Beyond Gay Marriage; Assimilation within the Queer community

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Beyond Gay Marriage

By Lisa Dettmer

Problems with the Institution of Marriage.................3Civil Marriage — Tool of Social Control...................4Gay Marriage, from San Francisco to the Supreme Court.....5Out in the Community: Interviews with queer activists and academic..................................................6Disabled AIDS Activists Have Other Priorities.............7LGBT Economic and Cultural Trends, 1960s – 2000s..........8Marriage as Economic Institution for Intimate Care and Domestic Work............................................10Marriage Is A Tool Of Anti-Black Racism..................11Government Policy Punishes Single Mothers................12Family Is More than Marriage.............................14Race and Class in the LGBT Movement......................14Health and Housing Loses to Marriage.....................15“What happens when queers move into the halls of power?”. 17“Can a gay movement which is run by one class, really serve the needs of another?”...................................17Gay Marriage Advocates...................................18Why White?...............................................19Cooptation by the Right..................................20Marriage is a tool of colonialism........................20Pinkwashing..............................................21Marriage is a tool of xenophobia and immigration enforcement..............................................22Does Gay Marriage Reduce Homophobia?.....................22Is Fighting Homophobia Enough?...........................23Race and Marriage........................................23Key Issues for the Queer Community.......................25Supporting Diverse Forms of Relationship.................26Where Do We Go from Here?................................28Afterword................................................30


This paper considers perspectives on marriage in the Queer

and feminist community reviewing key contemporary thinkers

on the subject and using direct interviews and material from

radical Queer activists and academics in the field. It

examines problems inherent in the fight for gay marriage and

examines the ways gay marriage intersects with issues of

race and class. I conducted dozens of interviews over the

course of the research involved in this project. Many of

them were broadcast in a documentary entitled, “Beyond Gay

Marriage, broadcast on KPFA in 2010 and podcast by Race,

Poverty & the Environment

http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer. Quotations from

these interviews are interwoven in the text without specific

footnote. Unattributed direct quotations are excerpted from

the transcript of Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio

documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010).


From Stonewall to the Occupation Wall

Over 45 years ago street and bar queers rioted against

police harassment at the infamous Stonewall rebellion

igniting the U.S. gay and transgender liberation movements.

It was led by homeless queers, trannies, butch dykes and

other gender non-conforming queer street people among the

rioters and their allies. Many radical gay groups, such as

Gay Liberation Front emerged immediately following the

uprising sharing beliefs with other New Left and radical

groups of the 60’s and 70’s: economic equality, challenging

police and state violence against all oppressed groups and a

refusal to cooperate with dominant institutions.

At the around the same time, however, some middle class

white gays and lesbians disassociated themselves from the

violent riots of Stonewall seeking more assimilationist

goals as the homophile Mattachine society had earlier.1 It

is in that context groups like the Gay Liberation Front

began organizing across a spectrum of issues against the

everyday injustices experienced by poor queer people


included street people, hustlers, trans people and homeless

queers and other queer outlaws.2 The first “Gay Liberation

Day” celebrated on the anniversary of the resistance to the

police has now devolved into the LGBT Pride parades

celebrated all over the world.3

Intersectional organizing for peace and justice and against

colonialism and imperialism and state violence led by

lesbians and feminists has been derailed into a struggle for

legal recognition that puts the LGBT movement in alliance

with some of the most conservative economic forces in the

country.4 From radical beginnings, the LGBT movement has

grown much-more aligned with mainstream political

perspectives. Campaigns for same-sex marriage are emblematic

of this paradigm shift to a more homo-national form of

consciousness and organizing. Gay marriage and the

assimilationist politics of the current mainstream gay

movement must be seen within the context of that broader

understanding of neoliberalism nationally and

internationally. It is that paradigm that allows us to


understand the broad success and support of that issue and

its relationship to other issues like gentrification, the

xenophobia of policies in relationship to immigration and

Islamaphobia and the politics of terrorism. In other words

accommodation to racism and imperialism are enabling factors

for gay acceptance and official citizenship5 as symbolized

by widespread legalization of gay marriage.

Problems with the Institution of Marriage

Marriage has been criticized by feminists for over a century

(for example Emma Goldman’s 1914 essay Marriage and Love6),

many of the 19th century socialists7 and by gay

liberationists since the 1970s. It is still being criticized

by radical feminists and queer activists today. The website

beyondmarriage.org displays the names and organizational

affiliations of over 2,000 well known scholars and activists

(including this author) who have signed onto a statement

that advocates for the reframing of the narrow terms of the

marriage debate in the United States.


The statement argues that the “opposition to same-sex

marriage is only one part of a broader pro-marriage, ‘family

values’ agenda that includes abstinence-only sex education,

stringent divorce laws, coercive marriage promotion policies

directed toward women on welfare, and attacks on

reproductive freedom.”8 This attack when seen within the

context of a 30 year attack on the social safety net that

has ended up putting the burden on households to take up the

slack one can begin to see the larger societal interests in

pushing for a marriage agenda for gays and for poor people.

The statement argues that the LGBT movements focus on

marriage as a stand-alone issue may secure rights and

benefits for some LGBT families but it ends up leaving

others isolated and vulnerable. These activists seek to

create a movement where the struggle for marriage rights is

part of a larger movement to strengthen the stability and

security of diverse households and families. To that end,

they advocate four policies.


Legal recognition for a wide range of relationships,

households and families – regardless of kinship or

conjugal status.

Access for all, regardless of marital or citizenship

status, to vital government support programs including

but not limited to health care, housing, Social

Security and pension plans, disaster recovery

assistance, unemployment insurance and welfare

assistance.

Separation of church and state in all matters,

including regulation and recognition of relationships,

households and families.

Freedom from state regulation of our sexual lives and

gender choices, identities and expression.

Civil Marriage — Tool of Social Control

Professor Dean Spade and Craig Willse and others in the

Against Equality coalition9 also argue that civil marriage

has always been a way for societies to categorize those who

will be rewarded or normalized (and get those 1,000


benefits) and those who will be punished or criminalized.

While marriage is being rewarded, other ways of organizing

family, relationships and sexual behavior do not receive

these benefits and are stigmatized and criminalized. In

short, people are punished or rewarded based on whether or

not they marry. They argue marriage isn’t about the freedom

to marry or equality rather it is a coercive regulation

where those who are not married can lose vital life

resources like health care and paths to legalized

immigration and that changing who can join the “charmed

circle” and be rewarded doesn’t change the fundamental

inequalities.

In an article on Organizing Upgrade, Spade and Willse

contend: “Freedom and equality are not achieved when a

practice crosses over to being acceptable. Instead, such

shifts strengthen the line between what is considered good,

healthy, and normal and what remains bad, unhealthy,

stigmatized, and criminalized. The line moves to accommodate

a few more people, who society suddenly approves of,


correcting the system and keeping it in place. The legal

marriage system—along with its corollary criminal punishment

system, with its laws against lewd behavior, solicitation,

indecency and the like-enforces the line between which

sexual practices and behaviors are acceptable and rewarded,

and which are contemptible and even punishable

“We learned feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial

movements social movements, they argue that “ marriage as

a technology of social control, exploitation, and

dispossession wrapped in a satin ribbon of sexist and

heteropatriarchal romance mythology.” 10

Gay Marriage, from San Francisco to the Supreme Court

Over the last eight years, same-sex marriage has been a

predominant issue in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and

transgender (LGBT) community. Largely as a result of

decisions by federal and state courts, same sex marriage is

now legal in over 30 states,11 leading some to believe the

gay community is winning their battle for acceptance. But

many in the LGBT movements for social justice question


whether gay marriage is really the most critical issue for

their communities. and whether the focus on marriage is

something that upholds their ideas of creating a more

radical Queer culture.

1 Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 2 Christina B Handhardt, Safe Space; Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, pg 1).3 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/sw25/gifs/ stonewall_national_historic_landmark_nomination.pdf4 Urvaishi Vaid, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics5 “The (symbolic) entry into citizenship by (some) gay subjects… is predicated on the globalization of anti-Muslim racism in an international context of war, as well as the various local and national regimes of migration and/or occupation with which this war intersects. The myth of gay assimilation is crucially enabled by a redefinition of the West as sexually progressive. Puar and Rai argue that gender and sexuality discourses are central to these new knowledges, which draw on anthropological and psychological arguments in order to explain the apparent proneness of ‘Muslim’ cultures to producing terrorists. In particular, it is an improper, failed heterosexuality, manifested in polygamy and other ‘dysfunctional’ family structures, which produces these ‘evil’ masculinities, whose destruction serves as the spectacular rationale for the ‘war on terror’. Colonialism, once described by Gayatri Spivak as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ is rewritten, in this moment of gay assimilation, as ‘white (straight and gay) men saving brown women (and gays) from brown men’.” Jin Haritaworn,Loyal Repetitions of the Nation: Gay Assimilation and the ‘War on Terror’http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/05/02/loyal-repetitions-of-the-nation-gay-assimilation-and-the-war-on-terror/#foot_src_25 who cites: Puar, Jasbir (2005), ‘Queer Times, Queer Assemblages’, Social Text 23(3-4): 121-139, Puar, Jasbir and Rai, Amit S. (2002), ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots’, Social Text 20(3): 117-148. 6 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1914) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1914/marriage-love.htm7 Richard Weikart, Marx, Engels and the Abolition of the Family, History ofEuropean Ideas, Vol. 18, No.5, pp.657-672, (1994)


That same sex marriage has been a dominating issue is a

particularly pointed question in California where pro-gay

marriage groups spent over $43 million to oppose Proposition

8, which outlawed same-sex marriage, despite the fact that

domestic partnership in California provides almost the same

benefits that same-sex marriage would. 12 After the passage

of Proposition 8 there were many “gay” groups that blamed

African Americans as voting in favor of Prop 8 in large

numbers even though those statistics were later proved

unfounded.13 This blaming of black people once again points

out how not only does the mainstream gay community fail to

8 http://beyondmarriage.org9 http://www.againstequality.org/about/marriage/10 Dean Spade and Craig Wills, Marriage Will Never Set Us Free, Organizing Upgrade, http://www.organizingupgrade.com/index.php/modules-menu/beyond-capitalism/item/1002-marriage-will-never-set-us-free11 Twenty one states legalized same sex marriage as a result of court decisions: Alaska (Oct. 17, 2014), Arizona (Oct. 17, 2014), California (June 28, 2013), Colorado (Oct. 7, 2014), Connecticut (Nov. 12, 2008), Idaho (Oct. 13, 2014), Indiana (Oct. 6, 2014), Iowa (Apr. 24, 2009), Massachusetts (May 17, 2004), Nevada (Oct. 9, 2014), New Jersey (Oct. 21, 2013), New Mexico (Dec. 19, 2013), North Carolina (Oct. 10, 2014), Oklahoma (Oct. 6, 2014), Oregon (May 19, 2014), Pennsylvania (May 20, 2014), Utah (Oct. 6, 2014), Virginia (Oct. 6, 2014), West Virginia (Oct.9, 2014), Wisconsin (Oct. 6, 2014), Wyoming (Oct. 21, 2014). Eight states legalized same sex marriage as a result of by State LegislatureDelaware (July 1, 2013), Hawaii (Dec. 2, 2013), Illinois (June 1, 2014),Minnesota (Aug. 1, 2013), New Hampshire (Jan. 1, 2010), New York (July 24, 2011), Rhode Island (Aug. 1, 2013), Vermont (Sep. 1, 2009). Three states legalized same sex marriage as a result of Popular Vote: Maine (Dec. 29, 2012), Maryland (Jan. 1, 2013), Washington (Dec. 9, 2012)


create racial and social justice alliances but how the idea

that African Americans are more homophobic than other groups

is linked to how mainstream LGBT groups imagined their

relationship to low income people of color within urban

centers in the early years of the consolidation of the LGBT

rights movement. A relationship were mainstream gays with

money helped enable the displacement of people of color by

gentrifying urban neighborhoods or creating policing tactics

in coalition with other white middle class property owners

to criminalize poor street people even when it included

Queer homeless youth. As LGBT urban spaces have become more

and more closely tied to tourist areas and less refuges for

homeless and displaced queers migrants from around the

world, those communities have also colluded more and more

with the racist policies of gentrification and police

criminalization of poor people. The focus on marriage needs

to be seen within that context of a history of the LGBT

12 Section I. Title,This measure shall be known and may be cited as the "California Marriage Protection Act." Section 2. Article I. Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:Sec. 7.5. Only marriagebetween a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.


community become more middle class and racist as it become

more assimilated.14

A 2008 study done at Hunter College shows that the majority

of LGBT people actually consider economic discrimination to

be the No. 1 issue in their lives. 15 And Lisa Duggan, New

York University professor of social and cultural analysis

has pointed out that queer white men are the most likely to

be coupled whereas black lesbians are the least likely to be

coupled, thus demonstrating that marriage will benefit gay

white men more than queer women of color. So the question

remains. Why is same sex marriage the issue drawing the

largest attention and funding by mainstream LGBT groups and

the media?

Out in the Community: Interviews with queer activists and academic

As part of my research I visited the Pacifica center which

is my local queer center in Berkeley, CA and went to a

13 http://seachangeprogram.org/what-we-do/work-with-us/ 14 Christina Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence,2013).15 Patrick J. Egan, Murray S. Edelman, Kenneth Sherrill, Findings from the Hunter College Poll of Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals: New Discoveries about Identity, Political Attitudes, and Civic Engagement 2008.


local gay senior event to find out what other queer folks

are thinking about the gay marriage movement. A variety of

respondents made the point that other issues were far more

significant including: homophobic violence, health care,

affordable housing and internalized oppression. They also

noted that gay marriage advocates tended to tokenize Black

people Comments such as: “I would much prefer not being

terrified of getting beaten up.” “I don’t hear the gay and

lesbian, bisexual, transgender community thinking about the

issues of seniors lives.” “The campaign for marriage

equality is very white, very Eurocentric...” “What about all

the discrimination that happens internally to the people of

color, to trans folks, to the young folks to the elders?” 16

where common responses.

Disabled AIDS Activists Have Other Priorities

For a more in depth view I did a longer interview with Brian

Bassinger, executive director of the San Francisco AIDS

Housing Coalition, which works with homeless and low-income

people with AIDS.


Bassinger lives in San Francisco with his partner, James.

Both of them live on the money they get for their AIDS

related disabilities. Brian’s story is one example of how

some queer people continue to struggle for basic economic

survival. Even if Brian and James wanted to get married,

they couldn’t without losing their disability support. And

their story is not unusual for queer people with AIDS.

16 Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E (2010) Direct quotes from respondents from this mini-survey.Respondent 1: “There are other issues that have affected me more immediately than marriage ever will. I would much prefer not being terrified of getting beaten up. There’s a lot more issues that I would prefer were addressed.”Respondent 2: “I don’t hear the gay and lesbian, bisexual, transgender community thinking about the issues of seniors lives. For example, the issue of health care, the issue of affordable housing. As we age, most of us are living on very limited incomes. I received an email from the Courage Campaign, asking us what issues they should focus on. I looked at the list of 5 issues and there was not one thing on that list that affected me personally. There was not one word about senior’s lives. Andthe needs of seniors that don’t have a lot of money” Respondent 3: “I think the campaign for marriage equality is very white,very Eurocentric, especially with the fact that it did get passed, and both the Black and Latino communities were demonized by saying that theywere the majority of voters voting in favor of it, when in fact, black and brown people are the minority in the state of CA as far as voting. And I feel like in my experience there’s been a lot of tokenizing, like ‘yeah! We do people of color work, we have this one Black person workinghere! And they talk to Black people’ kind of thing. As opposed to everyone working on their issues and white people checking their privilege,”Respondent 4: “I want to know, from the gay community, what’s going to happen after gay marriage? Ok. We get these rights to marry, what about all the discrimination that happens internally to the people of color, to trans folks, to the young folks to the elders. I feel like gay marriage is a way for people with privilege to gain more privilege and almost forget about the people who are still struggling.”


Brian Bassinger: “I’m on a program called SSDI, and he's on

a program called SSI. These poverty programs are very

strict, and they don't let you have any money. And so, they

want James to live on $845 dollars a month, and my income

from Social Security disability of $1300 dollars a month

would have disqualified him from SSI, cause it's a poverty

program. You're not allowed to have anything in order to

quality for that income, and also for the health insurance

that's attached to it. And in addition he pointed out

marriage was not an option for most poor, disabled or

homeless queers. And even if they were to get married it is

very unlikely that their partner would have money or health

insurance so the financial benefits or marriage would be few

And he said ,” it annoys me when these people try to use us,

when people who are promoting the marriage agenda try to use

us. Use disabled people with AIDS, and poor people—those of

us who are really going through these real-life critical

struggles, to advance what is really a set of benefits that

are not part of our reality. There is nothing about gay


marriage that benefits my life today. It has nothing to do

with me whatsoever.”17

LGBT Economic and Cultural Trends, 1960s – 2000s

Dean Spade, an assistant professor of law at Seattle

University, suggests that the way the gay community came to

prioritize marriage reflects a broader shift in politics

away from an approach that looks at larger structural

issues. “In the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s, there

were a lot of questions being asked about what oppression is

and how to solve it. People were thinking about how

policing, in general, impacts black communities in the U.S.,

and the ways in which militarism is a part of U.S.

imperialism abroad, and how that reflects in the domestic

arena... As movements professionalize and upper class people

take the reins and set the agenda, a shift happens towards

an individual rights framework and what kinds of major

structural changes would have to happen to make it so that

people have what they need.”18

17 Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E, 2010.18 Ibid.


Historian Christina Hanhardt explains that the difference

between 1960 and 2006 was that in 1960 there were still many

laws on the books criminalizing sodomy which affected gay

men across race and class although not evenly enforced.19

And laws against lewdness, vagrancy, and cross dressing were

targeted a wide range of gender non-conforming people so

that an imagined connection existed between many of those

arrested at the Stonewall Inn.20 By 2000 private acts of

anti sodomy had been decriminalized and lewdness and

vagrancy laws were almost exclusively used against poor

queers of color dissolving that imagined solidarity and

setting the stage for white middle class gays and lesbians

to dissociate themselves from the issues of poor queers of

color. So we saw the rise of LGBT groups with

assimilationist politics even working together with anti-

crime groups in NYC to clean up the historically Gay West

Village of the young queers of color who used that

neighborhood to cruise and hook up . While in the 1960s it


was still politically salient to argue that crime and

poverty were linked and structural solutions were sought,

by 2000 “crime” was seen as result of unhealthy kinships and

intimate relations. Mainstream LGBT people and groups began

creating coalitions with other white and middle class

gentrifying groups in the formerly Gay West Village were

most gay business had been gentrified out of existence to

create safe streets by getting rid of the same constituency

that had lead the Stonewall Rebellion, queer street kids and

outlaws. This effort to “clean up” the village of those

unsavory street people also lead to the formation of another

radical queer group FIERCE (Fabulous Educated Radicals for

Community Empowerment) organized to fight against the

gentrifying middle class straights and gays. It was these

very quality of life policing tactics that were targeted at

queer youth of color in Greenwich Village that were the of

the larger policing tactics of NYC that have ignited the

new civil rights movement of today.21

19 Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence,2013.20 Ibid pg. 5.21 Ibid pg. 4.


Others like Sarah Schulman point to the AIDS epidemic as one

of the reasons the gay community has become so

assimilationist seeking rights like gay marriage and the

right to be in the military prior to seeking the right to

protection in the workplace. She argues “"Our intense

desire to be accepted, and hence- hopefully- defended, is a

consequence of AIDS trauma: our collective memory of being

discarded and abandoned to die like our friends before

us.”22

And she argues becoming a more assimilationist community and

movement end up making us more vulnerable instead of more

powerful.

"The consequence of these marginalizations on our collective

consequences are significant politically as well as

psychologically. If, at the start of the AIDS crisis, in

1981, we had been divided into privatized family units,

instead of constituted as a community, as consumers instead

of activists, with leaders hand-selected by the networks,

22 Carolyn D’Cruz and Mark Pendleton, Editors. After Homosexual: The Legacies of Gay Liberation, UWA Publishing pg. 168.


and dependent on cable TV and Entertainment Weekly to learn

about AIDS, we would never have been able to respond to the

epidemic as effectively as we did. ...in the liberation

years we knew that we were misrepresented, and therefore

built a vibrant LGBT press, literature and activist direct-

action groups that forced AIDS in the spotlight." 23

Marriage as Economic Institution for Intimate Care and Domestic Work

Lisa Duggan believes that the focus on the individual and

the family is rooted in the neoliberal economic model that

pushes privatization in many arenas. “The kind of social

supports that were put in place between the ‘30s and the

‘70s have eroded since the ‘80s,” she observes. “If you have

fewer services and fewer benefits provided by your

employment and fewer services provided by the state, the

slack gets taken up by private households. All these costs,

as they’re cut away from the state and corporations [get]

moved to the private household. There’s a strong ideological

23 Ibid. pg. 189 .


push to make family, marriage, and the private household the

proper, moral place to do this kind of social support.”24

Idealizing marriage is a way of making the institution of

marriage seem like this is the institution where social

support should happen. It's idealized as really the best

place to take care of elderly people, take care of sick

people, bear the cost of raising children. All these costs

then as they're cut away from the state and they're reduced

in corporations and they're moved to the private household,

there's a strong ideological push to make the family, and

marriage, and the private household seem to be the proper,

sanctified, moral and good place to do all of this kind of

social support. But most people are unaware of this

connection between gay marriage and economic issues.

Marriage Is A Tool Of Anti-Black Racism

Dean Spade and Craig Willse further point out the connection

between racism and marriage. They argue that since the

founding of the U.S regulating family formations has been

24 Lisa Dettmer, Beyond Gay Marriage audio documentary, KPFA/ RP&E, 2010.


key to racism and violence. For example during slavery the

family ties of slaves were regulated to create the best

economic interest of the slave holder to ensure that

children would be enslaved and to be able to continue to

maintain black people as property. This continued after

emancipation when the government coerced marriage among

newly freed black people and criminalized adultery as one

way to recapture them and put them into a convict lease

system. After Brown v. Board of Education, which challenged

formal, legal segregation, illegitimacy laws became a

favored way to exclude Black children from programs and

services. We can see how even today Black families are

portrayed as pathological and criminal in academic research

and social policy based on marriage rates which was most

famously and overtly depicted in the Moynihan Report.

“Anti-poor and anti-Black discourse and policymaking frame

poverty as a result of the lack of marriage in Black

populations. Clinton’s 1996 dismantling of welfare

programs,25 which disproportionately harmed Black families,

25 http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/rules/legislation/pdfs/pl_104-193.pdf.


was justified by an explicit discourse about poverty

resulting from unmarried parenthood. Under both President

George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, “Health Marriage

Promotion”26 initiatives have been used to encourage low-

income women to marry, including at times through cash

incentives. Demonizing, managing and controlling Black

people by applying racist and sexist marital family norms to

justify both brutal interventions and “benign neglect” has a

long history in the US and remains standard fare.”

Government Policy Punishes Single Mothers

Priya Kandaswamy, an assistant professor of women’s studies

at Mills College, argues that government policies that

punish single mothers and promote a heterosexual two-parent

family were enacted to control the lives of people of color

in particular, and are part of a larger political and

structural shift that the mainstream gay movement is

unconsciously incorporating into its politics.

26 http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/ 2005/0105olson.html.


“In the mid ‘90s, when the U.S. welfare system was

dramatically reorganized, the image of single, black mothers

with bad family values was frequently invoked to justify

cutting assistance to working class people in this country.

So, when the same-sex marriage movement takes up this same

language of ‘good families are two-parent families,’ i.e.

families that have a certain kind of economic status, they

are implicitly reinforcing our assumptions about what it

means to be in a single-parent family or a family that is

not as economically well off.”27

These government policies, Kandaswamy argues, were similar

to the Christian right ideology, which “constantly invokes

the idea of marriage as foundational to the family and to

the nation. It’s striking when gays and lesbians start to

use the same language and says a lot about who they are

trying to appeal to.”

The Bush administration continued the Clinton era emphasis

on portraying marriage as a was out of poverty. Tommy



Thomson HHS Secretary said the Bush administration plan

“puts a new emphasis on marriage.” The rationale he

presents: “Children living in single parent households are

on average 5 times more likely to be poor, 2-3 times more

likely to use drugs, experience educational, health and

emotional problems and be victims of abuse. Thus, it is

simply common sense to redirect our policies to encourage

the formation and maintenance of healthy marriages.”28

Kandaswamy says the idea that marriage is a solution is

nothing new. “The welfare reform law that was passed in 1996

starts with the proclamation that marriage is a foundation

of a successful society. And goes on then to create

mandatory work requirements, to put a lifetime limit on

certain forms of public assistance, to deny assistance to

certain populations. And I think that that statement,

though, that marriage is a foundation of a successful

society, is often echoed in what advocates of same sex

marriage say.”

28 2002 NPR report recoding can be heard at http://reimaginerpe.org/rpe/radio/dettmer.


Lisa Duggan also tracks the origins of gay marriage advocacy

to a similar constellation of issues. “So when the same sex

marriage movement then starts to come into really prominence

in the 1990s, a lot of the rhetoric of saying marriage is so

important, marriage is a sign of our full adulthood,

marriage is how we show we're responsible, marriage is the

key to citizenship, that kind of language adds to marriage

promotion of the conservative marriage movement and ends up

promoting privatized marriage, private households as the

site for social support to the neglect or disadvantage of

collective social supports.”

Priya Kandaswamy echoes the critique that the strategy is a

dangerous concession to the right. “So, when the gay

marriage uses a discourse of family values, what they're

doing is implicitly invoking the same set of ideas around

family. When one says that gay and lesbian families deserve

citizenship rights because they are families that are just

like the normative two-parent, white, suburban, heterosexual

family, what they're arguing is that other people whose


families don't conform to those models don't deserve those

rights. That idea has been manifested in US welfare policy—

to very violent ends, in fact. And so, I think that's a very

dangerous claim for the marriage movement to make.”

In California, domestic partnerships, which already existed

were created to have the same benefits as marriage. But

groups leading the fight knew that all along. For example,

Kate Kendal, the executive director of National Center of

Lesbian Rights said “ There are very few actual formal

legal differences between domestic partner benefits and the

protections that couples get under state law from couples

who are married under state law.”

Family Is More than Marriage

In the 70s and 80s when as feminists we were fighting for

the right for our female friendships to be valued and for a

new definition of what family is. Today, people live in all

kinds of family relationships especially queer people who

aren’t married and don’t have children. Priya Kandaswamy

says for these reasons, it is dangerous to talk about


marriage as the only way that relationships and families are

validated.

Priya Kandaswamy: “In other words, when we say that marriage

is a human right and it is fundamental to our existence,

what are we saying about people who don't want to get

married, or people who aren't married, or about families

that are not organized through marriage? Arguing that

marriage is a human right elevates marriage over all other

forms of relationships. Similarly, the idea that marriage is

a foundation of a good nation sounds a lot like conservative

family values discourse. The Christian right is constantly

invoking the idea of marriage as foundational to the family,

as foundational to the nation. It is striking when gay and

lesbians start to use that same language, and it really, I

think, says a lot about who they are trying to appeal to and

who they see their constituency as. “

Race and Class in the LGBT Movement

Some believe that it is the race and class divisions within

the LGBT movement that lead to single issue policies like


gay marriage. “The landscape of LGBT organizations is pretty

polarized,” says Duggan. “There are national organizations—

basically structured around private fundraising—which have

prioritized marriage equality. They don’t have

constituencies, they’re not grassroots, they don’t mobilize.

And, they tend to be dominated by prosperous white people.

Many grassroots organizations, usually locally based, have a

different structure and different politics. In New York

City, queer groups predominantly made up of people of color,

such as the Audre Lorde Project, Queers for Economic

Justice, and FIERCE, tend to prioritize around poverty,

racism, immigration, health care, retirement, and violence

on the street.”

One of these more grassroots organizations is Queers for

Economic Justice in New York City. This group closed 2 years

ago … It was a non-profit that promotes economic justice in

the context of sexual and gender liberation. Kenyon Farrow

is the executive director, she sees problems with the impact

of gay marriage on poor people. Kenyon Farrow : “The effect


of gay marriage on the rest of us who are working on other

issues in queer spaces is huge. There are funders who want

to only fund marriage, or people working on access to

military service, or any of those number of things. The way

it usually gets framed to us, as grassroots organizations,

is 'Well, we don't know what impact you're really having, or

what impact you're really going to have. So, if you're not

working on a very specific and narrow policy change but

you're doing more work that's building a grassroots base to

do organizing,' and among marginalized queer communities,

like Queers for Economic Justice, and working with a lot of

queer and trans homeless people for whom the groundwork to

do that kind of organizing and advocacy, or even creating

policy solutions that folks are interested in takes a much

longer time.”

Health and Housing Loses to Marriage

Critics of the gay marriage movement believe that it has

taken funding away from other critical needs for queer

people. Leslie Ewing, who worked from 2004-08 at San


Francisco’s Lyon-Martin Health Care, the only freestanding

community clinic in California providing health care

specifically to trans, lesbian, and bisexual women, notes

that she was often unable to get funding for issues

affecting poor lesbians and transpeople from those same

funders who were more than happy to fund gay marriage. “As a

queer community, we have to look at issues that affect all

of us, not just some of us,” she argues, “and not just

issues that are lucrative for fundraising... People who have

inheritance, people who are concerned about property values

are writing the checks to keep this issue on the front

burner.”

Brian Bassinger, executive director of the San Francisco

AIDS Housing Coalition, which works with homeless and low-

income people with AIDS, claims that “the gay marriage

movement took the air out of the AIDS movement, as well as

the funding. While we as a community were fighting for gay

marriage, the Governor decimated the state’s Office of

AIDS!”


When Bassinger heard that $43 million were spent on

Proposition 8, which he feels was “such a narrow agenda for

such a small part of the population,” he was livid because

“at the same time, they were cutting $85 million in HIV/AIDS

care in the state of California. They eliminated funding for

housing, including residential care facilities for the

chronically ill.” But the response in the LGBT community was

negligible.

Bassinger and his partner are both HIV positive and on

disability funding. If they were to get married they would

lose their SSI and SSDI benefits. And his situation is not

uncommon.

“The majority of people with HIV and AIDS in San Francisco

are living in extreme poverty,” says Bassinger. “There’s

this mythology that gay men are wealthy. The reality is that

gay men living in poverty are twice the national average. We

are poor. And poor people see marriage equality as a middle

class and upper class issue.”


Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a long time queer activist who now

works in housing rights in San Francisco, argues “If we as a

movement are not going to be fighting for housing and jobs,

food, and basic essentials like health care, then I’m not

sure what we stand for as a movement.”

“According to a study done by the National Lesbian and Gay

Task Force in conjunction with the National Coalition of

Homelessness, 45-50 percent of homeless youth in America are

queer or trans,” Mecca points out. “In San Francisco, the

number is considered to be about 30 percent. Now, those

numbers are way above what is considered the percentage of

queers in the population, i.e. 10 percent. And that’s scary.

I think that that should be a wake-up call for our movement,

but it hasn’t been.”

“What happens when queers move into the halls of power?”

Tommi Avicolli Mecca: “I think that a lot of the mainstream

gay movement has not addressed this issue is because I think

that a lot of the people who have gotten into power, from

the queer community, are not people who see this as their


issue. Especially here in SF, the people who have gotten

into city hall, the people who have gotten the jobs in city

hall, and the department of health and a lot of the service

provision, are what we call ‘A-Gays.’ They are people who

are making maybe a three-digit salary, or close to a three-

digit salary. They are living in very comfortable

surroundings. They are not worried about losing their

housing, they eat well, they have health care, so I think

for them, the reality of the people who live not far from

city hall, in fact, the tenderloin is right near city hall,

surrounds city hall, they don’t see that need. And for them,

the issue is wanting to get married, or wanting to become a

homeowner, because in SF it’s really difficult to become a

homeowner because there’s not a whole lot of affordable

housing available for people to buy. So they are looking at

it from their class perspective, and from their class

perspective, those are the issues.


“Can a gay movement which is run by one class, really serve the needs of another?”

Tommi Avicolli Mecca: “The people who are on the advantaged

side of the class divide are not going to really see the

concerns of the people who are on the other side, as being

their concerns or as even being important. And at times I

think they pay lip service and at times I think at times, at

Christmas time, Thanksgiving, you see these folks coming to

the food program where I volunteer, and volunteering and

bringing the big bag of old cans of beans and corn out of

their closets that have been sitting their for 17 years, and

that soothes their conscience. So they think they’re doing

something, but they’re not. That’s not what poor people

need. They don’t need your old cans of corn. What they need

is living wage jobs, they need decent housing, they need

universal health care, they need services. They basically

need the same things that we all need, it’s just that for

the ‘A-gays,’ the ‘a-gays’ have achieved this stuff and it’s

on the backs of the radical queers movement. Because it was

the radical queer movement of the early 70s that created the


atmosphere and the acceptance that these people now take

advantage of, and enjoy.

Gay Marriage Advocates

Of course, many LGBT people do want equality and are

actively fighting for gay marriage. Andrea Shorter is the

Deputy Marriage and Coalitions Director for Equality

California. She says that marriage is very significant to

her on a personal level.

Andrea Shorter: It’s really about potential. See, I believe

that when you are holding people back, and you keep them in

a state of a second-class status, we know that through human

history that we lesson people’s opportunity to really give

themselves, and really be a full partner in our communities.

If I get up every day, I go to work, I pay my taxes, I

should be able to go to the clerk's office like anyone else,

in a city hall, with a woman that I love and say, 'We are

ready to make a contract, a commitment, and as citizens in

the state of California, as citizens in the United States

under Constitutional law,’ I should be able to do that.


“I know that one of the perceptions of the issue of marriage

is that it's a luxury issue for white gay folks, and middle

class, upper middle class folks. I don't agree with that.

I'm an African-American lesbian, but I am aware of the

perception. I'm also aware of the perception that

predominates popular notions of who is LGBT. And what I mean

by that is that again, it's gay, white folk.”

Why White?

For Joseph DeFilippis the mainstream LGBT movement is

deliberately fostering the image of the gay movement as

white and middle class because that serves its own interest.

Joseph DeFilippis: In the 80s there were these surveys

done, in magazines like the Advocate and they found this

information out as the result of the surveys of the

readership that has been widely circulated for 20 years now

which is that we tend to be white, double income, no

children, with you know, disposable income. And the fact

that women weren’t subscribing and trans folks weren’t

subscribing, and poor people weren’t subscribing was


completely lost in this mythology. The mythology was

completely put forward by our movement, by our leaders,

because they were trying to flex this newfound political

muscle that they were developing, and as AIDS was mobilizing

many people in our community, this became a tool, with which

we could go to politicians, go to corporations, and say ‘you

better pay attention to us, our needs, we vote, we shop and

we have power.’ And so it became this myth that has become

internalized and has been used against us, frankly, by the

right. Which has characterized almost all of our battles,

they’ve characterized in the work that they do as a bunch of

spoiled white privileged people who already have lots of

rights and why are they fighting for special additional

rights?

“And nowhere in these discussions were a butch, Black dyke

who just got out of prison and is trying to find a job. That

is not how our community is depicted. The most that is

depicted with regards to poverty in our community is the

issue of young people being kicked out of their homes for


being queer or running away from home because they’ve been

abused.”

Cooptation by the Right

Urvashi Vaid, the author of Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race,

Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics points out that the

intersectional organizing for peace and justice led by

lesbians and feminists has been derailed into a struggle for

legal recognition that puts the LGBT movement in alliance

with the most conservative economic forces in the country.

In the book she explores what it means to be in alliance

with the Koch Brothers, who are supportive of gay rights and

who hosted a fundraiser for Republican politicians who

supported gay rights in New York State. “One of the things

that disturbs me so much is that, in the politics of our

time, the consensus that we are supposed to build is with

the right wing, and not with other progressive forces. Not

with one another. And that is disturbing to me.

Pragmatically speaking, many gay rights wins in state

legislatures have been won by appealing to moderate and


conservative Republicans. We’ve gotten a few of them on our

side because they have gay kids, or because somebody

prominent in the state who’s a gay Republican donor got

involved and made it safe for them (to also become

involved).”29

Marriage is a Tool of colonialism.

In their article on “Marriage Will Never Set Us Free” Dean

Spade and Craig Willse look at how colonization utilizes

notions of sexuality and gender.30 They say: “Colonization

often casts invasion as rescuing colonized populations from

their backward gender and family systems. Forcing indigenous

people to comply with European norms of gender, sexuality

and family structure and punishing them for not doing so has

been a key tool of US settler colonialism in North America.

Marriage has been an important tool of land theft and ethnic

cleansing aimed at disappearing indigenous people in many

ways. The US encouraged westward settlement by promising

29 Urvaishi Vaid, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics and Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation .Published by: off our backs, inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20835389.30 Dean Spade & Craig Willse Marriage Will Never Set Us Free., Organizing http://Organizing Upgrade.com, September 2013


male settlers 160 acres to move west, plus an extra 160 if

they married and brought a wife. At the same time, the US

criminalized traditional indigenous communal living styles,

burning longhouses where indigenous people lived communally,

eliminating communal landholding methods, and enforcing male

individual ownership. Management of gender and family

systems was and is essential to displacement and settlement

processes. Enforcing gender norms in boarding schools as

part of a ‘civilizing mission,’ and removing children from

native communities through a variety of programs that

persist today are key tools of ethnic cleansing and

settlement in the US.”

Pinkwashing

In it’s extreme form, gay assimilationism has enabled

contemporary imperialism to engage in “pinkwashing”

(covering up imperial aggression through marketing and

political strategies aimed at promoting a product or an

entity through an appeal to queer-friendliness.) As Jaspir

Puar has pointed out in her 2007 monograph31 and in a more

recent article32 the Israeli government has created public


relations campaign to alter public perception of Israel as

"militaristic and religious" and promote it instead as a

"modern democracy", a "safe and secured place for

investment", and a "tourist destination with the sun and the

sand for gay tourists” because of its supposedly gay

friendly laws and atmosphere.

Puar characterizes this, and a related cluster of gay

actions that support conservative political agendas as

Homonationalism. For Puar homonationalism undergirds U.S.

imperial structures through an embrace of a sexually

progressive multiculturalism justifying foreign

intervention. Puar critiques the deployment of

homonationalism in the United States as a justification for

violently implementing the doctrine of American

exceptionalism embodied in the War on Terror. Puar argues

that like Israel the United States flaunts its supposedly

liberal openness to homosexuality to create an identity that

is in contradistinction to sexual oppression in Muslim

31 Jaspir, Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, 2007.32Jaspir, Puar, Rethinking Homonationalism Int. J. Middle East Stud. 45, 2013.


countries. This so called oppression then serves as an

excuse for the United States to “liberate” oppressed women

and sexual deviants in these countries, simultaneously

papering over sexual inequality in the United States.

Marriage is a tool of xenophobia and immigration enforcement.

Spade and Willsa argue that “From its origins, US

immigration law has put in place mechanisms for regulating

those migrants it does allow in, always under threat of

deportation, and labeling other migrants “undesirable” to

both make them more exploitable by their bosses and easier

to purge. Keeping out poor people, people with stigmatized

health issues, and people of color have been urgent national

priorities. Marriage has been one of the key valves of that

control. The Page Act of 1875, for example, sought to keep

out Asian women, hoping to prevent Asian laborers in the US

from reproducing, but allowed the immigration of Asian

merchants’ wives. Marriage continues to be a deeply unjust

tool of immigration control in the US, with marital family

ties being one of the few pathways to immigration. One


impact of this system is that it keeps people stuck in

violent and harmful sexual and family relationships because

their immigration status depends on it.”33

Does Gay Marriage Reduce Homophobia?

Some in the gay marriage movement admit that gay marriage

may not benefit many queers especially those who are singe

or without property but they argue that raising the issue of

gay marriage has helped has helped reduce homophobia

generally, but DeFilippis disagrees.

Joseph DeFilippis: “When homophobia is your only target

then the removal of homophobia will only benefit the people

for whom that was the only issue facing them. If you’re

homeless and you’re a person of color, and a person of color

who is an immigrant, and you’re queer, getting rid of

homophobia tomorrow doesn’t change the immigration battles

you have, or the racism you have to contend with, or the

struggles to have to pay for your apartment.

33 Dean Spade & Craig Willse Marriage Will Never Set Us Free., Organizing http://Organizing Upgrade.com, September 2013


“If you look at the generation of today, if you look at the

attitudes of 20-year-old gay people versus 60 year olds,

it’s just a cultural shift that is happening and to credit

it all to gay marriage I think is ridiculous. To say that it

helped to expedite it a little, probably, but that doesn’t

justify the huge resources that have been poured into it,

the ways in which other more life and death issues were

utterly ignored. It doesn’t justify any of that in my mind.”

Is Fighting Homophobia Enough?

For DeFilippis, fighting only against homophobia is not

enough and, in some ways, it is racist. Joseph DeFilippis:

“I would say, absolutely, the mainstream gay movement is

racist. And I would say that racism takes many forms and

sometimes you are aware you’re being racist and most of the

times you are not. And that institutional racism is much

more potent and deadly than some individual person using

some racist epitaph, which is what they hear when they hear

things like ‘they are racist.’ They think it means that

you’re calling someone a ‘nigger.’ And, in fact, what it


means is that you are completely ignoring their lives, their

issues, their agendas, and you’re taking money away from the

funding of their lives, their issues and agendas to focus on

yours which you perceive as being much more important. You

perceive as being the ‘real’ work, not all of this ‘extra

stuff on the side,’ which is how our work is often dismissed

and I would call that racist. Yes.

Race and Marriage

Lisa Duggan argues that beyond the stereotypes, there’s

reason to believe fewer queers of color are even looking to

get married. Lisa Duggan: “The majority of the LGB

population is un-partnered. The majority—more than 50%. But

the white, wealthy gay men are the most partnered population

in California. And for instance, Black lesbians are the

least partnered and the most likely to have children. But if

you were looking at that data and wondering, what do our

constituencies really need? Marriage would not be at the top

of your list.”


Priya Kandaswamy, says a large percentage could not get the

material benefits gained through marriage, for a whole host

of reasons. Priya Kandaswamy: “There are certainly queers of

color who are interested in marriage, and who as individuals

would benefit in certain ways if they were given access to

the institution of marriage. However, if we think

structurally about the rights that people might get through

marriage, these rights are incredibly racially stratified.

For example, we can think about property rights. There are

queer people of color who stand to gain from the property

rights that marriage would bring them. However, the

allocation and organization of property in this country is

still really racially stratified. And the same is true for

healthcare through a spouse's employer. While certainly some

people of color might gain healthcare through a spouse's

employer through marriage rights, it is in fact true that

far more white people work in jobs that provide healthcare

through an employer than people of color do. So, if people

of color disproportionately don't get healthcare through

their employer, then people of color are disproportionately


not going to benefit from the right to healthcare through a

spouse's employer.”

Dean Spade: “And this is part of this theory that what the

law says is what matters, rather than whether or not people

have what they need to survive. If we were really concerned

about the survival and basic needs of queer and trans people

in California, our top priority would have been dealing with

immigration detention in California, and the violence

against queer and trans people, and the massive criminal

punishment system in California. But that's not the goal of

what this supposed movement is, right? The goals of the

marriage campaign are very narrowly about this formal legal

right. And the people who are the most vulnerable are

communities who could really stand to have some much more

urgent life and death issues dealt with. They're really

basically left out of the picture, and those issues don't

get the attention or the resources.”

“As the racial wealth divide grows in the United States,”

Spade continues, “you’ll have an agenda that’s going to


benefit the people with the most privilege. And the vast

majority of the people are certain to be left in the same or

a worse position because they don’t even have solidarity

with other people in their community anymore!”

Key Issues for the Queer Community

Kenyon Farrow, former executive director of Queers for

Economic Justice, a grassroots group in New York City,

believes that the queer community ought to be focusing on

issues that would go a long way towards protecting the lives

of queer and transgender folks. “I absolutely think housing

for poor, homeless, and low-income queer folks is a huge

issue for us, as is doing anti-violence work,” he says.

“HIV/AIDS is still a huge issue and [perhaps] more broadly,

the question of what the healthcare reform package means to

the LGBT community.”

Kandaswamy believes that if mainstream lesbian and gay

organizations are interested in working towards racial

justice, they need to take on issues like the criminal

justice system. “They should think about the fact that


people of color—including queer people of color—are

incarcerated at incredibly high rates in this country,” she

says. “They need to think about racist immigration policies

and racial disparities in economic security in this country.

Racial justice is not about bringing a few people into an

organization to represent the interests of queer people of

color. It’s about being willing to do political work that

betters the lives of queer people of color in all dimensions

of their lives.”

The consensus among marriage equality critics seems to be

that if we had taken the $43 million spent on the failed

Prop 8 effort and really invested it in a broader LGBT

social justice movement, we could have sustained a change

for all kinds of vulnerable people—such as, preventing new

HIV infections among young African Americans.

Supporting Diverse Forms of Relationship

Lisa Duggan is also part of an online group, “Beyond

Marriage” that advocates for recognizing a greater diversity

of households and partnerships.


Lisa Duggan: “We want domestic partnership and reciprocal

beneficiary for members of our community who don’t want to

or aren’t in a position to marry. We don’t want health care

and social security allocated through marriage. We want

universal benefits.”

Instead of marriage, Lisa Duggan says the concept known as

‘reciprocal beneficiaries’ is better way to imagine legal

partnerships.

“So that, for instance, the great thing about reciprocal

beneficiary is that it allows you to have a partnership with

someone with whom you do not claim to have a sexual

relationship. It could be your best friend or your sister.

And you could then get recognized for purposes of medical

decision-making and taxation and things like that.

Reciprocal beneficiary, actually exists in several states

and that form of recognition really takes the regulation of

sex away from the state altogether. “

Even Kate Kendal who fights for gay marriage with the

National Center of Lesbian Rights, says that marriage


shouldn’t be the only way relationships are protected. “You

shouldn't have to get married to have your relationship

protected, and you shouldn't lose benefits by getting

married. The ideal construct, from my perspective, would be

to have marriage have less of that psychic, cultural

importance. Have it be a religious ceremony for people who

want to have their union solemnized in a church, but for

everyone: gay, straight, older, younger, poor, rich—if you

want to have legal entwinement with each other, and

obligations, you're domestic partners, you're in a civil

union, you're reciprocal beneficiaries. But as a lesbian

legal advocate, until we have an equality of systems

available to all, marriage is how we best protect couples in

this culture. And until that changes, that has to be a

fight.”

In the national movement, we’re very much still engaged in

trying to get ourselves recognized in the law. And I’m not

denying the value of that. I understand that our rights have

to be written into the law in order to be protected by it.


But what I’m saying is that being written into the law, in a

way, brings with it a bunch of other problems. We’re bought

into a system of compliance with the law when we really need

to be talking about how to use the law to restructure power

in this country. So there’s a disconnect sometimes between

the issues that are important to people on the ground and

what the mainstream organizations are fighting for.

But if you look at the legal organizations that are actually

representing clients, like the immigration groups or the

transgender groups, those groups are very much involved in

these bread-and butter issues and the economic justice

issues, and access to services and denials to services and

fighting criminalization.

So marriage equality has dominated the headlines and it was

a conversation that everybody was talking about. But the far

less sexy issue of how many gay people and transgender

people are unemployed didn’t dominate the headlines. It’s

also harder to address.


Although gay marriage is still the issue that most of the

media and mainstream voices from the LGBT community continue

to amplify and highlight—there are plenty of queers who are

challenging that agenda by dedicating their lives to

issues that affect the poor and disenfranchised members of

our communities.

Kenyon Farrow feels now is the time to re-orient the LGBT

movement to more fundamental issues. “This is a moment where

the agenda may be changed, but it won't be changed by the

organizations that are pushing the mainstream agenda. I

actually think they have painted themselves into a corner,

because they've been so narrow in their focus. And from

everything I hear from talking to civil rights

organizations, to economic justice organizations, to labor

movements and what have you, they have succeeded in ticking

off a lot of organizations by . . . people have felt very

used by many of the mainstream organizations. And as soon as

the mainstream organizations got what they wanted out of

them, they walked. Said that they wanted to build bridges


and work with civil rights organizations and communities of

color, with labor, with women's organizations—all of whom

I've heard a range of things from lately—who've all felt

that the mainstream LGBT organizations approached them, got

what they wanted, and then they walked. And they never got

another call again about anything that the other groups on

the other side wanted, and needed their support around. So,

I think it's a good time to strategically begin to build

better relationships, and relationships of integrity, with

those kinds of organizations that are interested in working

with queer organizations, but have been burned by the

mainstream agenda. And I think we can begin to advance a

different kind of queer agenda.”34

Where Do We Go from Here?

Now that in the majority of states and for the bulk of the

population in the U.S. same-sex marriage is now legal, even

groups that were heavily invested in the marriage fight are

setting their sites on new goals. The Human Rights Campaign

35 has laid out an ambitious agenda of civil rights



protections for people based on their sexual orientation and

gender identity, including employment housing, and

education. The Center for American Progress, a mainstream

liberal group that works on many issues other than gay

rights has also advocated for shifting the focus to issues

such as protecting workers, immigration reform, youth

homelessness, and health disparities.36

In a 2013 article published in The Nation magazine,37 three

LGBT rights advocates, including Lisa Duggan reflect on

where the LGBT movement in the U.S. should be heading on

post-supreme court rulings favoring gay marriage.

In a 2013 interview with the Newspaper Street Spirit Urvashi

Vaid analyzes the strengths and weakness of gay marriage as

a means for building a movement for seep structural change.

38 35 http://www.hrc.org/campaigns/beyond-marriage-equality-a-blueprint-for-federal-non-discrimination-protect36 https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/report/2013/07/09/69047/whats-next-for-lgbt-equality/37 Urvashi Vaid, Lisa Duggan, Tamara Metz and Amber Hollibaugh, What's Next for the LGBT Movement? June 27, 2013 -http://www.thenation.com/blog/175015/whats-next-lgbt-movement38 Urvashi Vaid, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics


There are many alternatives to marriage being created. Many

different family structures and living arrangements are

popping up all over. Co-housing arrangements often combining

Queers and straights and self sustainable urban farms. And

radical sexual outlaws like the queer Fairies or feminist

women’s land is still caring on traditions of the past

transformed with those new practices of the present and

future. More single people enjoying solitude, and many

people reinventing concepts of community beyond the

virtual even in these post-modern times. Hundreds of others

queer and feminist activists and scholars are dedicating

their lives to challenging the neoliberal discourse and

making our communities more focused on the needs and lives

of queers of color and women, homeless and imprisoned

queers, and queers with AIDS, and are working to making the

whole queer community truly part of our family. Almost a

decade ago the National Gay And Lesbian Task for resisted

our workshop title that linked gay marriage with racism .

now even liberal institutions are challenging the focus on

marriage and the military because of the pressure of radical


activists and ordinary people who felt their lives were not

being represented . Change is happening. While we may not

be that visible yet , we’ll are continue to fight for a new

vision… just beneath the radar.


Afterword

In 1980, I wrote a paper for a history class at Earlham

College about how marriage as we now know it—defined as

romantic relationships between two persons—was not the

primary purpose or understanding of marriage prior to the

1900’s. I asserted that historically, marriage was not an

affective relation but was primarily an economic

relationship in a world that was often homosocial.39 My

paper was not accepted because the professor felt my thesis

was not historically accurate. In the era of compulsory

heterosexuality in which I was living then, this rejection

seemed a direct outcome of the rampant homophobia in the

educational system.

In addition to imposing compulsory heterosexuality, dissent

was squelched in the defense of heteropatriachy40 and more

broadly the educational system was used to “legitimize

39 Definitiion of Homosocial: J. Childers/G. Hentzi eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York 1995) p. 13840 “The academy is a place of transformation, of incitement to learning of disobedience. Yes, it is here and now a heteropatriarchal institution.” Tamsin Wilton, Lesbian Studies: Setting An Agenda, Routledge NYC, 1995


notions of Manifest Destiny and foundational mythologies of

settler colonialism and exceptional democracy.”41

Nonetheless, this suppression of dissent has been punctuated

by attempts by scholars to challenge and subvert that

tendency especially within disciplines that grew out of the

movements of the 1960s: Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and

now Queer Studies.42 None of those disciplines existed at

Earlham in 1980 when I was attempting to graduate. With

the submission of this paper, I now I get a chance to

demonstrate that contested knowledge can occasionally be

accepted into the academy.

41 Chatterjee and Maira, Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Imperial University; 2014 ) 42 Tamsin Wilton Lesbian Studies: Setting An Agenda, Routledge NYC


Beyond Gay Marriage; Assimilation within the Queer community

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