Research

Quotes from this essay:

And the more troubling question is: Who is going to clean up this mess? How did gay marriage become “the issue” in Maine and how did so many LGBTA folks get duped into making this campaign their top priority, emotionally, financially and otherwise, by the shallow rhetoric of equality?

This is something we still need to deal with. Even after federal marriage equality took place during the Obama administration, so many people (including liberals in the LGBTQIA+ community want to ignore that we still are not free. We did not get liberation because we could enter into a state-sanctioned structure that protected a few but not many, leaving so many people behind.

Gays and lesbians of all ages are obsessing over gay marriage as if it's going to cure AIDS, stop anti‐queer/anti‐trans violence, provide all uninsured queers with health care, and reform racist immigration policies. Unfortunately, marriage does little more than consolidate even more power in the hands of already privileged gay couples engaged in middle class hetero‐mimicry.

Two things:

1. This is still happening to some extent because people are really pushing this as the end-all-be-all of queer liberation, when it's not even liberating in the first place. And, as we've seen in other arenas, it's so fucking easy to smash them and have these rights removed with barely a fight (by the people who claim constantly to "do what's best" for us).

2. This kind of fight still happens in places where same-sex marriage is under attack or straight out banned. We still see people pushing for the most minimal of changes and obsessing over them to our detriment. It's infuriating.

Let’s be clear: The national gay marriage campaign is NOT a social justice movement. Gay marriage reinforces the for‐profit medical industrial complex by tying access to health care to employment and relational status. Gay marriage does not challenge patent laws that keep poor/working class poz folks from accessing life‐extending medications. Gay marriage reinforces the nuclear family as the primary support structure for youth even though nuclear families are largely responsible for queer teen homelessness, depression and suicide. Gay marriage does not challenge economic systems set up to champion people over property and profit. Gay marriage reinforces racist immigration laws by only allowing productive, “good”, soon‐to‐be‐wed, non‐citizens in while ignoring the rights of migrant workers. Gay marriage simply has nothing to do with social justice.

Note: 'Poz' is a reference to HIV+ people. (This is something I had to look up because it was not part of my vocabulary.)

Fucking hard agree, though. And this is still the case.

Comments on the sections: "An Opportunistic National Strategy" and "Following the Money"

This is a huge problem, and I don't think enough people saw through it as it was happening. This ties into issues with the Non-Profit Industrial Complex; they get to help set the stage as tools of governments, and that's a huge issue. Instead of focusing on all the problems above, which would've helped far more people (including queer people)? We got stuck on goddamned marriage equality and everything tied to belongings, wealth, and ownership.

I also feel like we haven't done enough to actually check into where the money is coming from and has gone; there are so many things I didn't know because they weren't happening in my community, and there wasn't a queer community for me to safely be a part of (where I lived).

And I'm starting to wonder how much of that lack of community was caused by same-sex marriage campaigns soaking up cash, spending it, and ignoring on-the-ground needs of people in a range of places.

In a state with a tanking economy, this kind of reckless spending on a single issue campaign that isn’t even a top priority for most LGBT folks is blatant and unrestrained classism at its worst.

Some suggest that gay marriage is part of a progress narrative and that it is a step in the right direction towards more expansive social justice issues. This largely ignores a critique of power. Once privilege is doled out to middle class gay couples, are they going to continue on to fight against racist immigration policies, for universal health care, for comprehensive queer/trans inclusive sex education, or to free queers unjustly imprisoned during rabidly homophobic sex‐abuse witch hunts? Doubtful is an overstatement. It's more likely they will be enjoying summer vacations at an expensive bed and breakfast in Ogunquit while the rest of us are still trying to access basic rights like health care and freedom of movement. Let’s be real: Privilege breeds complacency.

And this has absolutely happened middle-class and wealthier queer people, especially white queer people, have absolutely ducked out of any kind of push for change. They're largely fine with assimilating, as evidenced by constant battles like "Should cops be at Pride?" (No) or "It's okay if corporations are at Pride" (No). They got what little benefited them, and the rest of us can get fucked (globally).

There really is a hierarchy in queer spaces, and it's got to go.

If we are to imagine queer futures that don't replicate the same violence and oppression many of us experience on an everyday basis as queer and trans folks, we must challenge the middle class neo‐liberal war machine known as the national gay marriage campaign. We must fight the rhetoric of equality and inclusion in systems of domination like marriage and the military, and stop believing that our participation in those institutions is more important than questioning those institutions legitimacy all together. We need to call out the national marriage campaign as opportunistic and parasitic. We must challenge their money mongering tactics to assure our local, truly community based LGBT organizations aren’t left financially high and dry while offering the few essential services to the most marginalized of our community.

Quotes from this essay:

Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.

I'd also venture to say that sometimes love can be harmed by marriage, as people may feel constrained by the social expectations of the institution. The very act of being married requires that a lot of people figure out their relationship to their potential spouse and how the state will view their relationship. There's a lot that is tied up in marriage, especially as the result of settler-colonialism.

I feel like this video by The Liberal Cook outlines a lot of the modern issues with state interference in relationships.

On the other hand, it is utterly false that love results from marriage.

The elements of 'settler-colonialism' are why I somewhat disagree with the paragraph this comes from. I don't think it's false; I don't think it's impossible. I do agree that, to some extent, it comes from the "adjustment to the inevitable."

Arranged marriages are not part of my culture, so this is not an area that I'm comfortable with speaking on and how this might be different today.

But I am confused by this: "... the spontaneity, the intensity, and beauty of love, without which the intimacy of marriage must prove degrading to both the woman and the man."

Why must love be spontaneous and intense? It's not even always beautiful, but I certainly don't understand why it must be spontaneous or intense. This certainly doesn't speak to the range of relationships or love that exist within the world.

Marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact. It differs from the ordinary life insurance agreement only in that it is more binding, more exacting. Its returns are insignificantly small compared with the investments. In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, how ever, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.” Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.

It's interesting in how some of these have changed (in places where 'names' were lost, we're now seeing an uptick in women keeping their names or hyphenating -- minor point), but there are aspects where these things haven't changed that much.

I'm also curious about "condemns her to complete uselessness." Which class of women was she speaking about? In 1911, a lot of lower-class women were working as maids and in textiles; they were doing piecework and taking care of families.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end.

Again, this is an interesting point because of which communities still seem to have retained this messaging. Thinking back to my time growing up (with everyone assuming I was a girl), it was very clear to me that I should "get married" and "have children." These messages are still everywhere, even as we're saying that it's okay not to, but some communities receive them more frequently.

Though, this phenomenon seems to be slowly decreasing in urban areas.

It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

This feels like an interesting area to look into, and I may have to. But I do feel that a lot of relationships (especially within the Western context) have this issue. Sex is still somewhat difficult to discuss, as are needs within a relationship. It's difficult to talk about these things when you've been taught otherwise for so long.

If, on rare occasions young people allow themselves the luxury of romance they are taken in care by the elders, drilled and pounded until they become “sensible.”

Though the conversations about what is "sensible" have changed somewhat, this still happens! (Also threats. I got a lot of threats about what would happen if I ever "turned up pregnant," and I suspect that didn't help a single iota in my relationship to sex.)

The important and only God of practical American life: Can the man make a living? Can he support a wife? That is the only thing that justifies marriage.

Again, I think it's clear that we need to ask which class of women is Goldman talking about or to. It's not to say that poor people didn't enter into marriage for economic reasons in the early 1900s, but it was definitely more likely that families of wealth had to consider that.

It's much like now. Poor people who want to get married are less often considering the financial status of each other (unless, for whatever reason, it impacts their ability to live a better life -- such as how disabled people can sometimes lose their benefits when marrying someone) because they generally have a better understanding of precarity and its impacts.

Yet with all that, but a very small number of the vast army of women wage-workers look upon work as a permanent issue, in the same light as does man.

Aha, here we go. I'd love to see numbers on how women viewed work (permanence) in the early 1900s to compare across decades until now.

The woman considers her position as worker transitory, to be thrown aside for the first bidder. That is why it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. “Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home.” Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.

This bit is something that I'd actually like to explore more, especially considering unions initially did not want to include women (as well as non-white people, particularly Black people). If the union didn't want to let you in, your outlook on joining them might be negative because they excluded you.

Early unions that included women were often run by women. (Wikipedia overview.)

Silk Stockings and Socialism actually discusses the history of the textile unions, which was among the first to start organising women in large numbers (because other than the top jobs, like knitters, most of the workers were women and girls -- think of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire and how many girls and women died there).

It's amazing what happens when you spend time listening to and supporting people.

But the child, how is it to be protected, if not for marriage? After all, is not that the most important consideration? The sham, the hypocrisy of it! Marriage protecting the child, yet thousands of children destitute and homeless. Marriage protecting the child, yet orphan asylums and reformatories over crowded, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children keeping busy in rescuing the little victims from “loving” parents, to place them under more loving care, the Gerry Society. Oh, the mockery of it!

Children are actually an aspect of the nuclear family and marriage that I'd love to see discussed more because of how often they are entirely excluded (until someone needs to "protect" them from something). It really hurts their liberation from the whole system.

The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, --- and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman.

I do think we need to go back to thinking about what the purpose of all the "birth rates are falling" news stories are. These questions asked are particularly poignant in that light.

Our pseudo-moralists have yet to learn the deep sense of responsibility toward the child, that love in freedom has awakened in the breast of woman. Rather would she forego forever the glory of motherhood than bring forth life in an atmosphere that breathes only destruction and death.

On a list of things that sound strikingly familiar over 100 years later.

Quotes are from the named essay in the book Queering Anarchism.

In 2009 I was helplessly kicking and screaming while the national campaigns for gay marriage descended on my mostly poor, mostly rural home state of Maine. Now, in the aftermath of the nauseatingly class-elitist failed campaign, gay and lesbian organizations, and the professional activists that prop them up, remain resiliently resistant to critically questioning what we, as queer and trans subjects, are seeking to be equal to in the first place. Do we really want full inclusion in the institution of marriage, a social contract that explicitly limits the ways in which we can organize our erotic and emotional lives? Furthermore, do we really want to reinforce a social institution where our immediate needs and access to collective benefits are contingent on this singular articulation of partnership? Or have many of us allowed ourselves to be convinced by some vague notion of equality, with all its empty promises,* that gay marriage is a battle worth fighting for?

All of these questions still need to be addressed and considered. Furthermore:

*The promise of health care, freedom of movement across nation state borders, the inheritance of property, etc. These promises only apply if one or both of the people entering into a marriage agreement have a considerable amount of wealth/property/assets, professional employment, and citizenship status. For many, this is not the case and therefore many will not gain materially from marriage.

Empiricism aside, the so-called healthy and privatized familial structures through which the institution of marriage seeks to minimize violence cannot be emulated if we, as a radical queer and trans community, are to confront the violence within our own community and families (chosen or otherwise).

In addition to the affective discourse outlined above, a more analytic approach is being deployed in tandem. This rhetoric relies on a certain brand of rugged American individualism that has spawned gay and lesbian organizations that invoke a rights-based discourse in their attempt at achieving what they contend is full equality. It is here we find numerous LGB and sometimes T activists in a rage over their 1,138 rights that federally recognized marriage will bring them, but are denied. These state benefits and privileges, as outlined in the Defense of Marriage Act, are overwhelmingly about the transfer of money and property (including children, as the only way marriage allows us to think about them is like property). The almost exclusive emphasis on property rights highlights that marriage has little to do with love, but with benefits and privileges as doled out by the state to those who adhere to a specific set of moral values determined by the church.

Gay marriage organizations are mobilizing this rights-based discourse focused on “equal” access to state benefits and privileges in tandem with highly effective love rhetoric to win over public opinion by appealing to socialized emotional responses while simultaneously making a more strategic/analytic argument for gay marriage. This two-pronged approach has successfully dragged many LGBT activists into its blinding double discourse by effectively motivating the engagement of many queer and trans folks who would be better off putting their energy elsewhere. What if we, as a queer and trans social justice movement, focused on achieving access to many of marriage’s forbidden fruits (i.e., healthcare, freedom of movement across nation-state borders, etc.) for all people, not just citizen couples, gay, straight, or otherwise?

This neoliberal fantasy of the nuclear family as the only provider of emotional and economic safety is being recovered and deployed by the contemporary gay rights movement. In a bizarre twist in history, gays and lesbians are turning their backs on the kinds of radical new configurations of “family” that have liberated straight people.

The question remains then: How do we, as radical queer and trans folks, push back against the emerging hegemony of rainbow-flavored neoliberalism and the funneling of our energy into narrow campaigns that only reinforce the hierarchical systems and institutions we fundamentally oppose? How do we reconcile the contradiction of our anger and fervent criticism of so called equality when presently many of our material lives depend on accessing resources through the very subject of our critique? Although I do not have concrete solutions to offer, I believe we must create more space and time to have these vital conversations, be more open and public about our critique of marriage, build coalitions with others who stand little to gain from marriage, imagine other worlds together, and dream up new ways of meeting our material and affective needs.