Queer Politics

Equal Rep.com/Nation-Wide Campaign to Create a New Secretary of GLBT Affairs. Or, How To Silence Queers and Still Love the Idea

Oh, this is too amusing for words.

Following, perhaps, on the heels of Mary Frances Berry’s idea that we should just dump the Commission on Civil Rights in favour of a new organisation that will focus first on, yup, you guessed it, GLT (no B, no Q) issues comes this new group that you can find on Facebook.

And the Winner Is...Gay Marriage! Or: Why Milkand Sean Penn’s Acceptance Speech Do not Equal the Need for Gay Marriage [23 Febru

As expected, Milk received major 2008 Oscar awards, including the one for Best Original Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black) and Best Actor (Sean Penn).

And, as I expected, the success of Milk has become, in a bizarre fashion, some kind of emblem for the continued success of the gay marriage movement.

Father’s Day, Queer Families, and Gay Marriage [22, June, 2009]

For Joshua

Legalize Gay, Or: So You Think You’re Illegal? [6 July, 2009]

DADT and the Silence / Silencing of Queer Anti-War Voices [5 February, 2010]

Why I won’t Come Out on National Coming Out Day [9 October, 2008]

Proof: The Gay Marriage Movement Is Draining Resources from Queer Activism [14 July, 2009]

As anyone who’s been reading my posts on gay marriage knows by now, I’ve been critical of the “movement” for taking away much-needed resources and energy from far more important queer issues. I’ll discuss that issue in greater detail in a longer post, but for now here are links to two pieces that provide the kind of numbers and details many of us have suspected from the start. Note that this is not framed as a journalistic exposé, but as the affirmation of a hypothesis I’ve been mulling over for a while.

Dump Gay Marriage Now [2 July, 2009]

The popular and populist history of gays in the United States goes something like this: In the beginning, gay people were horribly oppressed. Then came change in the 1970s, where gays like the men in the Village People were able to live openly and had a lot of sex. Then, in the 1980s, many gay people died of AIDS, and that taught them that gay sex is bad.

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Gay Immigration (and) Inequality [6 June, 2006]

What does immigration mean for queers? A heterosexual U.S. citizen/permanent resident (c/pr) can sponsor a spouse for immigration; a queer U.S. c/pr can’t sponsor a partner. The Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) seeks to reverse this by substituting the phrase ‘permanent partner’ wherever the word ‘spouse’ appears in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Read more

Queer Immigration: Change the Paradigms [9 January, 2008]

The Uniting American Families Act (UAFA) is back in the news. Currently, heterosexual married citizens and permanent residents can sponsor their non-citizen spouses for immigration. The UAFA extends that privilege to same-sex binational couples, substituting the words ‘permanent partner’ for ‘spouse’ in the language of immigration law. Stories about binational couples emphasize that their relationships aren’t considered as equal to those of married people.