James Wagner

On page 3 of today’s Washington Post the paper’s New York Bureau Chief, Michael Powell, does a great job covering those within the lesbian and gay community who are sceptical of or even seriously opposed to the campaign for same-sex marriage.
If we had gotten reportage of this quality, this prominently and this timely when the AIDS epidemic first appeared 23 years ago the entire world would look very different today.
Not incidently, because so many of its most creative and energetic minds and bodies would have survived, queer activism would have created a different playing field by now, and Michael Powell’s piece would itself be very different – if not unnecessary.
Today’s reality however is that many of us are clamoring for equal marriage rights. But not everyone is interested in marriage, and its privileges should not be exclusive. We could instead be building new forms of relationships for everyone, and ensuring that society offer to all of its members, regardless of the nature or even the existence of affectional ties, the benefits they are due.
Powell did his homework, and the list of those he spoke to is pretty impressive. Somehow I was included [damn, you never get the quote you wanted], but I’m sure it was only because of a post I made three weeks ago.
One of the most thoughtful statements is that from Alisa Solomon.

“It’s the tension between the liberationists and the assimilationists,” said Alisa Solomon, a professor at New York’s Baruch College and writer for the Village Voice. “Our side made it possible for more conservative gays to come out of the closet, and when they did they brought a more conservative politics and culture to our movement.”
Solomon, like many gay rights activists, argues for redefining all marriages — homosexual, heterosexual — as civil unions. This would provide the legal protections that come with marriage, from health care to taxes to adoption, without the emotional and cultural freight. “The queer marriage movement needs a divestment campaign,” Solomon wrote in the Village Voice. “The only way we will win is if the state’s authority to pronounce is stripped from the ministers, rabbis, imams and priests.”

And jumping back to the ghosts of dead activists – and some of their heirs, überactivist Bill Dobbs has the last word in Powell’s article.

He leafed through the photos of the gay marriages these past weeks. There wasn’t a nose-pierced, pink-haired, breast-tattooed transgressive transgender queen to be seen. He has a nightmare vision of what the future holds.
“We’re going to just put the photo of our spouse on our desk at the law firm and represent some Fortune 500 corporation,” Dobbs said. “We’re not going to threaten to rearrange your finances or change your world in any way. That’s not my gay movement.”

In a column which appears in the print edition of The Nation this week and also on his own website Alexander Coburn tries to introduce nuance into the discussion of same-sex marriage. Like me, he’s against it.

I’m for anything that terrifies Democrats, outrages Republicans, upsets the applecart. But exultation about the gay marriages cemented in San Francisco, counties in Oregon and New Mexico and some cities in New York is misplaced.
Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about. Assimilation is not liberation, and the invocation of “equality” as the great attainment of these gay marriages should be challenged. Peter Tatchell, the British gay leader, put it well a couple of years ago: “Equality is a good start, but it is not sufficient. Equality for queers inevitably means equal rights on straight terms, since they are the ones who dominate and determine the existing legal framework. We conform — albeit equally — with their screwed up system. That is not liberation. It is capitulation.”

The major media outlets can’t seem to find them, being so incapable of recognizing nuance, but there are apparently plenty of very queer voices out there questioning the current marriage frenzy, and Cockburn airs three of them:

“The pursuit of marriage in the name of equality”, says Bill Dobbs, radical gay organizer, “shows how the gay imagination is shrivelling.” Judith Butler, professor at UC Berkeley, exhibited kindred disquiet in a quote she gave the New York Times last week. “It’s very hard to speak freely right now, but many gay people are uncomfortable with all this, because they feel their sense of an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed to be about finding alternatives to marriage.”
As Jim Eigo, a writer and activist whose thinking was very influential in the early days of ACT UP put it a while back, what’s the use of being queer if you can’t be different? “Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than others? Under its terms, gays who are willing to mimic heterosexual relations and enter into a legally-enforced lifetime sexual bond with one other person will be granted special benefits and status to be withheld from those who refuse such domestication…Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn’t it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?”

Although I confess I just read it now for the first time, several weeks ago Alisa Solomon wrote in The Village Voice on these same issues, emphasizing the church/state thing, and concluding:

There’s a wider advantage to promoting civil unions for all [and not marriage] as the simplest and most constitutionally sound solution to the vexations over queer vows. Once queer folks’ emotional need to see their love recognized is separated from the practical need for various economic and legal benefits (especially revolving around children), the community can look more clearly at what the state proffers to those civilly united—and why. Should a home with an amorous relationship at its center be any more deserving of the option to file taxes jointly than, say, a couple of single friends who have decided to set up a household together? Sure, I’d like to be rid of those extra income taxes, but I’d rather see our movement fighting for universal health care so nobody’s coverage depended on having a spouse with a job with insurance benefits.
As we win this the right way—and help lead America away from establishing fundamentalism as the law of the land by getting the state out of the business of holy matrimony—we can pick up the many issues that have been the bridesmaid for almost a decade now: the rising epidemic of violence against transgender youth and the homophobia faced by LGBT elders, to cite only two. Andrew Sullivan has infamously said that once gay marriage is won, the movement can pack up and go home. On the contrary.

[image from Voyager Virtual Season Project]