What the Gay Community Lost While It Was Winning Gay Marriage

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/11/what-the-gay-community-lost-while-it-was-winning-gay-marriage/281525/



More generally, the very topic of marriage equality foregrounds assimilation; those b-rolls sent to the studios presented LGBT people as typical middle-Americans, working middle-class jobs, raising kids, living the American dream. The half-naked Pride paraders were carefully pushed off center-stage. At the extremes, this trend meant gay people themselves were sidelined, as in the much-maligned failed 2012 Proposition 8 campaign in California, which focused on straight politicians and allies touting gay marriage rather than showing pictures of gay families (though, as Moscowitz says, a campaign in Maine the same year which centered on gay families also failed).

Moscowitz writes that, "in selling one particular version of gay and lesbian life, the movement risks unintentionally casting other forms of gay identity (not being part of a monogamous, married, child-rearing couple) to the margins." She argues that when news media chose LGBT weddings to highlight, they inevitably included couples who looked and acted as much like traditional heterosexual couples as possible. In a couple of instances, Moscowitz says, "one partner took the last name of the other, ironically participating in a heterosexist and patriarchal practice historically rooted in property ownership."

Moscowitz's general point is well-taken; assimilation is a loss as well as a triumph, and its rewards don't always extend to those who, for whatever reason, can't or won't fit themselves into the wedding cummerbund society demands. But is it really "ironic" for gays or lesbians to take on their partner's name? Does that really mean the couples in question are blind to patriarchy and property ownership? As an analogy: Moscowitz is in the academy, an institution which long restricted or outright excluded women. Is it ironic for her to be writing as a woman or advocating for gay rights in that context? Or does it show, not that Moscowitz is deluded, but that institutions can change? Similarly, when a woman takes another woman's name upon marriage, it could be seen not as ironic capitulation, but as an insistence that the rituals of marriage are about two becoming one in the name of love, rather than about property ownership. Assimilation is often seen as being a one-way process, in which a minority becomes more like the majority. But I think it could instead be viewed as a dialectic, which changes not just the assimilated but the assimilator as well.

This is not to dismiss Moscowitz's concerns. She's certainly correct when she emphasizes that the egalitarian potential of gay marriage will only be met "if the conversation about marriage…remains focused on the ummarrieds as well": Gay people shouldn't need to get married to be recognized as human, nor should only married gay people have equal rights.

[Jesus Malverde]

1. The observations are spot on.

In some ways the most visible goals of the LGBT community have been hijacked and are extremely conservative.

The op points out the weirdness of a community that had pushed sexual and relationship boundaries. Now returning to an institution that fails straight people 50% of the time as the promised land.

Better would have been to redefine societies notion of what are "acceptable" relationships and change the legal structures to accommodate them.

The other strange goal elevated above others was the determination to be warrior killers just like straight people...

The obsession of the LGBT community with joining the military, during a time of unending war, neutered the voices of peace and reason that we should have been hearing otherwise. Through concerted pink washing the LGBT community has been manipulated into hating some groups more than others.

One wonders, what next? What conservative reactionary roles and organizations can we strive to join next....

[xchrom]

2. well-- to a certain extent -- 1 can see our mainstreaming as subverting the mainstream.

but i think the whole thing is worth looking at and talking about.

i have bad gut reactions to anyone joining the armed forces -- more so lgbtiq folk -- though we do have a tradition and history for it.

[nomorenomore08]

4. I don't blame anyone for wanting to be "mainstreamed" when they've been treated as outcasts...

[Jesus Malverde]

9. I totally understand the sentiment.

The point is, that the acceptance comes, from adopting the dominant nuclear family paradigm. Those that don't are considered the outliers, and are marginalized.

The goals of equal treatment as legal guardians, for taxes, for healthcare, and inheritance could all have been achieved without the traditional modern failure of an institution called marriage.

It reinforces the misguided notion that monogamy is natural and superior to other relationship types.

Reinforces the concept of individual over communal living.

The adoption of these conservatives norms do not expand the definition of what constitute relationships, love and sexual expression, instead it conforms it.

[nomorenomore08]

10. Absolutely. And I think expanding/blurring these definitions will be the next important step.

The more "conservative" (or at least conventional) folks out there will just have to grin and bear it.

[closeupready]

5. This fight was ALWAYS about ending discrimination, for me.

It was NEVER about conforming, or conservatism, or patriarchal submission, or whatever else nonsense this article claims.

The fact that some on the right will try to hijack this overwhelmingly successful campaign as a tool to continue subjugating gay people into conforming to erroneous interpretations of what Christianity means - well that is not now nor was it ever a reason to stop fighting discrimination by state authorities.

[Lex]

3. Even heterosexuals who don't marry are marginalized

to some extent. But I do see the point of the article.

[DonCoquixote]

6. acutally a good point here

Whenever you assimilate, the majority assumes you want to be like them, and that it is a honor and prviledge to be like them. on of the first tributes demanded is that the people that were in your community get tossed aside, as shameful. Out with the people whose eccentiricties kept your culture alive, out with them that supported you even when Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia wanted you dead.

Two nasty things happen:
1) those who assimilate scorn their native culture, and I say this as a Hispanic that cannot speak to half his relatives thanks to not knwing Spanish, namely because freinds and teachers would discover I was "one of them" and give me crap for it. "My, you speak such good English." The LGBT couples will get compliments like "oh, you do not seem diferent at all" and sadly, interpret that as some sign they are doing the right thing.


2) Mr. and mrs. Suburbia still hate you, see references to Obama, Barack, aka 'that Kenyan Moose-lem" who, when you hear him talk, sounds like someone that was not raised in a minority culture by minorities, namley because he was NOT. As much as Obama tries to make himself accpetable to Suburbia, he is still hated.

[Fearless]

7. Ehh

They make a well written statement but I don't see anyone really caring if people don't want to get married any more that the past.

[pinto]

8. I think one of the underlying themes of the marriage equality movement

is that we all have more in common, for better or worse, than gets recognized.