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Monday, April 08, 2013

The Coming Gaybagger Wave

Roy Edroso is so right:
...about the slow shift rightbloggers are making, in their hour of defeat, from yelling about gay marriage to yelling about straight marriage [he is speaking, no doubt, about the whole flabbergasting recent "Down with divorce and the Pill!" cohort who apparently throng the southern swamps of the neo-Confederacy and tornado-torn turf of the flyover Red States --d]. You may not notice it yet, but I predict it'll be a comer; it'll be their chance to do outreach to gay people by giving the scolds, nags, and shrews in their community a place of welcome. Hell, they might even turn Andrew Sullivan back around
So very many awful gay men (not like wonderfully righteously gaily yours truly, natch) truly seem to experience "homophobia" primarily as their heartbreaking exclusion from white-racist patriarchal plutocratic privileges to which they otherwise feel themselves perfectly entitled, and you better believe that as soon as they're feeling more secure in their right to send other queers to kill brown people for desirable petrochemicals while they themselves consult their wedding planners and adopt however many squalling infants it takes to make the whole thing seem real they're going to drop the Democrats and vote for tax cutz and starve the poorz in cha cha heels. Just thinking of the rentboy savings austerity brings would probably be enough to merge the Human Rights Campaign with the Log Cabin Republicans for some of these guys.

Needless to say, housing, employment, adoption, healthcare, and immigration discrimination as well as exclusion from prevailing institutions like marriage and the military both express and exacerbate the marginalization and abjection of lgbtq citizens and had and has to be fought as such to the death -- and one may hope that the re-articulation of these mainstream institutional spaces and prevailing norms will render their stratifications by racist and patriarchal norms more capacious, and one has to say as a fighter against reprosexuality and militarism and consumerism that it is a more forceful intervention to reject these values when one is welcomed into them than when one is always already excluded from them in any case. But all that said and understood, there's still a long, long way to go from inclusion in the mainstream for those of us for whom the sense of queer politics would be to make the world more equitable-in-diversity, more secular-sustainable, more peaceful-consensual, more creative-expressive, more fabulous for real. Those who mistake the point of departure for the destination are going to discover soon enough that it gets better may still be a shit sandwich.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> the whole flabbergasting recent "Down with divorce and the Pill!"
> cohort who apparently throng the southern swamps of the
> neo-Confederacy

Beneath each tree
In Tennessee
Erotic books are read.
And when alligators thud
Through the Mississippi mud
Sex rears its ugly head.

-- Noel Coward, "I Like America"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ1niLkPaOo