Queer Activism After Marriage Equality

Joseph DeFilippis, Michael Yarbrough, Angela Jones, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones, Joseph DeFilippis, Michael Yarbrough, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Michael W. Yarbrough, Angela Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351365567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer Activism After Marriage Equality focuses on the implications of legal same-sex marriage for LGBTQ social movements and organizing. It asks how the agendas, strategies, structures and financing of LGBTQ movement organizations are changing now that same-sex marriage is legal in some countries.

Building on a major conference held in 2016 entitled "After Marriage: The Future of LGBTQ Politics and Scholarship, " this collection draws from critical and intersectional perspectives to explore the questions and issues facing the next chapter of LGBTQ activism and social movement work. It comprises academic papers, international case studies, edited transcripts of selected conference sessions, and interviews with activists. These take a critical look at the high-profile work of national and state-wide equality organizations, analyzing the costs of winning marriage equality and what that has meant for other LGBTQ activism. In addition to this, the book examines other forms of queer activism that have existed for years in the shadows of the marriage equality movement, as well as new social movements that have developed more recently. Finally, it looks to examples of activism in other countries and considers lessons U.S. activists can learn from them.

By presenting research on these and other trends, this volume helps translate queer critiques advanced during the marriage campaigns into a framework for ongoing critical research in the after-marriage period.

PART I

Examining the mainstream LGBT movement

1

LGBTQ POLITICS AFTER MARRIAGE

A panel discussion with Gabriel Foster, Paulina Helm-Hernandez, Robyn Ochs, Steven William Thrasher, Urvashi Vaid, and Hari Ziyad

Edited by Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis

Editors’ introduction:

Marriage dominated the agenda of the mainstream LGBTQ movement for over a decade. What was the impact of the marriage campaigns on broader LGBTQ activism? And now that same-sex marriage has been legalized, what is next for the movement?

This chapter presents a transcript of excerpts from the 2016 After Marriage conference’s opening plenary, a roundtable conversation where a group of seasoned LGBTQ activists attempt to answer those questions. The participants were Gabriel Foster (Director of the Trans Justice Funding Project), Paulina Helm-Hernandez (Co-Executive Director of Southerners on New Ground), Robyn Ochs (bisexual activist and educator), Urvashi Vaid (long-time LGBTQ movement leader), Hari Ziyad (writer), and moderator Steven William Thrasher (journalist).

Their discussion focused on identifying key issues facing LGBTQ activists after marriage, including immigration, poverty, incarceration, health care, and violence. In addition, the panel focused on larger political challenges facing queer liberation organizations and activists, such as fundraising, the limitations and strengths of identity politics, the importance of race, the challenges and potential of the non-profit structure, recruitment in the south, coalition-building, multi-racial leadership, and challenging liberal political frameworks in favor of a politics that actually challenge the state.

Readers are encouraged to consider these important issues in LGBTQ activism, and to contemplate what they mean about the future of a post-marriage equality LGBTQ social movement. What issues remain unaddressed by LGBTQ organizations? What should the agenda of the movement be? Who should decide that? How should organizations be structured?

STEVEN WILLIAM THRASHER: Thank you. Good morning everyone! Homosexuals, bisexuals, queers, friends, and even deviant straight people—we welcome you too. I’m really honored to be here. I’ve seen how much work Angela Jones and Michael Yarbrough have put into planning this day, and I look at this panel and think of all the panels I have been on that did not look like this. I really appreciate the organizers for finding such a really rich, fantastic group of people to speak from different kinds of experiences about LGBTQ politics. So, we’re just going to start off with each panelist talking very briefly about our work, and where we are, and then we’re going to talk to each other and really make it an engaged conversation.

I want to start us off by asking: Where are LGBTQ politics right now? How do you see them in terms of the work that you do and the issues that are important to you? And was marriage central to what you’re doing?

For me, HIV criminalization has been the focus of a lot of my work, which marriage was not necessarily central to. It’s helped me understand why my issue was not taken up more broadly. A couple months before marriage came legal, I wrote an article about a day where I spent the morning at the Supreme Court covering the last hearing for it, and then that evening I was 40 miles away in Baltimore covering an American city burning during the second night of protests happening in response to the police killing of Freddie Gray. And so, I’ve sort of been interested in different levels of activism.

And there’s nobody better to speak to this than Urvashi Vaid, who has been in our community for some really important challenges, related to how power and protest work.

“Our ‘victories’ have been limited – still partial, still incomplete”

URVASHI VAID: Thank you. Twenty years ago, in my book Virtual Equality,¹ I argued that equality could feel like appeasement. Like being bought off by the things you wanted to buy. Like living in a simulation, which feels mighty real inside its confines, but which ends in a return to life unchanged. Like declaring “Victory” and “Mission Accomplished” based on a narrow definition of what winning means.

We are living that appeasement today. Marriage embodies all that is good and insufficient about equality. It matters—because it did and does deliver meaningful rights, tangible benefits, access, recognition and social respect for those who participate in the institution. It matters—because the jurisprudence that won us the right to marry expands the 14th Amendment, concedes that we have liberty, at least a few fundamental rights, and the opportunity to challenge laws based on animus.

Marriage has worked culturally and legally because it made us legible to straight people—it turned outlaws into in-laws. And because it helped straight people to be less afraid of queer sexual desire—more of those folks could grudgingly concede our “common humanity,” to quote the MA Supreme Court’s 2003 decision, and started to change some of their attitudes.

But marriage fails for the reasons that formal legal equality as an end goal fails—it does not deliver justice, transform family or culture, nor expand queer freedom for all. It does not touch, much less end, structural racism; does not change the enforcement of compliance with the gender binary; does not deliver reproductive justice; nor end familial homophobia. It has nothing to offer about ending mass incarceration, and the systematic deployment of state violence against Black and Brown communities.

The queer movement’s focus on marriage, in fact, had the effect of delaying and slowing its work on critical problems—like poverty, violence against transgender people and transgender women of color, heterosexism and bias against cis-gender women, transphobia, divestment from the public infrastructure, and investment in wealthy people’s wealth.

In a sense, even the premise of this conference is a bit frustrating, because it reinforces the power of the paradigm it is trying to question. Marriage is not, and never was, the only, or the most important, or even the most worked on, issue in the LGBT movement. But if one reads the new triumphalist accounts of queer success, one would not know this. The narratives that center marriage—they reduce justice to access, liberation to liberalism, same sex to same old sex. Equality in this narrative is little more a straight people’s club to which queers most willing to conform have gained admission. And I’m one of them. I’m married. Include me in the critique please. These new narratives erase or minimize the progressivism of the very queer movements that set the stage for marriage and that still work, beyond marriage, to win liberation and equity for all parts of queer communities.

Straight culture’s supposed, newfound embrace of “queerness” itself, leaves me distrustful and actually irritated. I feel so perverse, and I ask myself, “Isn’t this what I wanted, and what we worked for? To be able to be welcomed by heterosexual society and my family of origin?” But there are reasons to feel distrustful.

The Right has not disappeared. They have not stopped trying to contain, control or convert us. Trump and the entire Republican party platform attest to the sexist, racist, and homophobic Right-wing’s power in this country.

Allies now say, “Isn’t the LGBT movement remarkable?” These same allies who now want to “learn lessons from the LGBT movement on how we won marriage” actually are still doing nothing to engage with queer people’s lives and movements, or to resist religious-based discrimination against us. Their new compassion reeks of yet another experience of being tokenized in a lifetime of tokenization.

When people ask, “What lessons can we learn from that movement that we can apply?” I want to say—okay, here’s what you do. Start by reading the history of colonialism, indigenous people’s genocide, slavery, women as chattel property. Then live as outsiders to every institution. Live being shunned and beaten and abused—by family, clergy, police, prisons, and everyone else. Try that for about a century. Then go on to dying. By the thousands. No, by the tens of thousands. No, by the hundreds of thousands. Victory required massive sacrifice—thousands of deaths from shame and stigma (AIDS, suicide, murder, alcoholism, drug use, hate violence).

Victory came because we created positive defiant queer identities (which continue to be mocked to this day as a distraction). Because we built communities and institutions (which continue to be funded at 28 cents for every $100 dollars of funding given by US foundations, and with less than 3 percent participation from our own communities).² Because we created community and queer cultures—we laughed, sang, wrote, danced, made family and sexual communities in defiance and in love.

Finally, I would advise those who ask how’d we do it—have a lot of people go to law school and start filing suits. Then start wearing suits, and buying political favors. Then create that mythic “safe space” so really reactionary people with power can think it’s safe to join you. If you do all of this, then maybe you win.

I am irritated because so much remains unchanged—from the continued racial siloing that renders so many queer organizations still not fully engaged in the fight to end mass incarceration and end police violence, to the misogyny that renders lesbians, bi, queer and trans women irrelevant to decisions made in this movement.

The bottom line is we can put on the rainbow lip gloss, and celebrate diversity day at the corporate and university tables, but our “victories” have been limited, still partial, still incomplete. Formal legal equality—which has still not been won—is indeed necessary, but it is insufficient.

Where I find home and hope, where I live today, is not the queer movement but a stateless place where the intersectional has replaced the identity. This new space of shared analysis and common purpose can be seen in each of the progressive movements that are actually moving today. I respect and take direction from the Movement for Black Lives, a brilliant and deeply thoughtful movement, grounded in Black feminism, and inclusive in profound ways. I respect and take direction from the immigrant rights movement, another intersectional and expansive movement in which queer and trans people are leaders; in the movements and organizing by transgender and GNC (gender non-conforming) people, and the transformation of the gender binary that is underway. In the anti-criminalization and prison abolition movements, in the workers’ rights to fight for 15, in the Chicago teachers union strikes, in the reproductive justice movement which still fights for birth control access and fights against the ban on public funding for abortions and reproductive control, in the anti-poverty activism, in the global climate justice movement, the environmental justice movement, and more.

Marriage is virtual equality. We are living it now. The neoliberal movement has “won” mainstreaming for middle class LGBT people, of all colors. And it has not won the same for those queer people whose lives remain constrained by economic inequality, racism and White supremacy, a colonial US foreign policy, and a brutal economic system that cannot exist without exploitation. Real social justice, real liberation, real freedom requires a structural change, not just integration.

SWT: Thank you, Urvashi. Next is Paulina Helm-Hernandez. I’m really honored you’ve traveled here all the way from Atlanta. And tell us, coming from part of the country that often gets overlooked, compared to the coasts regarding gay politics, tell us where we are politically after marriage.

“The power of love and kinship”

PAULINA HELM-HERNANDEZ: Well, thank you for having me. I feel like Urvashi just dropped the mic. I really agree with a lot of Urvashi’s reflections, about all the political compromises that we’ve had to make to get here.

SONG has been around for 23 years, now. And we were started by six incredible feminist-dyke organizers, who were involved in organizing fighting against the Klan, fighting against really harsh White supremacy and the way it manifests in the south, and fighting against all of the dyke-baiting, the lesbian-baiting, that was happening inside of the anti-violence movement, inside of feminist organizations, multiracial organizations, and civil rights organizations. So, a lot of their mission and vision was to challenge homophobia and transphobia inside of those civil organizations. And also, to really push the gay and lesbian organizations around race and class. So that was all part of their strategy.

For us, we have been thinking about how much same-sex marriage should be a marker of progress, and asking how much it represents a culture shift. What have we seen shift? What hasn’t shifted? We have to reflect on this now.

For a long time now, since same-sex marriage was first being debated, SONG recognized that we were in a fight for the soul of the LGBTQ movement. There were a lot of questions on the table about it. And we questioned what we were willing to do so that some of us could get married and so some of us could walk down the aisles and to go, as Urvashi said, from being outlaws to having in-laws.

One of the things that we’ve been reflecting on deeply is the power of love and kinship. The power of love and kinship. Because what often drew our southern people into the same-sex marriage conversation had very little to do with marriage itself. Very little. Instead, it had to do with the need for our people to have access to more support. Like, for instance, dyke moms, who were the foster parents to ten kids, who were saying “We’re taking in more and more queer kids by the day. We need help. Something has to happen. Something has to break. Like, we have to be able to do more for our people.” And so, in some ways, some of the compromises that people made to get on board with this issue—it was really about that. It was trying to figure out the answer to this question: “What are all the formulaic ways that we can have as much of a safety net as we can?” That’s what it was about for some of us.

And I think some of us got lost in that conversation. And it became about the metrics of marriage and about the metrics of federal reform. It became about who was on our side and who wasn’t. And I think we left a lot of people out of that conversation and I think we’re paying the cost of that. We’re paying the cost of that.

And I know in the south it’s been so profound, because ultimately people turn out for each other in so many different ways. They support each other in complicated ways. People don’t just build their lives around being couples. But marriage only supports couples, and not these other ways that people turn out for each other.

And, you know, I actually really understand and have a lot of empathy and sympathy for people wanting to be married, and wanting to be in loving relationships that they feel are validated and supported in a collective sort of way. But I think that when we have explicitly, more deliberately, focused on the framework of liberation is when we have said “That is actually not good enough.” It is when we recognize that one individual family, one individual couple, really can’t transform the conditions of our community that are at the core of our survival. It can’t just be about individual couples.

And so much of what the law is telling us in the south, and what so much of the policy conversations that we have are about, are our individual fears. It’s like: “What is the one protection that’s going to inoculate against me being discriminated against and fired?” Which is absolutely the thing to ask if that’s the thing that’s politicizing you. But I think we often allow our people to remain in that place. In that place of individual-ness, in that place of, “What can you do for me? What can the movement do for me?”

Versus when I came into the movement, when SONG adopted me (and that’s what I say because they adopted me, and they literally saved me from myself in so many ways), it was one of those things where they said “No, you have to be committed to the movement. And you have to be where people can see you.” In so many ways, I was taught to really humble myself to the queer south. And to go all over the place and talk to small town folks, asking them: “What are your dreams?” And that’s literally what our folks have been wanting and asking for. And what they want is love and kinshi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Examining the mainstream LGBT movement
• 2 New social movements
• 5 “This is the freedom ride we are taking”
• 6 “Building the world that we want to live in”
• 7 Putting the T back in LGBTQ?
• 8 Centering intersectional politics
• 3 Transnational perspectives
• Index