So, I have to say it. I love Helen Razer. I love her in that kind of ‘fan girl’ kind of way (or really I should probably say fan boy). I love watching her tweet, I love reading her blog, and there is that part of me that just hopes, one day, that she will respond to me, and I we will be Twitter friends forever.
And there’s nothing like when she gets going on Twitter. And boy did she get going yesterday. As people were covering our screens with Human Rights Campaign logos (urgh, worst), she let rip on same-sex marriage. And it was amazing. If you missed it, her are some of my favourites:
If your “progressive” argument does not extend much past “I Choose My Choice!” and crying at sappy GetUp ads, you might need another think.
Your terror of perversion is palpable. Why do you want to domesticate queer by applauding that dull portion of it that craves marriage?
Putting queer in the stultifying museum of marriage will see its death. You don’t want difference. You want homogeneity.
Queer people are NOT JUST LIKE YOU. They are different. Stop fighting for their “right” to sameness.
This year, Mardi Gras had “Parental Warnings” on its arts events and every fucker had a fresh little kid in a Baby Bjorn and I am ashamed.
Queer is dead. Instead we have pale gay privations of straight. I am cross & now I am going to have to become a poly just to make a point.
If the “left” is going to continue to fret about marriage and radio hosts I am going to get more annoying, more perverse and more cats.
And what a fuss it caused. Suddenly (actually, not really suddenly, people do this to her all the time), people were jumping all over her – calling her a narcissist, a ‘self-hating lesbian’ (note that she doesn’t actually identify as a lesbian), that she was bitter and irrational because she had been dumped (because that’s not sexist at all), and telling her that she hated the idea of equality and was denying people their free ‘choices’.
But do you know what, even though she can be a bit rough about it, it’s about time we dealt with the fact that Helen is right. I could go over the many reasons she’s right, from the fact that we shouldn’t want to be buying into a heteronormative world, that the choices we are fighting for are completely false and restrictive, that we are just trying to normalise queerness when the whole debate should be about getting rid of the idea of ‘normal’. For fuck sake, there are so many problems with the same-sex marriage movement it’s hard to start.
But do you know what I hate more than the same-sex marriage movement; it’s the way people in the movement react to those who want to challenge and question the same-sex marriage movement. It’s the people who don’t like it when we say that we shouldn’t compare the same-sex marriage movement to the civil rights struggle, the people who have a go at you if you say sexuality is a choice, the people who shut out trans*, intersex and poly people from the debate/movement as it will make ‘winning marriage more difficult’.
Yesterday these people were calling Helen Razer a self-loathing lesbian. They were telling her that she hated queer people because she didn’t like the idea of marriage. I mean forget the fact that you can have an argument that both supports full equality, and be critical of the movement and the institution of marriage (and therefore thinks that we should be putting our energy into that rather than getting access to an oppressive institution), but it seems to me that the so called ‘queer’ movement is now starting to use the very language that heteros have been using against us for centuries.
And it’s not just directed at Helen Razer. I’ve seen marriage advocates tell members of the poly community that they’re not going to fight for poly marriage because poly people don’t want it, and because ‘marriage is between two people’ (sounds a lot like ‘marriage is between a man and a woman’ to me). I’ve seen prominent queer actors told to shut it when they say that it was their choice to be queer. I’ve seen the poly community be told that they can’t march in Mardi Gras, because they’re simply not queer enough.
I mean for fucks sake.
Not only do we have to want to get married now (they tell me that if I don’t want to get married I don’t have to, which is all well and good until you wage a campaign which bases itself on the idea that marriage is the epitome of love), but if we decide we want to question it we become pariahs within our community. Support marriage or get the fuck out apparently – if you don’t support it, if you don’t fit within the marriage mould, or if you think that fighting oppressive institutions is more important than trying to get into them, then you’re not longer part of our movement – or even worse, you hate freedom and queer people.
I mean, wtf? This is my movement as much as it is yours. This is my liberation as much as it is yours. As a long as you talk down to me because I hold different views, as long as you push me aside because I’m not a mono gay man or lesbian woman, as long as you tell me that marriage is the be-all and end-all of our movement, then I will know that you are the one really hurting our chances of liberation.