It's hard for us to believe what we're hearing these
days. Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want
a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is
continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to
be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed
black men and bashing queers, and gays want more
policing. More and more Americans are suffering and
dying because they can't get decent health care, and
gays want weddings. What happened to us? Where have
our communities gone? Did gays really sell out that
easily?
As young queer people raised in queer families and
communities, we reject the liberal gay agenda that
gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality.
The queer families and communities we are proud to
have been raised in are nothing like the ones
transformed by marriage equality. This agenda
fractures our communities, pits us against natural
allies, supports unequal power structures, obscures
urgent queer concerns, abandons struggle for mutual
sustainability inside queer communities and disregards
our awesomely fabulous queer history.
Children of queers have a serious stake in this. The
media sure thinks so, anyway. The photographs
circulated after San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's
2004 decision to marry gay couples at City Hall show
men exchanging rings with young children strapped to
their chests and toddlers holding their moms' hands as
city officials lead them through vows. As Newsom runs
for governor these images of children and their newly
married gay parents travel with him, supposedly
expressing how deeply Newsom cares about families:
keeping them together, ensuring their safety, meeting
their needs. These photos, however, obscure very real
aspects of his political record that have torn
families apart: his disregard for affordable housing,
his attacks on welfare, his support for increased
policing and incarceration that separate parents from
children and his new practice of deporting minors
accused – not convicted – of crimes. As young people
with queer parents we are not proud of the "family
values" politic put forth by these images and the
marriage equality campaign. We don't want gay marriage
activism conducted in our name – we realize that it's
hurting us, not helping us.
We think long-term monogamous partnerships are valid
and beautiful ways of structuring and experiencing
family, but we don't see them as any more inherently
valuable or legitimate than the many other family
structures. We believe in each individual and family's
right to live their queer identity however they find
meaningful or necessary, including when that means
getting married. However, the consequences of the
fight for legal inclusion in the marriage structure
are terrifying. We're seeing queer communities
fractured as one model of family is being hailed and
accepted as the norm, and we are seeing queer families
and communities ignore and effectively work against
groups who we see as natural allies, such as immigrant
families, poor families, and families suffering from
booming incarceration rates. We reject the idea that
any relationship based on love should have to register
with the state. Marriage is an institution used
primarily to consolidate privilege, and we think real
change will only come from getting rid of a system
that continually doles out privilege to a few more,
rather than trying to reform it. We know that most
families, straight or gay, don't fit in with the
standards for marriage, and see many straight families
being penalized for not conforming to the standard the
government has set: single moms trying to get on
welfare, extended family members trying to gain
custody, friends kept from being each other's legal
representatives. We have far more in common with those
straight families than we do with the kinds of gay
families that would benefit from marriage. We are
seeing a gay political agenda become single-issue to
focus on marriage and leave behind many very serious
issues such as social, economic, and racial justice.
How the marriage agenda is leaving behind awesome
queer history.
We're seeing the marriage equality agenda turn its
back on a tradition of queer activism that began with
Stonewall and other fierce queer revolts and that
continued through the AIDS crisis. Equality California
keeps on sending us videos of big, happy, gay
families, and they're making us sick: gay parents
pushing kids on swings, gay parents making their kids'
lunches, the whole gay family safe inside the walls of
their own homes. Wait a second, is it true? It's as if
they've found some sort of magical formula: once you
have children, your life instantly transforms into a
scene of domestic bliss, straight out of a 1950's
movie. The message is clear. Instead of dancing,
instead of having casual sex, instead of rioting, all
of the "responsible" gays have gone and had children.
And now that they've had children, they won't be
bothering you at all anymore. There's an implicit
promise that once gays get their rights, they'll
disappear again. Once they can be at home with the
kids, there's no reason for them to be political,
after all!
Listening to this promise, we're a bit stunned.
Whoever said domesticity wasn't political? Wasn't it
just a few years ago that the feminists taught us that
the personal is political? That cooking, cleaning,
raising children and putting in countless hours of
physical, emotional, and intellectual labor should not
mean withdrawing from the public sphere or
surrendering your political voice? After all, we were
raised by queers who created domestic lives that were
always politically engaged, who raised kids and raised
hell at the same time. What makes Equality California
think that an official marriage certificate is going
to make us any less loud and queer? Oh wait. We
remember. It's that sneaky thing about late liberal
capitalism: its promise of formal rights over real
restructuring, of citizenship for those who can
participate in the state's economic plan over economic
justice for all. Once you have your formal rights
(like a marriage license), you can participate in the
market economy and no longer need a political voice.
Looking around at the world we live in, we're
unconvinced.
We're also seeing another alarming story surface: If
gays are ready to get married and have children, the
AIDS crisis must be over! Gay men shaped up after AIDS
hit, or at least the smart ones did. Those responsible
enough to survive realized that they wanted children,
and promptly settled down into relationships that were
monogamous and that, presumably, carried no risk of
HIV contraction. Come on. We reject all the moralizing
about parenthood, responsibility, and sexual practice
that goes on in this story. Besides the obvious fact
that the AIDS crisis is not over, in the US or abroad,
we realize that parenthood and non-monogamy aren't
mutually exclusive. The gay marriage movement wants us
to believe that you need a sperm donor or an adoption
agency to have children, but we know that there are
more ways to make queer families than any of us can
imagine. We refuse the packaged and groomed history
that writes out the many HIV+ individuals in our lives
and communities who are living healthily, loving in
monogamous and non-monogamous relationships and
raising children. We challenge our queer communities
to remember our awesomely radical history of building
families and raising children in highly political,
inventive, and non-traditional ways.
How marriage equality fractures our community and pits
us against our strongest allies.
We believe that the argument for gay marriage obscures
the many structural, social, and economic forces that
break families apart and take people away from their
loved ones. Just for starters, there's the explosion
in incarceration levels, national and international
migration for economic survival, deportation,
unaffordable housing, and lack of access to drug
rehabilitation services. The argument for gay marriage
also ignores the economic changes and cuts to social
services that make it nearly impossible for families
to stay together and survive: welfare cuts, fewer
after school programs, less public housing, worse
medical care, not enough social workers, failing
schools, the economic crisis in general.
We choose solidarity with immigrant families whom the
state denies legal recognition and families targeted
by prisons, wars, and horrible jobs. We reject the
state violence that separates children from parents
and decides where families begin and end, drawing
lines of illegality through relationships. We see this
as part of a larger effort on the part of the state to
control our families and relationships in order to
preserve a system that relies on creating an
underclass deprived of security in order to ensure
power for a few. We know that everyone has a complex
identity, and that many queer families face separation
due to one or more of the causes mentioned here, now
or in the future. We would like to see our queer
community recognize marriage rights as a short-term
solution to the larger problem of the government's
disregard for the many family structures that exist.
As queers, we need to take an active role in exposing
and fighting the deeper sources of this problem. We
won't let the government decide what does and does not
constitute a family.
The way that the marriage agenda phrases its argument
about healthcare shows just how blind it is to the
needs of the queer community. It has adopted marriage
as a single-issue agenda, making it seem like the
queer community's only interest in healthcare is in
the inclusion of some members of two person
partnerships in the already exclusive healthcare
system. Health care is a basic human right to which
everyone is entitled, not one that should be extended
through certain kinds of individual partnerships. We
know this from queer history, and if we forget it, we
will continue to let our community live in danger. The
question of universal healthcare is urgent to queers
because large groups of people inside our communities
face incredible difficulty and violence receiving
medical care, such as trans people who seek hormone
treatment or surgery, people who are HIV positive, and
queer and trans youth who are forced to live on the
street. Instead of equalizing access to health care,
marriage rights would allow a small group of people
who have partnered themselves in monogamous
configurations to receive care. If we accept the
marriage agenda's so-called solution, we'll leave out
most of our community.
Perhaps because the gay marriage movement has
forgotten about the plurality and diversity of queer
communities and queer activism, it has tried to gloss
over its shortcomings by appropriating the struggles
of other communities. We reject the notion that "gay
is the new black," that the fight for marriage
equality is parallel to the fight for civil rights,
that queer rights and rights for people of color are
mutually exclusive. We don't believe that fighting for
inclusion in marriage is the same as fighting to end
segregation. Drawing that parallel erases queer people
of color and makes light of the structural racism that
the civil rights movement fought against. The
comparison is made as if communities of color, and
black communities in particular, now enjoy structural
equality. We know that's not true. We would like to
see a queer community that, rather than appropriating
the narrative of the civil rights movement for its
marriage equality campaign, takes an active role in
exposing and protesting structural inequality and
structural racism.
Rather than choosing to fight the things that keep
structural racism intact, the liberal gay agenda has
chosen to promote them. The gay agenda continually
fights for increased hate crimes legislation that
would incarcerate and execute perpetrators of hate
crimes. We believe that incarceration destroys
communities and families, and does not address why
queer bashings happen. Increased hate crimes
legislation would only lock more people up. In a
country where entire communities are ravaged by how
many of their members get sent to jail, where prisons
are profit-driven institutions, where incarceration
only creates more violence, we won't accept anything
that promotes prison as a solution. Our communities
are already preyed upon by prisons – trans people, sex
workers, and street kids live with the constant threat
of incarceration. We believe that real, long-term
solutions are found in models of restorative and
transformative justice, and in building communities
that can positively and profoundly deal with violence.
We challenge our queer communities to confront what we
are afraid of rather than locking it up, and to join
members of our community and natural allies in
opposing anything that would expand prisons.
The gay marriage agenda also supports the expansion of
the army, seemingly forgetting about all of the ways
that the army creates and maintains violence and
power. The gay marriage agenda fights to abolish the
"don't ask don't tell" policy, promoting the
military's policy and seeking inclusion. We've thought
long and hard about this, and we can't remember liking
anything that the US military has done in a really
long time. What we do remember is how the military
mines places where poor people and people of color
live, taking advantage of the lack of opportunities
that exist for kids in those communities and
convincing them to join the army. We think it's time
that queers fight the army and the wars it is engaged
in instead of asking for permission to enter.
Marriage doesn't promise real security.
As the economy collapses, as the number of Americans
without a job, without healthcare, without savings,
without any kind of social security net increases,
it's easy to understand how marriage has become an
instant cure-all for some. Recognizing that many in
our community have lived through strained or broken
relationships with their biological families, through
the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic in the United
States, through self-doubt about and stigmatization of
their relationships, we understand where the desire
for the security promised by marriage comes from.
However, we see the promotion of gay marriage as
something that tries to put a band-aid over deeper
sources of insecurity, both social and economic. With
marriage, the state is able to absolve itself of
responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, as
evidenced by the HRC's argument that with gay
marriage, the state could kick more people off of
welfare. If the HRC got its way, the queers who do not
want, or are not eligible for, marriage would be even
less secure than before. We're frightened by the way
the marriage agenda wants to break up our community in
this way, and we're committed to fighting any kind of
politics that demonizes poor people and welfare
recipients. We challenge our queer communities to
build a politics that promotes wealth redistribution.
What if, rather than donating to the HRC campaign, we
pooled our wealth to create a community emergency fund
for members of our community who face foreclosure,
need expensive medical care or find themselves in any
other economic emergency? As queers, we need to take
our anger, our fear, and our hope and recognize the
wealth of resources that we already have, in order to
build alternative structures. We don't need to
assimilate when we have each other.
We're not like everyone else.
Everywhere we turn, it seems like someone wants us to
support gay marriage. From enthusiastic canvassers on
the street to liberal professors in the academy, from
gay lawyers to straight soccer moms, there's someone
smiling at us, eager to let us know how strongly they
support our "right to marry," waiting for what should
be our easy affirmation. And there seems to be no
space for us to resist the agenda that has been
imposed upon us. We're fed up with the way that the
gay marriage movement has tried to assimilate us, to
swallow up our families, our lives, and our lovers
into its clean-cut standards for what queer love,
responsibility, and commitment should look like. We
reject the idea that we should strive to see straight
family configurations reflected in our families. We're
offended by the idea that white, middle-class gays –
rather than genderqueers, poor people, single moms,
prisoners, people of color, immigrants without papers,
or anyone whose life falls outside of the norm that
the state has set – should be our "natural" allies. We
refuse to feel indebted or grateful to those who have
decided it's time for us to be pulled out from the
fringe and into the status quo. We know that there are
more of us on the outside than on the inside, and we
realize our power.
We write this feeling as if we have to grab our
community back from the clutches of the gay marriage
movement. We're frightened by its path and its
incessant desire to assimilate. Believe it or not, we
felt incredibly safe, happy, taken care of, and
fulfilled with the many queer biological and chosen
parents who raised us without the right to marry.
Having grown up in queer families and communities we
strongly believe that queers are not like everyone
else. Queers are sexy, resourceful, creative, and
brave enough to challenge an oppressive system with
their lifestyle. In the ways that our families might
resemble nuclear, straight families, it is accidental
and coincidental, something that lies at the surface.
We do not believe that queer relationships are the
mere derivatives of straight relationships. We can
play house without wanting to be straight. Our
families are tangled, messy and beautiful – just like
so many straight families who don't fit into the
official version of family. We want to build
communities of all kinds of families, families that
can exist – that do exist – without the recognition of
the state. We don't believe that parenting is cause
for an end to political participation. We believe that
nurturing the growth, voice and imagination of
children as a parent, a family and a community is a
profoundly radical act. We want to build networks of
accountability and dependence that lie outside the
bounds of the government, the kinds of networks that
we grew up in, the kinds of networks that we know
support single-parent families, immigrant families,
families who have members in the military or in
prison, and all kinds of chosen families. These
families, our families, work through our collective
resources, strengths, commitments, and desires, and we
wouldn't change them for anything.
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