3: Queers

I will be among the first to point out that the queer community has a million problems, flaws and failings. We fuck up regularly. We keep trying to love each other well, and sometimes we succeed in spectacular and very moving ways. Then sometimes we don’t try. Then some other times we exclude each other, accidentally or worse. Sometimes we behave like self-righteous douche bags, especially when we think we’re being “radical.” All too often we are as racist, classist, misogynist, transphobic and otherwise deluded as the larger culture we are trying to resist. Sometimes we replicate the very problems we try to address. Sometimes I need to manifest the presence of my finger up my butt just to deal with all the glittery elitism, cliquish condescension and premature enlightenment.

At the same time that I often feel alienated, I am also very proud of us. We have our love and we have our hope and best of all we have each other. I’m proud of our resilience and all we have survived. When I was a closeted kid, somebody told me that gays stick together because their families reject them. It gave me hope. And for gay marriage to divide my people into pairs when we have already created a more successful and more loving and more expansive social structure is positively frightening. Community doesn’t happen by accident but the mainstream default state of individual isolation requires very little effort. I fear the impact gay marriage will have on gay community. I fear that marriage might narrow the group of people we care for into a "family" at the expense of the expansive group of cared-for people we currently call our community.

My personal commitment to always actively build community has made my life more fulfilling than I ever dreamed it would be. I have experienced more love among queer people than I ever hoped to receive from a straight family structure, more than I ever saw around me in my straight upbringing, more than I imagined I would ever deserve or attain. I was brought up to believe as a dyke I would be doomed to unrequited love for straight women who could never possibly love me back. I was not going to marry so I would die alone. My life has already turned out much better than I had ever imagined, and certainly better than I had been raised to expect. The ongoing work of entering, understanding, sharing and repairing queer community has been and continues to be fundamental to sustaining my ability to exist in this world.

Gay marriage feels much too much like the compulsory heterosexuality I experienced growing up in the suburbs. At our best we have made markedly different, more just and more rewarding lives for ourselves. I want us to be able to stick with it and keep working on it. The fabric of the queer community is delicate and requires our care. If we throw it in the marriage washing machine and it disintegrates into couples, we’ll ruin something very precious, something that improves the world through its presence. Weakening the queer community would be a real loss for everyone who has ever wanted something more from their love relationships than what has been socially dictated. Hand wash only, please!

Shit List Day 2: Gays Aspiring to Marriage

The day after the NY marriage decision, the Michael Kors store had HRC logos all over their window. Behind the window was a display of wedding cakes topped with bride-bride and groom-groom decorations. At the dyke march I saw lots of great subversive signs, but right outside the Michael Kors store I saw somebody with “Cuomo-sexual” written on their back. The juxtaposition embodied much of what has been troubling me.

Could you be more of an unquestioning minion of the state? Could you more openly discredit the hard work our people did in favor of praising an opportunistic (and social service-cutting) governor? I could have grabbed this person by the neck, repeated “no” very firmly, and smacked them on the behind with a rolled up newspaper. Queer people! Please do not behave like lap dogs. We are not on this earth to form a market group or as a voting block for inadequately progressive politicians/corporate shills. Have some self-respect. We’re not here merely to vote or make campaign donations to Cuomo. I could have broken the window at Michael Kors and shit in their display.

Even as a child I wanted more relational options than the two I was taught: married or old maid. I realize that some of my more difficult feelings about gay marriage go all the way back to being indoctrinated to believe that if I didn’t get married then I would die alone. From my earliest memories, I rejected this dichotomy. I knew there had to be something better.

Some gay people want to get married, often for child custody, citizenship and/or healthcare, and sometimes for romantic reasons. Many of us do not want to get married. Of course our marriages should be recognized, but that still doesn’t make marriage something to aspire to. Nothing will convince me it is a good idea to force my most intimate relationships into more conventional frameworks; I am much too proud of how hard we work at breaking free from monogamy, jealousy, possession and patriarchy. I enjoy my queer relationships, writing, art, music, humor, fashion, films, house parties, political activism, made-up families, academic theory and counter culture. I love the queer culture boom happening right now. I hope a million new organizations, collectives and households form. Bottom line is that I like my friendships and love and culture as they are, totally queer. And I feel no less protective of this community than any other doberman would.

Shit List Day 1: Straight Homophobic Patriarchs

Four days after the NY Gay marriage decision, this guy on the train was yelling, “Civil rights are for people who are civilized. A woman letting another woman fuck her with a strap-on is not civilized. A man fucking another man up the ass is not civilized.” He was arguing loudly with a woman who was clearly offended and yelling right back. I went to another car.

But what I could have done was swipe the ugly little hat off his head. It was part of his ridiculous religious garb. I could have thrown it on the floor and crushed it with my boot. What I could have done was snap his head right off his shoulders and kick it down the length of the train to shut him up.

When I went back to my workplace after being laid off to turn in my final paperwork to Chuck in HR, he told me all about how he was leaving early to see his daughter’s recital. I minimally acknowledged what he was saying, as I had done the first time Chuck was introduced to a bunch of us and had attempted to build a rapport by talking about his family and football.

But what I could have done was smash all the framed pictures of his kids that he keeps on his desk. What I could have done was sit him down and talk about how the all straight-power high-fives make the workplace extremely fucking uncomfortable for people like me. So many good dads and committed moms there, trying to manage their work-life balance! Every check-in, every conference call, every meeting, people were constantly affirming their wholesome heterosexuality. It made me feel invisible and furious that the only way people could relate was through this hetero banter where I had never had anything to add. What the fuck do I have to say about your morning sickness or engagement or sleepless nights with the newborn? Holidays were the worst. The head of HR should know better, so I could force him to be educated clockwork orange style. Actually I am not even sure that would work. Even after all that I might have no choice but to beat him over the head with a giant dildo.

The law that now allows gays to marry in NY includes “exemptions” for religious organizations. Homophobic organizations are officially exempt from respecting the gay marriage law. In order for this to happen, a lot of people had to think it was reasonable to hate gays. It is considered a moral issue for churches and religious non-profits to discriminate against us. Their “right” to discriminate is written in to this law such that if it is ever taken away, the law is invalidated. The law that passed functionally legitimates the homophobia of the church. A lot of fuss was made by republicans about “protecting religious freedom,” conflating the desire to discriminate against queers with freedom of religion. (I am pretty sure freedom of religion was supposed to be freedom from state mandated religion.)

For this one, I could make some kind of breakthrough in astrophysics that would prove beyond any question that there is definitely no such thing as god. But that wouldn’t work because religious fucks are all about having faith despite evidence. Maybe I could call on the gods of Ancient Greece to smite them for their hubris. Or maybe there could be a god who appears on earth just to tell the fundamentalists of every religion that the only people doomed to hell are those dumb enough to take scripture literally. A fantasy that is really satisfying here would have to destroy both the church and the state, so maybe the fantasy is simply apocalypse. But you know some surviving asshole would immediately want to set up a church.

Pulling on the Marriage Thread

What is at stake for straight people in taking up the fight against homophobia? Now I am not talking about cheering from the sidelines or supporting gay marriage from the couch, checkbook or even the voting booth. In order to cultivate better friendships, I have to wonder what it will mean for straight people to really stand with queers. Some of my straight friends are very invested in this question too. Just a few times in my life, I have been asked with the utmost sincerity for help understanding homophobia. I deeply appreciate being asked. Connecting with the straight people I love around homophobia very much informs my understanding of this heterosupremacist culture where available explanations of homophobia have proven so inadequate. And seeing people willing to challenge their own hetero privilege is powerful and has strengthened me in my belief that it can be done. So what is the cost for those who authentically and sincerely desire to be with us in the struggle? And how is it connected to the fears of those who would do anything to stop us?

Injustice wouldn’t be so enduring if it weren’t benefiting anyone. To explore the question of what is at stake for straight people, we need to look for what they get out of the status quo. What do straight people stand to lose, for instance, if queer people get married? Why is marriage such an infuriating issue for homophobic people? Marriage is a loose thread I would like to pull and pull and see what falls apart. There are a million more issues to explore, arguably a million times more important that marriage. Yet no matter how hard most queer people try to have a vision of justice larger than matrimony, marriage comes up again and again (and again) as the singular issue that commands everyone’s attention. 

Gay marriage will secure some rights for some gays. It will not create real change for queer people and certainly will not convert marriage from a patriarchal ownership compact into a baggage-free expression of love. And yet there is such strong opposition and a lot of support and all kinds of emotion surrounding this issue. From both the support and all the opposition, it seems to me we are actually talking about marriage not only as a legal institution but also as a marker of moral righteousness. And this is illuminating because it reveals some of the underlying, unstated beliefs in this so-called debate. It’s illuminating because it suggests more of an explanation of why people are so worked up! If gays marry, it will spoil the congratulatory marriage discourse by making marriage less wholesome. Beyond the legal benefits, gift registry and reception expense, marriage is all about conferring moral goodness. Beyond Proposition 8 court battles are people’s concepts of good and evil.

For a long time I struggled to pinpoint the homophobia in people’s steady stream of marriage congratulations. Wedding talk has always been extremely stressful for me. I have never been able to authentically relate to the fuss over engagement and marriage, so I have observed the way people behave in order to be able to make some semblance of a socially acceptable response to engagement announcements. (I’m kind of like an anthropologist that way, or a sociopath.) Finally I realized it is not the couple or the displaying of the ring that scares me. It’s the fawning and more so the pressure for everyone to fawn. In order to be perceived as a moral person, or even as a person at all, I have to provide my compulsory approval for compulsory heteronormativity. I can’t bring myself to fawn, but I have trained myself to ask a few cursory questions about the proposal and wedding planning process. This banter is a form of social affirmation reserved for heterosexuals. It is more than simply being happy for somebody. It is congratulating them on joining the morally wholesome ranks of The Family.

Hi B,

I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, and about the part on how you don't want to NOT be happy for a friend who is engaged or expecting. And I assured you that is not what I want. Yet there is a grain of truth here- there will be a loss. On a personal level, I still want you to be happy. But the truth is that if straight folks start to really understand homophobia and how it functions in hetero social structures (including conventional gender roles) to exclude what is queer, it will be less fun to be straight. And you can't NOT notice anymore. If straight folks really start to understand how homophobia works, looks and sounds, well, it will be kind of deafening. It will no longer be unproblematic to participate in a hetero-reinforcing behaviors all the time. "Straight" won't easily mean honest and good anymore. People will start to notice when they are enjoying camaraderie that's about how men and women are supposed to relate. Everyone can still love their family but you won't be able to assume every human aspires to a life just like yours, or that it is totally natural, and you will have to think about how to love any current or future queer family member and how to include them. So queerness actually does jeopardize family values. It doesn't destroy them, it just shows how stuff people think is wholesome, natural, normal, universal is actually painfully exclusive when you are on the receiving end. (Dr. Laura was right to be afraid of us!) No seriously, it will be less fun. I didn't say no fun, just less fun.

For NY Times Liberals who passively support gay marriage, they maintain their moral superiority while allowing some of us to be superior too, at least those of us who want to live in monogamous couples and raise children. (In today’s baby-madness cult of motherhood, we have conveniently forgotten/erased the married straight people who do not want children.) Most liberals are willing to permit queer peoples’ entry into the realm of the morally good if we shape our lives along the same lines as theirs, substituting a “same sex” partner where an “opposite sex” partner would be. For them, marriage confers its moral superiority by collecting moral touchstones like the state, monogamy, permanence, romantic love and parenting into a super-set of moral goodness.  Queers can exist in relationship to that moral goodness as long as we accept all the other premises too. This conditionality might not be explicitly articulated, but instead manifests in beliefs like: Gays are just normal people like us! But some are really a little too “out there.” In this liberal assessment of queerdom, the vast majority of us are excluded, transgender people are consistently ignored and left out, and mainstream-minded gays are allowed to loudly insist they are representative. No substantive change occurs in the culture, no self-examination, just a small renegotiation of barriers. There is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in the liberal framework, in fact, the life choices of liberals are reinforced by the idea that everyone really just wants the same things they want.

For Fox News Conservatives who oppose gay marriage, any entry of queers into marriage jeopardizes their moral dominance.  They cannot maintain their moral superiority if marriage becomes tainted, because unlike liberals who will still feel good about marriage and their liberal world, conservatives will no longer be able to feel good about their conservative world if gays are in it.  For them, marriage confers its moral superiority precisely through the exclusion of degenerate queers, and by collecting moral touchstones like the church, monogamy, purity, permanence, parenting, family values and heritage. Queers cannot exist in relationship to morality because by definition we are immoral, even if we are married and monogamous and conform to societal expectations in every single way but one. Clearly there is zero loss of privilege or moral superiority in this conservative framework, in fact, getting outraged by the gay rights movement bolsters their self-image as morally good. Protesters at the dyke march and gay pride clearly derive a great satisfaction from their own superiority. We can observe their pleasure at these events. In a more benign-seeming form, straight people who recommend civil unions may be responding subconsciously to the threat to their moral self-valuation. They are conflicted. They want to be fair but they don’t want to give up any of their own moral righteousness. The thing that makes marriage special for conservatives is the conference of morality, bringing the married couple up a level on the moral hierarchy. And the way to keep straight marriage moral is to keep queer people immoral.

Whether embedded in liberal tolerance or conservative intolerance, heterosupremacism as a persistent social structure will more than likely survive gay marriage unscathed. For me, the liberal version is still soul-crushing in how it seeks to diminish our uniqueness and sets normality as a gatekeeper to recognition. (I came out as a lesbian in my early twenties but I’ve always been queer and never been normal.) In the liberal version we still have to conform in order to be recognizable as human beings, and in the conservative version no matter how much we conform we can never be recognizable. Heterosupremacism wins whenever liberals tolerate our palatable differences and whenever conservatives condemn those same differences. Either way, being straight is central and being queer is marginal. Either way, most of us do not even get to be part of the argument.

Queer freedom requires dislodging heterosexuality from its central position. It will make heterosexuality less awesome… but will also open a whole world of human expression to queer and straight people alike, and everyone else too. Examples of how forced heteronormative conformity hurts straight people are everywhere. Dismantling heterosupremacism will require us to see more people as fully human, including more unmarried people, gender nonconforming people, childless people, sex workers, single parents, recluses, sluts, faeries, people with all different kinds of sexualities and life arrangements. More possibilities will open up for everyone when heterosupremacism is named and disputed and undermined.

With those expanded possibilities will come loss. A lot of people in many different places in society will enjoy less moral self-satisfaction, and that will be a loss for straight people regardless of what other privileges and/or forms of discrimination they face in terms of gender, race, class, age or anything. For liberals and conservatives alike, disrupting heterosupremacism will produce an uncomfortable sensation of the ground shifting underfoot. It may even be a devastating loss for some to realize that such a source of pride, the traditional marriage, is just one of many ways to arrange our love relationships. Heterosexuality and heteronormative lifestyles can no longer remain admirable in and of themselves. People are proud of their families. Part of that pride comes from feeling morally good, and getting admiration and acknowledgement. Part of that goodness, admiration and acknowledgement is rooted in being Not Queer, but normal and natural and wholesome. That’s the part needs to go. And it’s a big one. Maybe acknowledging the loss will help us move our energy forward instead of in this tiresome circular marriage conversation. We cannot tiptoe around heterosupremacism but we have to acknowledge that we are asking people not only to make an intellectual move but an emotional one too. The conversation I hope to have with straight people is not the tedious recitation of similarities and differences, but the difficult examination of all that is at stake in our solidarity.

Listen to Mattilda on NPR!

Now here is something to be proud of this June:

Assimilation Lunch

Abby: The other day on the Huffington Post, I saw something about Kim Kardashian “outing” a U.S. Air Marshall on Twitter, and I wasn’t sure what an Air Marshall is, but I assumed he was some kind of military person or something, if it was a big deal to out him.  I read through the article and there was nothing about him being gay, and I realized that the author was using the expression to mean disclosure of any kind of private status. That’s part of what assimilation is; letting them take parts of our culture and use it to mean whatever they want.

Sloan: Yeah, and it’s not even close to the original meaning... In that Michelangelo Signorile book he talks about media silence about the sexuality of public figures who were openly gay, that the point of “outing” was at least in part to break the media’s silence about queerness and address their failure to report any facts that would reveal that somebody is gay, because gayness was not something to talk about in public.  The practice of outing was not always about shaming homophobic/hypocritical closeted gay people but initially was about the media making our lives invisible and unspeakable.  It was not just revealing something secret but pointing out homophobia.

A: Of course words always change meaning over time, but what this made me think about was gay marriage.  And how we seem to have only two choices: assimilate and let them take whatever they want from our culture, or refuse and continue to be treated as outcasts.  In my class the other day we were discussing Tiger Woods’ apology. Somebody insisted that all professional athletes cheat, and another student responded, “Not all of them- some of them are homosexuals.”  Students laughed at the idea of gay athletes. That statement almost makes me want gay marriage to be legal, because at least then straight people would have to acknowledge that our relationships aren’t so alien, or less important.

S: And the professor did nothing, right? So now we are in a position where we are supposed to choose between exile and execution, between being shunned and being acknowledged but suffocated. And just like in any subculture, there will always be people ready to relinquish their uniqueness in exchange for belonging, in order to feel fully human and end the pain of invisibility.  But it won't work.  If we keep trying to attain equality only through similarity and conformity, we'll just end up losing our identities but still being considered less than human.  Sarah Schulman talked about this at the Kessler Lecture, that we’ve mistaken tolerance for love and lost sight of what we actually deserve.  

A Gathering Storm

Part 1: That Dreadful Storm

Now I am no fan of gay marriage, but I am well aware that the self-appointed defenders of marriage hate the shit out of queers. The legalization of gay marriage in five out of fifty states motivated homophobes to create A Gathering Storm, a TV commercial that literally voices the fear of homosexuals.  Miss California, please. “No offense,” they claim, in an attempt to inoculate themselves against charges of being offensively hateful.  Opposition to gay marriage provides a convenient way for homophobes to oppose homosexuality without appearing to openly hate us; it allows them to shamelessly display, discuss and demonstrate their homophobia without literally stating it.  Through their opposition to gay marriage they can voice their opposition to gay lives but tell themselves and others that they are not bigots. They merely want to protect marriage. 

The National Organization for Marriage website further provides so-called facts to back up the dramatic statements in their commercial.  The explanations reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of rights.  In each fact presented, the group articulates an instance in which a religious organization or individual was attempting to discriminate against a homosexual, and ran up against some form of legal trouble.  Examples include a fertility clinic doctor who refused to treat a lesbian patient and a church that refused to host a gay marriage ceremony.  The so-called rights they are afraid of losing boil down to the “right” to engage in discrimination without any consequences.  Every example consists of people feeling entitled to treat us as less than human because of their flimsy morality, and by invoking parenthood and church they speak to institutions that conservatives want desperately to own.

The ad has some inherently hilarious elements, like the earnest delivery of the line “I am afraid,” and the reference at the end to forming “a rainbow coalition.” The seemingly earnest approach and bizarre special effects might seem dated or inept in the context of high production-quality media. But the heavy-handed approach speaks effectively to an existing audience with a message that resonates for those who feel threatened by queers and who do not give a damn about slick media.  A Gathering Storm was not intended for anyone who thinks the presentation of the message is lame. It was intended for people who already believe in the message and need just a nudge to be stirred into action.  Actually, the seemingly naive, hokey quality fits into that old family-values-versus-liberal-elite trope most recently voiced by Sarah Palin with her joe-sixpack and her you-betcha. 

By emphasizing fear instead of hate, they seek to cultivate the belief that straight people are the victims of homosexuals, that homosexuals are more privileged than straight people, and that homosexuals are invading their world.  Homos get put into the role of the liberal elite, versus the decent and moral god-fearing folks who made that commercial.  This mentality of fear is a fertile ground for hatred, in fact it creates the feelings of disempowerment and instability that help hatred to grow.  It is a mindset that lends itself to hatred.  The hate is real and its impact is real.  Imagined victimization at the hands of a supposedly powerful minority exceeding their social status helps motivate white supremacists, anti-Semites, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and homophobes alike. 

Part 2: The Witty Response

What a huge response A Gathering Storm has generated!  There are too many parodies to watch in just one sitting.  Who is making ALL these parodies?  From amateurs on You Tube to Steven Colbert, to a bunch of TV actors and Lance Bass, the parodies proliferate far beyond the gay community.  Everyone wants to get in on the fun and show support for gay marriage... maybe the parodies are even winning over more straight allies for gay marriage. Straight liberals enjoy being in on the joke when it comes to queerness, in the know, with it, etc.  Add to that the fact that no one wants to be the butt of the joke.  The studio audience was in a laughing fit over Steven Colbert’s parody of A Gathering Storm and his commentary.  We have managed to make homophobia un-cool in certain privileged social circles.  While that is a little something, it is not much and it is not unproblematic.

The ad and its response illuminate one of the major reasons that affluent straight liberals can really get into supporting gay marriage: They risk NOTHING in supporting it. In fact, supporting gay marriage helps them feel good about themselves.  With every plea for marriage, gays serve to reaffirm the consumer/hetero lifestyle of marriage, ownership and offspring.  Straight people can look to us and feel content that their life choices are Good and Correct, so much so that gay people are just begging to attain this same exact life.  Now, I love my straight friends and that is why I know we can do better than this.  We can and do have friendships and alliances based on mutuality, respect and empathy.  But for a lot of straight married folks it must feel somewhat affirming to know that all us homos want is to be more like them.  We’re not the promiscuous free-loving seducers, exuberantly skipping down Fifth Avenue in our underwear... we are the committed monogamous neighbors.  Gays become much safer for previously uninterested straight people to accept as long as we aspire to nothing more than a life just like theirs.  Straight liberals love the marriage movement message because it poses no threat to how they live or what they believe.  They can be good liberals and support gay marriage and enjoy the moral high ground without having to give up anything, rethink anything, or do anything differently. The gay right is going out of their way to assure straight people the way things are is good and everything is just fine (except for gays not being allowed to get married.)  Every time there is a media story about gay marriage, it comes without the voices of progressive queers, without feminist queers, and without all of us proud queers who do not believe we need to get married in order to be fully human. 

Our voices are left out because it serves the advancement of the gay marriage movement to affirm the status quo as something universally appealing.  Our voices are left out because they threaten the social order far more than gay marriage ever could.  The affirmation of marriage may even assuage some of married people’s internal discontent, the doubts and fears they have about their own choices.  The gay marriage movement reassures straights that the patriarchal nuclear family structure is the best and only desirable way to live.  These structures exist at the expense of people in open or unconventional relationships, single people, transgender people, single parents, extended families, tribes and communities.   Marriages attain their status and legitimacy in part from our exclusion.  The continued replacement of “gay rights” with “gay marriage” reduces both our movement and our humanity.  In fact, it reduces everyone’s humanity, because it makes it seem as though you need to be in a relationship to have any sexuality at all.

And at risk of taking ALL the fun out of watching the parodies: What exactly is so funny about people placing an ad advocating against the legal rights of a minority, against rights that do not even exist except in five out of fifty states?  Would this be funny if it were about any other minority?  Of course, we’re special, and I’m not being sarcastic, our identity and culture have lots to do with sex and sex is a source of fun and obsession for pretty much every living thing on earth.  And of course humor itself is a legitimate and often effective form of resistance, one of my personal favorites.  But I do not think that is all of what is happening here.  Homophobia is not being addressed in a way that would change any homophobe’s mind, it is being addressed in a way that mostly just affirms the self righteous self-image of gay marriage advocates.

Part 3: Being Proud is Not the Same as Being Self-Righteous

The best part of these parodies for gay marriage advocates, what ever their sexual orientation, is that they get to feel really good about themselves while laughing at homophobes. Consequently there is a very real self-righteous sense of superiority being affirmed in these parodies.  The parodies are funny, but not that funny.  The mirth is in sharing a laugh at the expense of homophobes who are voicing something seemingly ridiculous.  The mirth shares the same variety of ugly self righteousness that came up in public conversations after the passage of Proposition 8 that blamed black people, absolved straight white people, and erased black queers all together.  Those who are laughing at the parodies get to feel like they are better than the ignorant fools who made that commercial.

For queers, there is definitely some appeal to the idea of feeling superior to homophobes. Of course we want to feel good, better than the people who are constantly sending us the message we are crazy, diseased, perverted villains.  Part of our cultural legacy is a fierce desire to say we are not villains, not inferior, not to be looked down upon.  For straights, I imagine they must enjoy thinking of themselves as morally better and more cosmopolitan and progressive than those ignorant, prejudiced, hatemongering homophobes.  There is also power in the act of dis-identifying with homophobes, and sometimes we all like to affirm our identity by point out what we are not.  Of course the desire to be better-than is very human and makes a lot of sense!  Liberals of every sexual orientation want to be good people, want to be on the right side of things.  But what does this orgy of superiority really accomplish? Straight liberals get to go back to their state-sanctioned relationships with the knowledge that they are better than those ignorant homophobes, with no changes to their thinking, values or behaviors.  Queers get to be funny and charming and get acknowledged by straights. 

What is missing here are the actual challenges that queers face on a daily basis that have to do with accessing adequate safety and humanity, not with accessing privilege and conformity.  So we enjoy a bunch of parodies, feel confident that we are on the right side of things, and go back to what ever we were doing before. Conveniently, we all feel better without actually doing anything differently. 

Part 4: Alliances

With friends and foes like these, I am not sure where that leaves queer rights, let alone queer liberation.  Consider Sean Penn, speaking up at the academy awards on behalf of gay marriage. 

For those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think that it is a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone.

On one hand, he made an excellent move by casting shame on homophobes.  Shame has long been used against queers, so it was thoughtful of him to invert that usual theme and use their very own weapon against them.  On the other hand, “equal rights for everyone?”  Not much to aspire to here.  “Equal rights” is an empty concept in an unjust society.  “Equal rights” are not going to end homophobia, nor are they going to teach kids to stop harassing other kids who are different.  So-called equality in a racist, classist, sexist society is not going to stop guys with baseball bats from beating Jose Sucuzhanay to death for walking arm-in-arm with his brother. 

The very next day after Sean Penn’s speech at the Oscars, the following quote appeared in the NY Times:

If we give the money to the widows, they will spend it unwisely because they are uneducated and they don't know about budgeting. But if we find her a husband, there will be a person in charge of her and her children for the rest of their lives.

MAZIN al-SHIHAN, director of a city agency in Baghdad, on his plan to pay men to marry Iraqi war widows.

Make no mistake about it, THIS is the very same institution we aspire to join.  We are kidding ourselves if we think a few homos getting married can alter or romanticize the fact of what marriage is: a legal institution that exists for the purpose of perpetuating male ownership and authority over women and children. 

And speaking of children, where exactly were all these advocates of gay marriage when Sakia Gunn and Lawrence King were killed? How about when Jaheem Harrera or Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover committed suicide? The comedic affect of all these parodies is pretty unimpressive when we consider how deeply homophobic our culture is, right now, today.  Queer children get killed or commit suicide while we take cheap shots at poorly produced advertisements. 

We have made it easier for straight people to like us, because instead of challenging the system that rejected us, we are asking to be let back in and promising to leave it relatively unchanged.  Instead of speaking up on behalf of our people who are harassed, bullied and killed, we are asking to be part of the family again.  Instead of asking for justice, we are asking for equality. Some of us have been seduced by the temptations of straight liberal approval and feeling superior to homophobes.  It all works out to support the status quo, and the hollow, oppressive nuclear family continues to dominate as the only legitimate social grouping by being propped up on the backs of all those who are excluded from it.  Gay marriage legislation addresses homophobia in an extremely superficial, marginal way.  So after everyone has a good laugh at the Gathering Storm parodies, maybe we can get on to the actual work of rethinking the way status quo gender and sexuality function in service of patriarchy, and start doing a better job looking out for those who are getting left out, crushed and even killed in the process.

Catholics

Why is it that whenever I talk to straight people about my opposition to marriage, I always find myself reassuring them that I am not judging their marriage or their choices?  They never feel the need to reassure me that they are not judging me when they talk about marriage or discuss who is engaged or any of the other choices they know very well I have consciously and deliberately ruled out of my life.  Straight privilege means never noticing that these conversations silence queerness by drowning it out with repetitive straight clichés.  

When a straight person tells me “I am a catholic,” it never occurs to them to reassure me that they disagree with their church’s views about sexuality or contraception or abortion or any of the other things I feel strongly about.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the pope’s views about homosexuality.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the church’s destruction of ancient and irretrievable books, its inquisitions, its crusades, its complicity with the holocaust and ongoing complicity with the AIDS crisis.  We are talking about the people who created the witch hunt, after all, why not at least pay lip service to this two thousand year abuse of power?  How much does an indulgence run these days, anyway? 

Yet when I say that I am opposed to marriage, I always find myself offering some comforting words to them so they know I am not opposed to their marriage.  I care about their feelings and our relationship.  I guess I am prioritizing the relationship over my ideas, which has its pro’s and con’s, but clearly the caring is not reciprocated.  Part of straight privilege is being comfortably certain that you will rarely be called upon to explain your relationship choices, or consider how your words, actions, beliefs, values and omissions might be painful for others. 

So the catholics now have a pope who has been a fanatical opponent of queer people since he was in the seminary.  We are Ratzinger’s favorite topic going way back in his hate-fueled career. This is the same guy who was protested by Queer Nation in NYC back in the late 80s.  He said in his 2008 year-end remarks that humanity needs protecting from the threats of homosexuality, transexuality and gender theory as much as the environment needs protection from destruction. It made me wonder who he is referring to with the word “humanity.”  In more than 20 years, this man has not moved an inch in his hatred and condemnation of queers.  Is the pope’s humanity the same humanity that led the Vatican to refuse to sign on to a UN proposal for nations around the world to decriminalize homosexuality?  Ratzinger extends open arms to a holocaust denier but looks the other way at state sponsored murder of homosexuals.  In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Nigeria and Mauritania, homosexuality is punishable by death.  The catholic church has made it very clear that for the Vatican, condoning the actions of states that put homosexuals to death is preferable to signing on to legislation that would suggest condoning homosexuality. People are being punished and even put to death, but they won’t sign on to a resolution to stop the killing because that would also marginally condone homosexuality.  How dense do you need to be to continue to be a part of a church that calls itself pro-life yet holds this untenable position? 

Humanity looks quite different to me than it does to this pope.  Clearly, my personal humanity and the humanity of my kind is not in need of protection in the eyes of Ratzinger.   It sucks to realize you have a more expansive view of humanity than this little old turd who gets to be a world leader.  The humanity of four trans women who were murdered in Memphis, Tennessee over the course of 2008 is the kind of humanity I find deserving of protection.  The pope missed this fact in his year-end reflection.  One of the women, Duanna Johnson, was beaten by police officers in June, was planning a lawsuit against the city, and was mysteriously found dead in November. So where exactly does the threat of transgenderism show up?  What threat did these women pose to humanity?  The question I continue to ask myself is:  When do I start holding the catholics in my life accountable for the position of their pope and church?  When will I start to ask the catholics I know to have some integrity?  Identifying oneself with catholicism is not a neutral position any more than identifying with a political party, and a very mean-spirited and vicious one at that. Either stand up to this fuck or leave his church.  Whose humanity really needs protecting here?