Oh and I want to fight all the Gen Z kids who are like ‘teehee, we’ll just do lavender marriages instead!’ Some of us are adults who want equal rights and protections under the law of our land.
Yeah, we wanted legal marriages because your spouse's horrid family could show up, get you kicked out of the hospital, steal all of their stuff, and there was nothing you could do about it.
When my wife went in for surgery before we got married, it was me and her horrifically homophobic mother in the surgery center waiting room and I knew without a doubt that if anything went wrong, I would be expected to leave without any access to her belongings, the pictures of us on her phone, or the funeral itself, and the obituary would not mention me or our relationship at all.
And that was after almost a decade of marriage equality! The fear and anxiety leading up to that surgery and the recovery process after reinforced for me just how important marriage can be. It’s a form of self-determination.
Lest we forget
(Image of Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers) by John Boskovich)
I had to stop listening to Bad Gays — the book, not the podcast — because the authors, who are old enough to know better, started going off on "assimilationist" gayness as the worst of sins. And while it is absolutely true that it's pretty fucked up the way the community fractured after the introduction of AZT & related therapies in the mid/late 90s, once AIDS was "over" (Fuck you, Andrew Sullivan), the way that they talked about queers who — gasp — wanted to get married and live "normal" lives kinda made me sick.
There is a difference between "we got what we wanted so fuck you now that our lives are no longer threatened" and "you suck because you want to be able to not have your partner's family steal your home, your life savings, your possessions, if something happens." I am so tired of that being presented as a 1/0 binary choice, as if those of us who organized for one thing weren't often also involved in other activism.
