GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

I always expected most gays and lesbians to disagree with my public defense of man-woman marriage. But what I was completely unprepared for was the violent vitriol directed my way by people who disagreed with my column on the consequences of same-sex marriage in California that appeared in three of the 25 largest metropolitan daily newspapers in the country.

Dan Savage, syndicated columnist and editor of the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger, used a vulgar four-letter word to describe my opinion piece, and called me a “self-hating douchebag” and “a bit of a nut.” His readers referred to me as a freakshow, a basket case, “too ugly to get it,” and a waste of flesh. At a gay Web site, I was called a fringe loony, a Jewish Nazi, a religious nut case, evil, “fugly,” a gullible idiot, seriously unstable, just stupid, a moron, an ignorant, self-loathing tool, and my favorite – a turd sculpture of Jimmy Kimmel.

Some of the language has been homophobic, such as the Stranger reader who referred to me as a deranged, soulless pervert, and the Web user who called me a ridiculously overwrought drama queen.

At its worst, the condemnation of an LGBT writer who has the chutzpah to defend man-woman marriage became murderous. One reader wrote: “I’ll give him a gun so he can off himself…. because he’s a faggot.” Another echoed: “I’ll just say I hope someone sticks a hand grenade up his ass. Deserves it.” A third was thankfully more gentle, suggesting I die of natural causes: “He’s a freak and deserves cancer.”

Now, the worst language I ever use to refer to supporters of same-sex marriage is “selfish and cruel.” I’ve looked around the Web, and mainstream supporters of man-woman marriage never call LGBT people faggots or sodomites or perverts or evil.

Why does the marriage-equality movement have such a vehement reaction to someone with same-sex attractions who doesn’t want to overturn centuries of a marriage-oriented society? I think it’s because it’s not a civil-rights movement at all, but a temper tantrum by the most selfish American subculture since the Hippies. Why else would gays spend millions of dollars on a purely semantic and symbolic issue in California, while ignoring many real needs facing LGBT people in distress? Why else would so many gays and lesbians be unable to simply agree to disagree, and instead spew such vicious bile at someone like me?

This slash-and-burn strategy against supporters of man-woman marriage is not just wrong, it’s extremely unwise. Most Americans disagree with same-sex marriage, but they are also sympathetic to some protections for same-sex couples. I know I feel that way. But I also believe in issues like redistricting reform and medical marijuana. If marriage defenders spend the next five months fighting and winning the battle to overturn the California Supreme Court ruling, and we encounter the kind of contempt and foul play represented by Dan Savage and his ilk, how likely are we to then put a lot of energy toward protecting gay and lesbian couples without marriage? I know I’m more likely to move on to issues like medical marijuana. No cancer patient suffering from nausea ever called me a douchebag.

Many American communities – such as the Catholic community, the Jewish community, and the African-American community – put a lot of resources behind helping the worst-off people with those identities. There are mentoring programs, food assistance programs, even direct aid. A large percentage of the resources raised from wealthy Catholics, Jews, and blacks is spent on the needs and problems faced by Catholics, Jews, and blacks who are the most vulnerable.

It doesn’t work that way in the LGBT community. In fact, the gay community tends to prioritize the issues that are most important to the wealthy white donors to LGBT organizations, and it shows little interest in the problems facing people in pain who aren’t like them.

The most blatant example is the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was one of the top 2-3 issues to the gay and lesbian community when I first became a gay activist in the summer of 1990. The gay white men who funded the gay movement at the time were dying of AIDS, and many of their friends were suffering and dying as well. So education, treatment, and funding for AIDS was a major priority to the gay movement.

Not that you’d know it by reading the gay press, but HIV is still a major crisis facing the LGBT community. More than 70 percent of new HIV infections in men happen because of gay sex. One in three African-American gay men is HIV-positive. In some cities it’s nearly one in two. But because the specific gay people suffering from HIV these days can’t afford to contribute to LGBT organizations, the epidemic has been de-emphasized by the gay movement in favor of issues more important to its middle- and upper-class funders, like marriage. The Web site of the nation’s biggest gay political organization, hrc.org, mentions marriage more than five times as often as AIDS.

And what about prison issues? In the 1980s and 1990s, the Bromfield Street Educational Foundation worked to help gay and lesbian prisoners, who are certainly among the most vulnerable members of our community. LGBT prisoners face rape, humiliation, and beatings every day of their incarceration. Studies show transgender people are overrepresented in prisons. Why isn’t the LGBT movement paying any attention to prisoners any more? The Web sites of the Human Rights Campaign and the Stonewall Democrats, among others, are completely silent about the needs of gay people in prison. Believe me, incarcerated gay men have far more important things to worry about than the “freedom to marry.”

I could go on. While I don’t expect the leadership of the LGBT movement to agree with me that trying to redefine marriage is both wrong and counterproductive, surely we could find a compromise that would allow them to continue to advocate for same-sex marriage while also starting to help the most vulnerable members of our community. I propose that gay and lesbian organizations cut their “marriage budgets” in half, and spend the leftover money and staff time working on issues that affect LGBT people who are poor, sick, of color, immigrants, in prison, and otherwise in dire straits, thereby ignoring the irrelevant fact that such people are unlikely to ever be able to afford to go to $275-a-plate dinners at fancy hotels where people wear tuxedos and bid on lavish trips in silent auctions.

I would love to hear a defender of the gay community’s current priorities explain what’s wrong with my proposal.

Transgender blogger Monica Roberts writes at Transgriot why she and other transgender people oppose the prioritization of marriage:

The first gay-only rights bill, passed in Wisconsin in 1982 has been that way for 25 years now. There’s no indication by the GLB leadership in that state if they’ll move to rectify the omission of their transgender brothers and sisters or if they’ll assign it a priority as high as the one they place on marriage equality….

Not long after [the National Center for Transgender Equality's] startup, the shift of the gay and lesbian rights priority from successfully passing inclusive rights laws on a state by state basis to marriage equality started. Transgender leaders such as [the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition's] Vanessa Edwards Foster warned that this was a mistake to push the issue a year before the 2004 elections, but once again transgender concerns were brushed aside.

When the Religious Right backlash resulted in gay marriage constitutional bans overwhelmingly passed in 18 states during that election year, the transgender community was proven correct once again.

This irritated the transgender community on multiple levels. The marriage-as-a-priority gays refused to acknowledge that not only did their actions cause the backlash to gay marriage and possibly generated enough conservative voters at the polls to help propel George W. Bush to a second term, despite the evidence of dozens of state [Defense of Marriage Acts] and anti-marriage constitutional amendments, they are in severe denial about it.

Transpeople are also miffed at the lack of [the Human Rights Campaign] concern as to how this backlash specifically affects our lives. Transpeople were never consulted and had no input whatsoever regarding the push for gay marriage, but the Religious Right anti-gay marriage laws get interpreted by the courts in such a way that they had the negative affect in some cases of wiping out existing pro-trans marriage and even identity rights.

We’re also pissed that the same people who demanded (and still demand) that we accept ‘incremental progress’ when it comes to trans rights hypocritically have no intention of accepting ‘incremental progress’ when it comes to legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

UPDATE: Monica has asked me to make it clear that she adamantly opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment.

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.