Stonewall was a Wedding?

Are we done yet? Do we have to endure another full day of self-congratulation at Obama’s personal endorsement of same-sex marriage? His announcement was heralded with as much praise as last summer’s legalization of gay marriage in New York. And that was, you know, actual legislation.

This is hardly surprising given the fact that marriage equality is designed to distract liberal consciences and give Democrats political cover to gut social services. While the passage of gay marriage enjoyed the support of prominent campaign donors, it was directly preceded by cuts to homeless shelters for queer youth. It’s a campaign season bait-and-switch — winning votes without making real concessions.

Case in point: Bloomberg commended Obama for joining a legacy of “courageous stands that so many Americans have taken over the years on behalf of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, stretching back to the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.” This days after slashing youth homeless shelter funding by $7 million, in a city where40% of homeless youth are LGBT.

Looked at from this vantage point, the chief beneficiaries of gay marriage will be Crate & Barrel, not the queer folks with the most desperate needs. There is an obvious disconnect between the desires of politically connected, wealthy gay people and the needs of queer youth, and yet the major gay rights organizations have all rallied around gay marriage as if it will solve the problems of gay people everywhere, regardless of race or class.

Gay marriage proponents feed us two flavors of justification for their crusade. For the romantics they supply fantasy — the notion that legal inclusion brings social justice; for the cynics, they tout the thousand individual rights that a marriage certificate bestows.

These arguments should raise serious red flags for the Jacobin rank-and-file, and indeed, neither holds water. You’d think in the “age of the 99%,” we teeming masses would be able to see that what’s good for the few isn’t good for us all. It’s true that marriage comes with material advantages — healthcare, citizenship, and inheritance chief among them — but therein also lies the problem. Marriage consolidates privilege by creating a legal basis for denying access to those thousand rights; it literally sanctions discrimination. Instead of bestowing rights based on relationship status, the state should guarantee those rights for all people. Instead we attach basic rights to an institution with a 50% failure rate.

The obsession with marriage also sanitizes the history of queer struggle. Stonewall was not a wedding, it was a riot, led by the very queers who are now erased from the public image of gay equality. Drag queens, trans people of color, young queers, and butch dykes fought systematic violence and in Sarah Schulman’s words, “[…] arose to change society, to expand rigid gender roles, to break down confining social mores of privatized families and to defy the consumerism that accompanies monogamy and nuclear family lifestyle in the United States.” That transformative vision has been sidelined by the marriage crowd, who are content to bestow rights only on the deserving few. Are there really members of our society undeserving of health care?

Only the most privileged among us could possibly see the fight for the right to party as a movement for social justice. Proponents tout the implications for healthcare and immigration status while members of our queer and trans communities are denied basic treatment in prison, while they are harassed and ejected by ICE. Loving couples making a public commitment to one another is a beautiful thing, but it is erroneously touted by gay rights groups as the single most pressing justice issue facing queer people. Issues of access to healthcare, education, and housing go unmentioned.

Look no further than Argentina for real leadership in queer politics. While we were busy patting ourselves on the back, the Argentine legislature passed the Gender Identity Law, arguably the most gender-affirming bill in any country, to date. Argentineans can now change their legal genders without having to demonstrate any medical treatment, and the public and private healthcare systems in the country are banned from charging extra for gender-related therapies or procedures. These changes may not have the comforting ring of wedding bells, but they address administrative inequalities that present huge obstacles to trans people in accessing basic services. And it teaches us that by building power for vulnerable communities, legislative reform can be an important part of movements for social justice.

I knew I was changing when people began to gawk at me again.

My body was blending gender characteristics, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. I remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stare — their eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am “other.” I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.

— Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg

We Don’t Need No Education (That Doesn’t Recognize Queer Identities)

Anyone who’s had any recent experience with the American education system knows that most of the time, it’s not an inherently queer-friendly place. From the locker room at gym to the video about where babies come from in health class, it’s a straight straight world out there. Despite our best efforts to make the educational sphere a more inclusive place for young queers — from anti-bullying initiatives to the FAIR Act in California — it remains an aggressively heteronormative space for kids who are very sensitive to the idea that there might be something bad, wrong, or unnatural about them. As major a victory as the FAIR Act was, with its assurance that kids would soon be able to learn about queer role models and historical figures in their public schools, even that may not be the slam dunk that activists had hoped for — California budget cuts mean that the next curriculum revision and textbook purchase have been pushed back to 2015, and individual school districts are being told to interpret the law as best they can without any new funding, and in spite of the fact that their funding overall has decreased by roughly 20% in the last few years.

As long as the majority of students in any academic setting are straight, are heteronormativity and cisnormativity in the classroom inevitable? Not everyone thinks so; Susan Stryker, the director of the LGBT Studies Institute at the University of Arizona, has some thoughts on how queer theory can make academia better when she spoke with the Toronto publication Xtra.

Xtra: Can, or should, queer/trans studies occupy space in the academy the same way that traditional humanities and social science disciplines do?

Susan Stryker: Because there’s homophobia in the world, sometimes it can be difficult to negotiate the academic environment when you’re out and queer, the same way it can be hard to negotiate any workplace, or public space in general. It’s not always a cakewalk. But there is a real recognition that understanding sexuality and sexual diversity is an important part of how you train students to be engaged, thoughtful, participatory members of society. There is not a lot of intellectual debate about whether or not it’s valuable to study LGBT and queer issues in the academy. Even among people who don’t quite get it, it’s recognized as being a legitimate set of questions that has some important things to say to everybody.

Read more here.