On Marriage and Community

Yesterday's experience with homophobia left me thinking. Right now, many of us queers who are in committed relationships, who have commitment ceremonies or legal marriages (goddess, I wish!), who are thinking about / talking about / actively building families are getting it from both sides. Not only are the religious radicals in charge of so many legislatures right now trying to outlaw us, our relationships, and our families, but many queer people themselves are uncomfortable with the idea of gay marriage or fighting for legislative equality. It leaves many of us between a rock and a hard place. Bear with me while I think this through.

The queer community has made a virtue of differences both real and perceived. If we were going to be ostracized for the people we loved, well, we would flaunt and enjoy those very things that set us apart. If we weren't "real" men and women, then we'd make both a poltical statement and a moment of pleasure out of wearing clothing meant for the other gender, putting on makeup (men), and building things (women). If we couldn't have legal marriage and the sanction of families, then we would valorize choice and freedom and the opportunities that not being tied down to the standard spouse/2.5 kids/dog/house in the 'burbs afforded us.

Nevermind that many queer people had and still have committed relationships that outlast those of most of the straight world. Nevermind that many of us don't fit the reverse-gender stereotypes. Nevermind that many of us aren't club bunnies or vegetarian or what have you. These things are myths of the queer community and they have been a light in the darkness of oppression and alienation.

But as some friends and I were discussing a few weeks ago, the differences between the straight and the queer communities are dissolving. So much of queer culture has been adopted by the straight world for the purposes of marketing, entertainment, or liberal display. So much of straight culture has been made available to us queers by the lessening of the day to day oppression. It's no longer possible to make the hard and fast distinctions of yesterday.

This is a good thing, in the main; it is part and parcel of becoming proud and visible and take-no-prisoners. But it means the queer community has lost some of the comforting closeness, smallness, that it once had. And this frightens many queers, especially those who lived through the harder times of silence and death and always fearing for life and livelihood. And in that fear, they are attempting to force a homogeneity in the queer community that they opposed in the straight one.

One of the arguments in the queer community against gay marriage is that we're capitulating to the mainstream straight culture, that we're buying into an inherently fucked-up institution. We're becoming like them. And I want to say, oh honey, there is no us and them any longer, not like there was.

They say we're a threat to their way of life; that the drag queens and the mighty queens will face even more pressure to capitulate to a life beige and boring and pressed. How exactly is it that we're a threat to the sanctity of straight marriage and the ability of queer men to wear false eyelashes and fuck anything that moves? At the same damn time?

I get it, the fear that we're losing something precious to us. But this isn't an either or. It isn't platform shoes vs. strollers. It isn't lesbian bed death vs. the most anonymous glory hole. We aren't any more homogenous internally than the whole culture is, and we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution. (And the gender politics of gay marriage within the queer community is a post unto itself.)

I tell you now: getting married and having kids doesn't make any of us less committed to queer rights and queer equality and queer culture. It doesn't make us disavow the genderqueers and the queens and the marys. Our having a kid isn't going to suddenly make us disavow our friends or get conservative or play vanilla. Gay marriage and gay adoption and gay childrearing is just one more path to what we, queer and feminist alike, say we want: for people to make the choices that are right for them, for their lives.

I'll be the one at Pride with the stroller, cheering the Dykes on Bikes and the leather community and the sparkly platform-shoed. I promise.

Comments

[art-sweet]

This is awesome.

We'll be standing there next to you.

[M.]

Yes, yes, yes!

We'll be right there with you too (hopefully with a baby in our stroller soon) as others who don't fit into a gender-bending box, er "femmes". Damn, stuck in another box!

[dale]

Wot they said.