In the past four+ years, the queer community has had a lot to celebrate. I've cheered quite a bit since Obama was elected. Marriage equality in New York and Washington and Maine and Maryland: "Yay!", I thought. DADT repeal, Presidential support for marriage equality, benefits for LGBT federal employees--yay!
But with more recent victories, I've been forced to then think: "Cue the cries of self-righteous, attack-your-allies, too-bitter-to-listen queers acting like they themselves are disenfranchised by this very achievement."
The self-righteous, polemic queers are the ones who perpetuate a war within the queer community. I'm talking to you. When you open your mouth to speak, you're making a choice. It's one thing to speak up for an issue that doesn't get the coverage it deserves (queer homelessness, limited access to proper health care and housing, etc.). But it's another to explicitly state that you will not celebrate DADT repeal, or that the movement for "gay marriage" (as if there is such a thing) will do more harm than good for the queer community, and that those who fight loudly for it might as well be no better than the religious right. Yes, there are large gaps of space between many members of the LGBT community and our allies with regards to our different experiences, but when you fill that space with a concrete wall and paint the words "YOU DON'T GET IT. JUST GO AWAY" on it, you are equating distraction with obstruction, passiveness with oppression, and privilege (as well as the state of being uninformed) with prejudice. This is folly, plain and simple. That concrete wall is built on a foundation of these erroneous equivalencies, and they need to be addressed.
Firstly, let's talk about your targets: that eeevil "mainstream." When a celebrity makes a marriage equality advertisement, yes, they may be more aware of the marriage equality issue than, say, transgender discrimination. But you accomplish nothing by tearing them down for their support. They are not part of the problem. They are a potential peg in the solution. They just may need a little nudge to secure that peg in its proper place. That nudge is information. You people, especially the cis-gendered ones, were once in that naive celebrity's shoes--you were once uninformed as well. If the first person to educate you on the realities of silenced LGBTQIAbcdefg....groups--and the land mine-like rules of political correctness that govern them ("No, not that word anymore! Didn't you get the memo?!")--had been as bitter and self-righteous as you are, you'd be in the same position as the people you're casting as "mainstream." That's stigmatization.
You whine and yell about how the "mainstreamers" apparently decided there's a "right" way to be gay, and how those who don't want to "assimilate" are being obstructed. They didn't, and you're not. At least not by anyone who's fighting for any and all queer rights. When you claim otherwise, you're building a straw man when there are real ones out there. Also, despite a difference in motive, your tone is sounding a lot like the homophobes who claim "harm" from the casting of a "gay marriage" as "normal". Hell, replace "biblical values" with "queer culture" and your fears of inevitable loss sound the same as theirs.
But those fears are irrational, because the reality is, when marriage equality is federally legal, you will not tangibly lose anything. You will not be indoctrinated into a white-picket-fence concentration camp with Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka as Hitler and Ava, or whatever. You'll just as easily be able to go about your life if you do not want to get married. But I do want to get married. And that victory, when it is won, will be for both of us. Marriage equality is trans equality, too. I won't be assimilating to some separate culture or society, or succumbing to it. I'll be claiming my rightful place in the society we all belong to. I want to be married because I want the same rights and protections that my parents have for each other and for me as their child. I don't want to be seen as "more straight". I want to be seen as equally human. This whining you're doing is very much like that of the indie music snob who acts like the very existence of artists like--*gasp*--Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, or Rihanna, diminishes their freedom to listen to whatever 'underground' band they want. It doesn't. You can hop off your high horse and join us "mainstreamers" on solid ground, please. We won't bite.
So when you glitter-bomb Dan Savage while he saves queer lives, when you cast Lady Gaga as transphobic while she fights for not just marriage equality but trans acceptance AND awareness for LGBT homeless youth, you're picking on the wrong people. When you attack your allies, you're lowering yourself to the level of your real enemies. And while you're doing that, while you're building that concrete wall between yourself and the "mainstreamers," the religious right is drawing up a battle plan against their targets which doesn't make that distinction, to say the least
And that's who your targets should be. Because you and I (yes, me, the privileged, white cis male) together, by virtue of being queer, are their targets. And some of these real enemies (Santorum, etc.) are, yes, straight white men. That's because, whether it's the voters of Maine or the Supreme Court, the world is run by straights. Our rights may be ours, and we should not have to earn them, but these guys wrote the Constitution. They wrote the Bill of Rights. They voted to overturn the interracial marriage ban. For centuries, the disenfranchised have had to fight to gain and maintain their rights. But it's those in power--the Man we always like to "stick it to"--who, for better or worse, hold in their hands the power of the law that gives us our rights. This is the truth, as inconvenient as it may be, and we need to work with it, not against it. It's the fundamental truth about every battle for rights from the CRM to the recent November victories. In the history of these fights for our rights, some of these men held out open arms (JFK comes to mind). Most held out a clenched fist from which we had to wrestle (and often die for) our rights. And to turn up your nose at a helping hand is to give more power to the clenched fists. Allies don't hold out clenched fists. Allies don't sit on their hands. But there are plenty of queer people who do sit on their hands. They are less a part of the fight than the straight people who don't. The word fight is an action verb, after all.
Equality cannot be reached without the open arms of everyone. And you can't hold your arms open if you have a thousand-pound chip on your shoulder; it weighs you down a bit too much. These guys--the Man--have political power. But knowledge is also power. If you want the straight world to be educated (like those straights who voted for equality in November were), you may have to swallow your "indie" pride and do the educating. Take them to school, not jail. Sit them down, stand up there and lay out the plain facts for them on the chalkboard, instead of slapping them on the ass with a ruler. When you spend all your energy attacking them for being ostensibly uninformed, you're wasting time that could be spent giving them the power of information. Why not give them some? They're gonna need it. Cause, like it or not, we're gonna need them. We're gonna need them to be with us, regardless of whether or not they are of us.
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