My partners and I were not the only queers, though, for whom gay marriage fell short of the Promised Land. More than many realize, a hefty share of the LGBT movement’s radical potential was lost or traded away so that they could say #LoveWon. For instance, in 2012, queer Minnesotans enjoyed a unique success when activists beat back an attempt to ban same-sex marriage in their state constitution, becoming the only state ever to defeat such an initiative at the ballot box. However, queer studies scholar Myrl Beam paints an instructive and troubling picture of the victory.
In his essay “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”, Beam describes what he calls the “love pivot”: in 2012 gay marriage activists across the country shifted from arguments emphasizing equality to arguments emphasizing love. According to focus group research funded by the major national players in the marriage movement (primarily the organizations Freedom to Marry and Third Way), a “focus on discrimination and equality simply did not resonate with straight voters.” Or, in the words of political strategist Richard Carlbom, “when you talk about equality people STOP listening.” Instead, activists were told to play up their life-long dreams of getting married and their desire to fit into the straight marriage mold—regardless of how authentic those desires were.
On the ballot in Minnesota that same year was another constitutional amendment proposed by conservatives, this one requiring a picture ID to vote. Although anti–ID law organizers sought to link the opposition to both initiatives, and gay marriage activists recognized that measures which limit voting tend to work against progressive causes in the long term, the gay marriage lobby made a strategic decision to take no stance on the ID campaign—in Beams words, “in the hopes of attracting some Republicans.” Even without marriage activist support, the ID initiative was defeated, but Beam’s point is that a narrow focus on same-sex marriage isolated queer activists from other progressive causes, while simultaneously requiring that they play down their own (righteous) outrage about the discrimination they face because, as it turned out, few voters cared. And indeed, Minnesotan gay activists discovered that their marriage-rights coalition simply was not interested in giving money or time to other issues of significance to broader matters of LGBT rights, such as safe schools and employment non-discrimination. As Beam puts it, “for movement organizations attempting to shift to other issues in the wake of marriage, many donors did not shift with them.”
Beam’s essay is one of the many compelling works collected in a trio of books put out this summer by Routledge in its After Marriage Equality series. All three were coedited by scholars Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Angela Jones, and Michael W. Yarbrough, the team that also organized the After Marriage conference in 2016, from which these books are drawn. Topics in the books—including immigrant rights, welfare reform, grassroots organizing, and polyamory—are all approached through the lens of how legal same-sex marriage has changed the terrain of the battlefield.
Although many of the collected pieces are critical of gay marriage—at least as an end in itself—there is no party line the contributors are asked to toe. Beam’s argument about the limits of love as an organizing strategy contrasts with an article by sociologist Mignon Moore that examines how same-sex marriage can, in certain contexts, be used to advance more radical queer issues. Moore and her wife were central to the 2012 “love pivot,” as one of the carefully selected same-sex couples in Freedom to Marry’s national advertising campaign. While Moore shares some of the broader progressive concerns about the marriage equality movement, she sees it as “a vehicle through which people, and particularly people of color, could begin to talk about LGBTQ issues with their family members and individuals in their racial and ethnic and cultural communities”—a start, in other words, rather than a conclusion. (...)
Moore’s point is a critique of (or perhaps an elaboration on) the idea of “homonormativity,” a word that wends its way through After Marriage Equality. Homonormative political strategies argue that queer people deserve rights because they are similar to heterosexuals, rather than challenging how rights and privileges are doled out in society generally. Both the “love pivot” and the quest for same-sex marriage as a whole could be called homonormative, as both focus on being “like” straight people. But what is considered normal in the United States has racial overtones—“normal” being something like a straight white suburban couple with a home and children—so Moore’s visibility as a married black lesbian mother is difficult to caricature as homonormative, even if she is making something of a bid for mainstream acceptance.
Full disclosure: I also have an article in the After Marriage series, a transcript of a panel I led on polyamory and family diversity. As a committed pervert, I cannot say that the movement for same-sex marriage has done much for me, other than transform many free summer weekends into jacket-and-tie obligations. But snark as I may, marriage has offered many people I know the opportunity to celebrate their love, start their families, protect their investments, adopt their partner’s children, get citizenship, and receive myriad other benefits, tangible and intangible, that come with offering up your most intimate relationships to the state. Still, I remain unconvinced that doling out tax privileges based on whom we screw adds up to good governance. Even if we accept at face value that the neoliberal state has an interest in promoting relationships of care—because these absorb the greatest costs of child rearing and help keep us off the streets, out of hospitals, and generally less dependent on government services—it can only be explained by recourse to tradition that these relationships must be heterosexual, romantic/sexual, and limited to two individuals. Otherwise, the state’s interests can be equally satisfied by: an opposite-sex couple, a same-sex couple, three elderly adult siblings, or eight adults and three children living in an old Connecticut mansion. I am not against marriage, I just see it as an inefficient, lazy, and unnecessarily limiting definition of the kind of relationships that the government has a vested interest in supporting. As a religious institution, it seems like a hoot; as a civil institution, it is a relic of a time when all people were expected to live one way, worship one god, and die young.
In his essay “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”, Beam describes what he calls the “love pivot”: in 2012 gay marriage activists across the country shifted from arguments emphasizing equality to arguments emphasizing love. According to focus group research funded by the major national players in the marriage movement (primarily the organizations Freedom to Marry and Third Way), a “focus on discrimination and equality simply did not resonate with straight voters.” Or, in the words of political strategist Richard Carlbom, “when you talk about equality people STOP listening.” Instead, activists were told to play up their life-long dreams of getting married and their desire to fit into the straight marriage mold—regardless of how authentic those desires were.On the ballot in Minnesota that same year was another constitutional amendment proposed by conservatives, this one requiring a picture ID to vote. Although anti–ID law organizers sought to link the opposition to both initiatives, and gay marriage activists recognized that measures which limit voting tend to work against progressive causes in the long term, the gay marriage lobby made a strategic decision to take no stance on the ID campaign—in Beams words, “in the hopes of attracting some Republicans.” Even without marriage activist support, the ID initiative was defeated, but Beam’s point is that a narrow focus on same-sex marriage isolated queer activists from other progressive causes, while simultaneously requiring that they play down their own (righteous) outrage about the discrimination they face because, as it turned out, few voters cared. And indeed, Minnesotan gay activists discovered that their marriage-rights coalition simply was not interested in giving money or time to other issues of significance to broader matters of LGBT rights, such as safe schools and employment non-discrimination. As Beam puts it, “for movement organizations attempting to shift to other issues in the wake of marriage, many donors did not shift with them.”
Beam’s essay is one of the many compelling works collected in a trio of books put out this summer by Routledge in its After Marriage Equality series. All three were coedited by scholars Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Angela Jones, and Michael W. Yarbrough, the team that also organized the After Marriage conference in 2016, from which these books are drawn. Topics in the books—including immigrant rights, welfare reform, grassroots organizing, and polyamory—are all approached through the lens of how legal same-sex marriage has changed the terrain of the battlefield.
Although many of the collected pieces are critical of gay marriage—at least as an end in itself—there is no party line the contributors are asked to toe. Beam’s argument about the limits of love as an organizing strategy contrasts with an article by sociologist Mignon Moore that examines how same-sex marriage can, in certain contexts, be used to advance more radical queer issues. Moore and her wife were central to the 2012 “love pivot,” as one of the carefully selected same-sex couples in Freedom to Marry’s national advertising campaign. While Moore shares some of the broader progressive concerns about the marriage equality movement, she sees it as “a vehicle through which people, and particularly people of color, could begin to talk about LGBTQ issues with their family members and individuals in their racial and ethnic and cultural communities”—a start, in other words, rather than a conclusion. (...)
Moore’s point is a critique of (or perhaps an elaboration on) the idea of “homonormativity,” a word that wends its way through After Marriage Equality. Homonormative political strategies argue that queer people deserve rights because they are similar to heterosexuals, rather than challenging how rights and privileges are doled out in society generally. Both the “love pivot” and the quest for same-sex marriage as a whole could be called homonormative, as both focus on being “like” straight people. But what is considered normal in the United States has racial overtones—“normal” being something like a straight white suburban couple with a home and children—so Moore’s visibility as a married black lesbian mother is difficult to caricature as homonormative, even if she is making something of a bid for mainstream acceptance.
Full disclosure: I also have an article in the After Marriage series, a transcript of a panel I led on polyamory and family diversity. As a committed pervert, I cannot say that the movement for same-sex marriage has done much for me, other than transform many free summer weekends into jacket-and-tie obligations. But snark as I may, marriage has offered many people I know the opportunity to celebrate their love, start their families, protect their investments, adopt their partner’s children, get citizenship, and receive myriad other benefits, tangible and intangible, that come with offering up your most intimate relationships to the state. Still, I remain unconvinced that doling out tax privileges based on whom we screw adds up to good governance. Even if we accept at face value that the neoliberal state has an interest in promoting relationships of care—because these absorb the greatest costs of child rearing and help keep us off the streets, out of hospitals, and generally less dependent on government services—it can only be explained by recourse to tradition that these relationships must be heterosexual, romantic/sexual, and limited to two individuals. Otherwise, the state’s interests can be equally satisfied by: an opposite-sex couple, a same-sex couple, three elderly adult siblings, or eight adults and three children living in an old Connecticut mansion. I am not against marriage, I just see it as an inefficient, lazy, and unnecessarily limiting definition of the kind of relationships that the government has a vested interest in supporting. As a religious institution, it seems like a hoot; as a civil institution, it is a relic of a time when all people were expected to live one way, worship one god, and die young.
by Hugh Ryan, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Cary Bass-Deschenes
