socialistexan:

Usually during Pride month, but especially this Pride month before the clusterfuck of a current Presidental Administation dominated all of our times, I see a lot of posts on how we should reject Marriage as a large victory because it is for the “mainstream” gay movement to show straights we are “just like them,” and that it took resources from other, more seemingly “radical,” issues we could be fighting. All of that is then followed by a, justified, flood

I never know where to fall on this, because, here’s the thing, both sides of this argument are kind of right here. People, especially LGBTQ people old enough remeber the peak of the AIDS crisis, are absolutely correct that the reason we even made marriage a priority is because gay people weren’t even allowed visitation rights during the AIDS crisis or life insurance benefits. That it only exacerbated insituitonal homophobia. These are all true, absolutely, and a lot of younger gay and trans people would benefit from learning our history between Stonewall and Obergefell.

But, even with its radical roots, the marriage issue, like much of the gay rights movement, was absoutely highjacked by the ‘just like you" neoliberal crowd for their own purposes. One of those purposes was to push people that didn’t fit what they wanted as their image. By the white upper middle class gay men who felt slighted and didn’t want to be associated with the “wrong” kind of gays. To these people any inch given to the undesirable gay people, from butch lesbiand to trans people, would force conservatives to “Take away” the thing that made them feel normal.

Consider Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is a “moderate” (who just a day ago said, in an article in which he advocated giving Trump his Wall to Appease him, he supports banning access to health care for trans kids and compared it conversion therapy) just this past Janurary blamed a 2% drop in popular support for gay rights on the expsure of trans people in politics and the “far left” taking (back) over the Gay rights movment. This is why people too young to remeber AIDS think Marriage was a bougie “just like you” politics:

Like, yes, we should absoluely know the history of why marriage became such a central issue for us, but we should also remember how it was highjacked and used to strip the movment of any radical aspects and make it a white gay male centric movement.