Have we turned our backs on ourselves with all this I do–ing? Is there another road?

If one relies on the Metroline for their LGBT news one would be under the false impression that there was only one side to l & g people marrying. Each month an article appears from Love Makes A Family and each month we hear that if g & l people marry in Connecticut that they will be afforded, dignity, respect and legal protections that marriage provides. We hear that the boys and the girls up on the hill in the state capitol building are beginning to love us more and more each day.  If one listened to only the political rhetoric coming from the comfortable l & g class would would think that the only thing that sexual minorities are interested in was a right to marry. A comfortable class who as Mattilda says is, “ a gay elite who has hijacked the queer struggle and positioned their desires as everyone’s needs–the dominant signs of straight conformity have become the ultimate signs of gay success.” But oh this right to marry, the dreams of school girls taking on the hunk (man I don’t need to be married to take on a hunk). Oh, that someday my princeses will come, and with that right person there will be children, a little house, and we will live happily ever after. And a good percentage of  those dreamers today who dreamt a little dream, are now dreaming after someone else. Let me off this circle jerk merry-go-round, I have to puke. So let’s see how can I begin my yearly on and off rant on marriage. Oh have I got a good place to begin. Not that this place will mean very much unless one is a thinker and doesn’t run with the monkey see, monkey I do, do crowd. But we’ll start there anyways. From my file collection.

WHO IS WHO? WHAT DID THEY DO?

*What do Dorothy Allison, Amy Andre, Ricky Blum, Leslie Cagan, Mandy Carter, Debanuj Dappupta, Lisa Duggan Barbara Ehrenreich, John D’Emilio, Tobi Hill-Myer, Jonathan Ned Katz, Armistead Maupin, Terrance Mc Nally, Jose E. Muzoz, Joan Nestle, Dean Spade, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Kay Whillock,  and many many more have in common? And what do many of us working class queers have in common with the elite of letters and thought?

“We the undersigned–Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists and community organizers-seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families. In doing so we hope to move beyond marriage politics as they exist in the United States today.”

“All families, relationships, and households struggling for stability and economic security will be helped by separating basic forms of legal and economic recognition from the requirement of marital and conjugal relationships. For example who among us seriously will argue that the following kinds of households are less socially, economically and spiritually worthy?”

• Senior citizens living together, serving as each other’s caregivers, partners, and / or constructed families.
• Adult children living with and caring for their parents.
• Grandparents and other family members raising their children’s(or a relative’s children)
• Blended Families
• Extended families(especially in particular immigrant population) living under one roof, whose members care for one another.
• Queer couples who decide to jointly create and raise a child with another queer person or couple, in two households.
• Close friends and siblings who live together in long-term, committed, non-conjugal relationships, serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers.
• Care-giving and partnership relationships that have been developed to provide support systems to those living with HIV/AIDS.

“Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others.”

“To have the government define as “legitimate families” only those households with couples in conjugal relationships does a tremendous disservice to the many other ways in which people actually construct their families, kinship networks, households and relationships.” 

For the full report see. www.beyondmarriage.org  “Beyond Same-sex Marriage: A new Strategic Vision for all our families and relationships.”

Now that could be a good place to start for some.

SO WHAT DOES PUNK PINK LIKE

Punk Pink has a liking to what is written above. But only for as long as there is still this type of a system that we call government that runs us ragged in America. Of course I would be for a revolution before anything else. But with all saddeness I see my people, the former revolutionary LGBT people embracing Capitalism and shouting for the “good old red, white, and blue”. Such a pity, they don’t shout for revolution and apple pie.  We know full well that all of the above household arrangements that are spoken about from our thinking class is how many of us in this country are now living. Even though I don’t think it matters to say it I will say it anyway, “So many hetero marriages are falling apart and really I read somewhere that marriage is a failed institution it is on the decline, “marital reproductive households are no longer the majority and most Americans spend half their adult lives outside marriage.” If one is to believe those ideas then it would seem to me that the comfortable class g&l are on the wrong track. I know they have turned their backs on our own. If truly we are here, there, and everywhere then all of the above from the beyond marriage crowd would be what this movement should have been working towards, a just society, wholeness not single cell selfishness of one man and one man, one women and one women. Hell I want the tribe down the street from me protected too.  Another reason that I like the above signatories is they all think beyond what is right there on the surface (idea of marriage as it is now). They all do not find their fulfillment from what others in straight society believe is right they do not use the straight measuring stick to measure the worth, dignity, respect or legal protections  They go way beyond the little box. They give us a start, a push and a shove in a queer direction

Now Punk Pink would like to go back to these words spoken in 1969 that as far as I am concerned still ring true today. “We regard established heterosexual standards of morality as immoral and refuse to condone them by demanding an quality which is merely the common yoke of repression.” Wow! Can you dig it? So when we say equal rights, marriage rights are we saying that we no longer believe in those words? Maybe we are saying, Oh those words, words of the young, the revolutionary, we’ve grown older and wiser now. Oh that little revolutionary rant, that was only by some gays, not all of us believed it then and we certainly don’t believe it now. Or are we really saying, we have given up. We can’t think beyond, we don’t want to work on Maggie’s farm no more. Just give us what we know. If it was good enough for mama and good enough for papa then its good enough for me. Mama and papa will understand. Straight society will come around. They will be flattered that we hold their institutions in such high regard. That we too are just like them so let’s share that pie. So here we go around and around in the circle game. That circle game that was disgusting back then and is just as disgusting now.  The mask of Ward and June Cleaver haunts the g & l movement. The everything we rebelled against we now have become. “NOT ME BABY, I would rather crap in my hat.”

SOME REAL FIGHTING WORDS.

“We want the abolition of the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family. We believe that the bourgeois nuclear family perpetuates the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality by creating sex roles, sex definitions and sexual exploitation. The bourgeois nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalism creates oppressive roles of homosexuality and heterosexuality…It is every child’s right to develop in a non-sexist, non-racist, no-possessive atmosphere which is the responsibility of all people, including gays to create.” -”The Third World Gay Liberation Manifesto” New York City, 1970.

Now to me that would be creating a society of our own not fighting to gain acceptance in straight society. We look out all around us and see a people that do not live in a decent and humane society and a people who are not free. As Kate and Deeg said in their wonderful article, Marriage is Still the Opiate of the Queers,  “We do not want crumbs from this society’s table, and we are not fighting for a place at it. We want to overturn the fucking table.”  ”Assimilation is NOT liberation.” Kate and Deeg also remind us that “According to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, there are 1,138 federal rights and responsibilities that are automatically accorded to married people. Why should we fight for 1,138 rights for some people, instead of rights for all people.”

THE CHEESE DOESN’T HAVE TO STAND ALONE. 

The movement for “marriage equality” as a stand alone issue  has been a mistake from the start.  Hear what Socialist Feminist Lesbian revolutionary Sue Docekel has to say, “Let’s remember this is a long haul fight for liberation.  Winning marriage rights alone with prove to be an unsatisfying victory-just as straight people. Only a fight for fundamental economic and social change, alongside our allies around the globe, can win a world based on moral values of cooperation and sharing, respect for differences and yes free love.” All the while the I love to I do, do crowd presents this marriage business as a single issue they help the right wing add fuel to the fire. The Right does not oppose same-sex marriage as a stand alone issue. The civil rights of all people are under assault.  Race, gender, class and citizenship status all are under attack as the right seeks to expand their conservative agenda. Funding for peoples programs, the elderly, childcare, nutrition programs, housing subsidies are all under attack. This dismantling will become  a priority for these dogs as more and more of our tax dollars goes to funding the war in Iraq and the funding of future wars. The right has been very successful in using marriage as a wedge that pits groups of people against LGBT people.  The marriage crowd would be better served if they emerged from their one issue politics and broaden their agenda to include Social Security preservation and to reform and expand the idea of universal health care. To work toward a recognition of diversified forms of household , to work for guaranteed health-care and retirement security. To work for welfare benefits that are given based on need not on martial relationship’s. They must expand the vision of social justice and then with the many diversified groups in America they will find that social justice concerning basic needs prevails. They will find that they are in a powerful coalition that will not be stopped by the political rhetoric of the right or by the cave in politics of the centrists.