The Gray Dot

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore has written a piece on AlterNet arguing that gay marriage is nothing to celebrate, because marriage is a flawed institution and because focusing on marriage draws attention away from more important causes.

I’ve heard this argument before and I have some real problems with it. I agree there are more critical things happening in the world, and that ending the war in Iraq (the example MBS uses) is certainly deserving of activists’ attention. But why should gay people be the ones to give up their rights? Why should we be the ones to lay down our placards and go fight for the more overarching good?

The right to marry doesn’t mean a whole lot to some queer people these days. We’ve been without the option for so many years, we’ve created a lot of our own alternative ways of being – some are in open unions, some have been with their partners in monogamous relationships for twenty years and feel as though they are married, and feel no need to get hitched just because the government is finally willing to sanction it.

But some queer people want the same things straight people want, and it’s the worst kind of ghettoisation to claim that there’s something inherantly suspect about that. Accusing those people of “1950s white picket fence ‘we’re just like you’ normalcy” is completely unhelpful, and a distortion of the reality that is many modern marriages. Choosing to get married is not about changing ourselves and our relationships to look like heterosexual relationships, to fit in with heterosexual expectations; it’s about the fact that our relationships and unions are the same. They are of equal importance and equal stature, and they should be treated equally by the law.

Yes, it’s not ideal that you have to actually get married to access some of the benefits (although in Canada, when gay marriage was legalised gay couples were also included under the common law which bestows the benefits of marriage on all couples who have lived together longer than a year. And in Britain, queer and straight couples who have been living together in a “relationship like marriage” for two years are treated as married for immigration purposes. As ever, the US is lagging behind because immigration is a federal matter and we’re still waiting for a gay marriage breakthrough at the federal level). We do actually need to do something though to establish permanence and inter-dependence for the purpose of deciding who you can sponsor to enter the country or make healthcare decisions for.

“In fact, the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care — all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be.”

Most of the noise being made about gay marriage is coming from the people campaigning against it. Are we to be held responsible for our own backlash? Gay marriage is always going to get more space in the media because HIV education and homeless care don’t generate headlines. That doesn’t mean we can’t actually work for those things too. Issues that affect gay and bi people more than straight people don’t always get a lot of coverage because we’re a minority – we’re not legally visible.

Same-sex relationships have gone through so many phases in societal perception. From being viewed as an abomination, to being not actively outlawed but quietly ignored like a gnat you hope will go away and leave you in peace, to being partially accepted. This is not the time to stop, just because things are pretty good if you happen to live in the right city. We need an end to all discrimination, we need our governments to make it absolutely clear that our relationships are not inherantly less than straight relationships.

“And let’s not forget the history of marriage as a legal method for keeping property within specific dynasties (property that originally included women and slaves).”

There have been many legal methods around the world and throughout history of restricting women’s freedom. Countless women have been enslaved in the name of various different religions, for example. But one person’s faith or system of belief need not agree with the oppressive dogma that has been associated with that religion by certain interpretations; nor need an individual marriage be anything like another one. Marriage need not be the flawed institution that it arguably is, and the first step towards changing that is making it more inclusive.

The problem is not “marriage”. The problem is that women and queer people have been marginalised in numerous societies by whatever means was available to the ruling class. One of those methods was to bar same-sex unions and other unconventional unions from gaining religious and governmental recognition.

I understand completely why some queer people don’t feel much like joining a club that wouldn’t have them for so many years. I understand if their attitude is, “No, we’ve made our own traditions and our own ways of being together, and we don’t need marriage to tell us that we’re a real couple.” I think that’s totally valid.

But the civil rights movement is about choice, and it’s about demanding what was righfully ours in the first place. If I’m going to make a stand against something, it better be because I made that decision and not because I was forced to make that stand by the rest of my community, who said, “No, that club’s not for us.”

Just because that “white picket fence” looks boring doesn’t mean it’s oppressive. And just because something looks radical doesn’t mean that it isn’t.

Last week the British comedian Johnny Vegas blustered on stage at a show in London and declared he’d like to be “inside” a female audience member. He then proceeded to have six other members of the audience carry her on stage, where he groped her breasts, pinned her to the floor and kissed her.

I don’t have much to add to this article. But something else struck me. Every time I read something in the Guardian blogs about government funding for childcare, the portrayal of women in the media, or some sexist ad campaign, I look at the top to see who wrote it. It’s never a guy.

Angry Black Woman is hosting a Carnival of Allies right now, calling for everyone who is an ally to some cause - fighting racism, homophobia, or what have you - to write about why it matters to them. And I think it’s important, to see who’s out there writing and campaigning about issues they care about even though they don’t affect them personally.

I write a lot about queer issues. That was never my intention for my life, I never set out to be a gay journalist. But I see so much happening and I think that if I don’t pick it up, nobody else is going to. And I think, how can I be gay and be in a position to talk publically about the issues that affect us, and not do so? How can I be a woman and not do something when I see another woman get whistled at in the street?

The men I know are not misogynist; the straight people I know are not homophobic. I wonder if sometimes we don’t really feel entitled to get involved in someone else’s fight, in case we say the wrong thing or say it in the wrong way.

I’m going to call myself out on this, too. Because I have plenty to say about the shooting of Sean Bell in my kitchen, but when it comes to writing about it, I choke. I grew up in a white, white, white town and I find myself really paralysed when it comes to talking about race, because I feel like I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Everyone has their own issues. But I think we could all be better allies, could all be more tuned into other kinds of oppression, and less hesitant to draw attention to them. If we were, maybe somebody in that audience would have got up, and got that girl the fuck down from the stage.

Just about everyone I met at Women, Action and the Media in Cambridge, MA last weekend seemed to be running a blog of some kind, and it’s been interesting over the last few days to see the responses to the conference starting to go up. I’ve read some really varied accounts of the weekend, which you’d expect in a conference of 600 people, but some of them surprised me. I’ve seen a couple people say they didn’t feel like it was welcoming for queer women, which I’ve definitely experienced in other all-female spaces, but I didn’t feel that at WAM at all.

I did notice the absence of the women at the top within the mainstream media. The majority of the country’s major newspapers, including the Boston Globe, weren’t represented at all. Maybe the organizers will manage to attract some of those people in the future as the event gets bigger. Also, as things that take place in the US tend to be, it was very American-centric. It would be awesome to see more Canadians make it down next year.

It’s only recently that I’ve really devoted myself to freelancing, and the way print journalism is going right now, sometimes I feel like we’re doomed before we even start. My girlfriend (who’s also in journalism) and I go to panels and talks on the future of the industry and come back depressed from the repeated reminders that a successful full-time freelancer can hope to make no more than around $24,000 a year. And the number of publications that don’t pay at all is staggering. There can’t be any other industry where you’re expected to do so much of your work for nothing. We’re not just talking about an unpaid internship to get your foot in the door; it seems like unless you want to write for exclusively big mainstream publications (and it can take a while to get there), you have to expect a real fluctuation in how much you get paid. I mean, I understand the tiny budgets small magazines operate on, and I’m happy to write for magazines I want to support, that are doing things no one else is doing (especially if I get a clipping I can use out of it). But there are publications that do make money for the people running them, that don’t need to exist, and none of those expect to finance themselves by refusing to pay their printers or their distributers. Why should the writers be the last on the list of who gets paid, or who gets paid an acceptable living wage?

So amongst all this gloom, which overwhelms us all occasionally, WAM was an overwhelmingly positive experience for me. These issues came up a lot, but there was a lot of positive discussion and a lot of evidence that there are people making their living at least partly from writing, and people involved in organizations that are doing incredible things. I was especially grateful for a session on writing non-fiction book proposals, which included Amy Caldwell from Beacon Press and Laura Mazer from Counterpoint Press. Publishing houses are often presented as these completely elusive entities where manuscripts go to die and where precious few actually make it into print, and it was nice to be reminded that books are getting published all the time, and to get that insight into what editors are looking for. Someone really needs to assemble a similar panel for fiction writing.

Journalism can be kind of isolating, so it was great to get together with other people who spend large chunks of their time hidden away with their computers. Assuming I’m not languishing in visa purgatory in Britain this time next year, I’ll definitely try to head down again for WAM 2009.

If you’re interested in reading some of the other post-conference write-ups, they’re up at The Silence of Our Friends, Jen Angel’s blog, Viva La Feminista, Racialicious, The Coup Magazine and Being Amber Rhea, to mention just a few. There’s also a discussion of Helen Thomas’ keynote address over at the Shameless blog, and write-ups of individual sessions here, here and here.

I’ve been meaning to do an overhaul on my website for a while, and now that I’m back from a weekend in Boston at the Women, Action and the Media conference and energised from proximity to star bloggers and numerous assertions that the media is increasingly going digital, this seemed like as good a time as any.

I did a few different things with this blog’s previous incarnation. I wrote longer and more opinionated reviews of the shows I saw or reviewed during the Edinburgh Festival, I wrote responses to news articles that drove me crazy, and I talked about the bizarre things I learned about the corporate world at the temp jobs I took for a few weeks after I graduated. And I’m probably going to do much the same over here. Except that I’m going to integrate this a little more with my professional life by posting links to my published articles on the Publications page.

And I’m going to post more regularly.