GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

During its first week, GaysDefendMarriage.com has unfortunately explored only LGBT reasons from the right to oppose the gay community’s marriage obsession. So I’ve added the perspective of the “Beyond Marriage” supporters to the “Other Voices” page on this site. This list of left-of-center LGBT activists concerned about the misplaced emphasis on marriage as a solution to our community’s problems reads like a who’s who of important, famous, and influential LGBT people, especially women and people of color. To name a few: Dorothy Allison, Joan E. Biren (JEB), Michael Bronski, Mandy Carter, John D’Emilio, Martin Duberman, Leslie Feinberg, Chai Feldblum, Amber Hollibaugh, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Jonathan Ned Katz, Kerry Lobel, Craig Lucas, Armistead Maupin, Terrence McNally, Holly Near, Joan Nestle, Judith Plaskow, Ruthann Robson, Nadine Smith, Paula Vogel, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Rebecca Alpert. The last quarter century of gay and lesbian history and culture would have been significantly impoverished without the contributions of these major figures. Yet the media never expresses how a major subset of LGBT leaders don’t agree that marriage should be at the top of the community’s agenda.

Now, I certainly don’t think any Beyond Marriage supporter agrees with me that society benefits from supporting male-female marriage. But I think we agree on more than we disagree on. For example, the Beyond Marriage people and I agree that:

• It is wrong to extend rights to same-sex couples in conjugal relationships that we deny to same-sex pairs in non-conjugal relationships.

• The issues facing LGBT people who are poor, immigrants, and people of color should receive much more attention than they currently do. The wealthy funders of the LGBT movement should stop insisting that the issues that benefit them the most take priority over what’s important to people who contribute in non-financial ways.

• Support for flexible domestic partnership laws (like the one in Salt Lake City) which provide “material support for the widest possible range of household formations” is vastly preferable to narrow advocacy for same-sex marriage.

• The LGBT community ought to drop its marriage obsession and explore a broader set of issues that affect gays and lesbians all over the country, especially those who are poor, sick, of color, and not in conventional families.

I have invited some Beyond Marriage people to post on our blog, which I want to be a comfortable home for everyone who disagrees with the LGBT leadership’s marriage fixation, whether because they don’t want to privilege any one kind of relationship over any other kind, or whether they don’t want to undermine man-woman marriage.