It is not the time to settle, to follow a movement that's soiled with the remnants of a history of oppression, or to come to terms with the rhetorics that promise a certain reform. And it never really will be. It's time to wrestle with the state a little more, to take the national liberal gay agenda by its throat, and to abolish what cannot be reformed. And it always will be. Marriage is a mass movement that flaunts the beliefs of capitalism, the utilization of power, legality as an appropriate means of validation, and property. When advocated as the most important part of the national liberal gay agenda, it begins to applaud the ingrained structures of the gender binary and relationship normalcy. It is an institution that invites people to submit to the perpetuation of what's already internalized throughout this country as success and social acceptance.
THE ABANDONMENT OF TRUE QUEER HISTORIES
Gay marriage doesn't mean that the queer kids won't get beat up anymore, among other things. The gay marriage campaign ignores the dead faggots, transpeople, and the blood of queers, through services like blood drives hosted by the Red Cross, for example. It has become a damn good decoy that seems to endlessly abandon a true, queer history of oppression, secrecy, and guilt. A history that also represents a hell of a lot of strength, resistance, and utmost bravery. The gay marriage campaign frames itself as a huge gesture of justice. It is not. It is a quick solution to supposedly satisfy the gay public. It does not restore hope or encourage folx to remember or relearn the honest battles that got us here in the first place. It perpetually blinds queers from a time-line of violence, hatred, pressure, and the resulting terror and uproar that live inside our own struggle. We cannot afford to forget it all: the bar raids, the riots, the discrimination tied to the AIDS epidemic, and the processes of unraveling our own identities, especially in a generation that asks us to quiet down and breath in that promising, legal, equal air.
The gay marriage campaign doesn't cease to play itself up as the end-all-be-all of queer struggle. Such a movement has mastered the art of noticing our desperate actions to lash out, telling us to hush, and silencing the stories that challenge its purpose. But honestly, we can all see how some folx, in our own communities even, are convinced that it is rich with good intentions, when we recognize how many people No on One, Maine's gay marriage campaign, is backed by, and when we count all those equal sign bumper stickers. It's time to key those cars and keep retaliating, to build the communities that are being wrecked by a $6 million campaign, and to save each other's lives.
GAY MARRIAGE, MONOGAMY, AND FAMILY DYNAMIX
It seems as though more and more queers are eating up what is being fed to them by all of this, in terms of relationship normalcy; that monogamy is the most appropriate romantic bond, and that our love affairs are constituted by legal status. For example, the Portland Phoenix voted the No on 1 team as one of Portland's "most influential people," because they're "still standing up for what's right." This determines that the entire campaign, including the 267,785 people that voted in favor, is only promoting the validation that comes with exclusive, monogamous partnerships, especially the ones granted governmental acceptance and legal documents. The gay marriage campaign regrets an entire spectrum of desires. Our queer as fuck and chosen families never planned on submitting to the straight, upper-class, American Dream ideology of family. When did it become so important to make sure our love affairs were recognized by the state?
GAY MARRIAGE AND HEALTHCARE
As the gay marriage campaign sugar coats its intention for healthcare reform for everyone, it continues to marginalize the less financially relevant folx in this equation. It dismisses the queers that can't afford shit in the first place. It's a shining example of the convictions of the medical-industrial complex. Furthermore, the gay marriage campaign reinforces the myth that healthcare is a privilege, instead of a basic human right to which no one shall be withheld. And it doesn't seem likely that we'll see the queer and trans kids who are living on the street find salvation in a marriage they can't afford before they can afford to have a little bit of shelter. By the power invested in gay marriage, services for HIV+ people in our communities, the resources and treatment accessible to trans folx, such as hormones and surgery, remain out of reach to so many queers: the working class, the non-monogamous, etc. The gay marriage campaign helps to insist that healthcare is a privilege. It persistently abides by the notion that only a handful of any given population will be granted such a necessity.
GAY MARRIAGE AND $$
So what did No on One spend $6 million on anyway? And when did all those dollars get so much louder than our outward rejection of the notion that Equality Maine stands so proudly by that gay marriage is "the fight for our lives." A righteous example of classism is this: because a considerable amount of liberals in this state are people of the upper class, the gay marriage campaign is indefinitely fighting the battle that the wealthy folx are asking for, and financially supporting.
While No on One's and Equality Maine's budgets don't cease to increase, local organizations and resources necessary to sustain the well-being and safety of queers are disappearing. For example, the HIV Prevention Outreach Educators will lose their funding in summer 2010 from the Department of Education. This is not to say that AIDS activism is only an extension of queer activism, rather to say that many of the people living with HIV are LGBTQA folx existing in the queer communities and neighboring communities; you know, all that blame, like the Red Cross doesn't want your blood if you've done this or that since 1977, etc. The emotional and mental support for our LGBTQA communities is worth more than any spare change or signature donated to the gay marriage campaign. But still, any spare change that could possibly be put in the hands that are working inside our own networks towards providing accessible resources for uninsured, homeless, or unemployed queers is more useful than any president of some equal rights campaign could fathom.
GAY MARRIAGE, VIOLENCE, AND THE ARMY
Violence is the evil utilization of power, your vulnerability tested, and any force that coerces or causes physical, emotion, or mental turmoil or toll. The gay marriage campaign includes an effort to reform the army, by asking to repeal the infamous "don't ask, don't tell" law, rather than creating outlets to start abolishing it altogether. The army has created a form of oppression on the battlefield, which is carried throughout the souls of those fighting and afraid overseas. It keeps the internalized homophobia intact, and endures secrecy and guilt among queers. Such an institution does not need to live on, seeing as repealing this act will spark more violence and terror than anyone wants to defend themselves against. It's a lose/lose situation. Gay marriage advocates to improve organized military as if it's served a legitimate purpose in the first place. The "don't ask, don't tell" law is one extension of the oppressive roots that the army stemmed from. There are more important wars inside of ourselves and closer-to-home that we must fight, and not for oil, or pride, but for safety and the sake of letting our histories thrive.
GAY MARRIAGE, THE GENDER BINARY, AND QUEER CULTURE
Somewhere along, a structure was built, a set of rules to define and be defined by human behavior and place in society which corresponds to a person's sex, better known as the gender binary. In the beginning, when queer theory began expanding outside of its own communities and into the ears of those homophobic, existed a handful of stereotypes and the products to satisfy the mainstream gay culture, and it still does today. You know, real men wear pink, all dykes are butch, consumerism, fashion, capitalist-scented colognes. When the fags started getting femmey and the dykes started cutting all their hair off, anyone watching began to internalize what they were seeing as a tendency to sympathize with an opposite sex, and strong desires to trade sex which took over their appearance, while gender goes unrecognized. At the top of the gay marriage campaign, where the most notable representatives and advocates are looking down from their hierarchical skyscrapers at all us fags, they can't possibly notice our oppositions, our rejections to the gender binary and the way it filters into an equal rights campaign for the assigned two genders that our society manipulates into roles.
If gay marriage had become a state-wide privilege this past election, how would all the androgynes and folx still in transition, a body with an indeterminable sex, present themselves to ask permission to marry? Would they resort to abandoning their true gender identities that take ages to figure out? Take me, for example, just for kicks. If by some strike of ignorance I ended up wanting to get hitched, would I forget all about my androgynous mind and present my female body to the state? "Hey state, I feel like a boy sometimes, but forget that, I am female and I want to marry a female." We want to diminish the gender binary, don't we? Gay marriage is a pure perpetuation of this kind of stigmatization.
FUCK THE BULLSHIT, FIGHT THE SYSTEM
In our own communities, and unmistakably removed from the liberal gay agenda, we have the privilege that we've provided for each other to exercise our own genders, sexualities, actions, etc. which creates a network of power that must be utilized appropriately. We have the tools to create the resources that will serve us, now, the generations to come after us, youth, and the queer folx who go unrecognized and silenced. The queers must recognize what needs to be diminished, like the rhetorics that consistently get folx to fall into the traps that preach the institution of marriage. The gay marriage campaign is a scum-fuck of a machine that cheats queers through tactics that remain on the surface. At this point, we know how to dig deeper, and we have the ability to plug into the communities that are chalk full of folx who've been fending for themselves for this long. By any means necessary, the queers must fight their way through the bullshit while dancing hard on all the wedding cakes, as our honest radical histories resonate inside our bodies until they start seeping out all over the place, from then on. Don't let the marriage machine assimilate you.
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