A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

-- Woody Allen as Alvy Singer, Annie Hall

Maine's governor ran for office opposing same sex marriage. He then had an epiphany and changed his position. Then, after getting elected in opposition to same sex marriage, he signed a bill legalizing it.

Do you think that being baited and switched might have motivated 5% of the voters to slap him down?

Do you think that a court decision in California that overturned a voter initiative might have driven turnout?

Same sex marriage is not ripe yet, given that in the 31 times that it has appeared on the ballot it has been defeated 31 times. The only reason why same sex marriage is stuck at the top of our agenda like a mister hankey waiting to plop on Christmas morning, is because conservative homosexuals with too much money paid lawyers to put it there, not because it was a priority of our communities.

What's going on here is that same sex marriage proponents do not have the same neural wiring as the common flatworm does. The flatworm is able to detect an obstacle in its path and change course to get around it. Same sex marriage fetishists are not as aware of their political surroundings and apparently will bash their collective heads against the wall until beaten to a pulp because it feels good to them. Their fighting of their good fight is what is important to them, irrespective of the consequences to the rest of us for their sucking out of momentum from our movement.

It is not acceptable to continue to focus on losing contests when there are winnable contests, political low hanging fruit out there. But those who have never lived anywhere else but in blue states on the coast don't understand that the protections we all take for granted, and, yes, there are other gay rights than marriage and military, are simply not available to tens of millions of queers in the flyover.

And I find it curious that progressive LGBT are sucked into marriage and military, given the assimilationist conservatism of those institutions and the fact that those issues have been given a push by our non-progressive hetero allies, Clinton and Newsom. A strong movement would have told them lovingly but firmly thanks, but our priorities, as proved by polling taken in the 1990s, are elsewhere. But the veal pen cowered and was led around by rings in the nose.

ENDA is being heard in the Senate today and since Barney Frank hired a transgendered aide, apparently the preparatory work has been done to close the gap from 2007 and protect all queers. Short of federal suspect class protections for LGBT, talk about eyes on the prize, ENDA and a housing protections package are the next logical move to actually win a contest and put our movement back on track.

Imagine the number of activists who would be freed from local up-hill employment and housing protection campaigns if federal protections passed, freed up to work on more ambitious federal campaigns.

If the marriage fetishists continue to press on oblivious, not learning like the flat worm does, then that will be solid proof that our movement is led by masochistic bottoms who cannot define themselves outside of permanent victim status, the ones who passed hate crimes protections (I can't even leave my house without fear of getting beat up) as our first federal victory, who cannot walk in power.

-marc

I'm angry, sad, frustrated, etc. I hate having to comfort my fiance because some assholes 3,000 miles away told him he's perverted.

Are you all going to cower in a corner feeling like victims until nobody doesn't like you?

Or are you going to figure out a way to learn from your defeats and take a different path?

I could care less what our opponents think of us in Maine or California. The dangers here are the political consequences of putting forth an image of weakness, of unbroken defeat which empowers people to act on their hatred. Had we been making progress, then that space would be closed. In losing, it opens up.

The reason why you cower is that our side failed in a fight we picked prematurely, not that the other side succeeded.

Sucks!The last time I checked, most gay men felt that sucking was a good thing, although the matter clearly requires a full-throated and deeper level of research. Does that make me a pervert? Good.

-marc

14 years ago, I helped co-found the Freedom to Marry Task Force of Northern California, created the mass committment ceremony of over 200 couples the Saturday before Pride down on the Embarcadero and won Best Float that year for the Freedom to Marry. I was then hired by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund to help with the gay marriage trial in Hawaii.

The predominant motivation for me in helping launch this movement was to earn substantial and prolonged media to fuel an international dialogue about what it means to be LGBT.

I realized that the majority of the global communications about us for decades had been animalistic – meaning it was about death, disease, and predatory sex-crazed Nellie-men and ax-wielding lesbians out to target the hetero-world. Classic boogey-men (and wymyn) tactic.

This was and is an opportunity to elevate the conversation and change the paradigm to a more humanizing discussion of us full human beings capable of love and relationships. (We haven’t even gotten to our stunning brilliance, artistry, heroism, etc.)

Foremost - I wanted to change the internal dialogue that goes on between our ears as queer people. I wanted to combat all of the negative programming we had internalized from a constant and lifelong onslaught of homophobia.

Only then - when we recognized our true selves - could we go out and challenge the hetero-dominant culture's nattering naybobs of negativity.

Achieving a set of 'rights' was a secondary goal to changing and uplifting our spirits as a people. As disabled people with AIDS, my partner and I cannot even benefit from the rights being advocated for.

As I said at the rally last night, the world is now talking about us as people who love and have relationships. We have been influencing the global public dialogue and changing hearts and minds for 14 years now.

We have already won the battle because we have captured the hearts and minds of the next generation. We are just waiting for the haters who have been denying our humanity finally die off or get out of the way for our win to reveal itself.

In the meantime, we keep fighting. We keep pushing. We keep changing hearts and minds.

We are not defeated.

We have already won the battle because we have captured the hearts and minds of the next generation. We are just waiting for the haters who have been denying our humanity finally die off or get out of the way for our win to reveal itself.

We have lost the marriage battle. We have lost the military battle. It is one thing to put on a brave front in public and quite another to live steeped in denial.

What does it mean to be LGBT? To trade our vibrant and diverse culture for one of sedentary, assimilationist commitment? Is liberation found by seeking acceptability in the institutions of "hetero dominant culture?" Or do queers insist upon self definition, of equal but unique?

LGBT have made the strides we have not because of any organized movement, not because of activists, rather in spite of the professional activists and their failures to achieve victories, tens of millions of everyday LGBT folks have lived our lives out and proud in every community in this country.

Most LGBT have not internalized negative programming for being LGBT. The news story is that in many places we have gained in strength in an increasingly less hostile environment. Most of us do not see ourselves only as victims, but the insistence on focusing on losing campaigns probably makes people feel more victimized. Just like the rich are dependent upon a steady supply of the poor, so are activists dependent upon a steady supply of victims.

The task before us is finite, yet it does not appear that the HRC has an end game in sight, largely because there would be no more gala dinners should that be the case, and Joe Solmonese and his crowd do not want to be reduced to gay Al Sharptons.

The best way to ensure that we don't win marriage until the last possible moment is to trumpet the proposition that we win when they die off.

This culture of coddling activists who invest so much of our community's energy in losing struggles, of holding them harmless from accountability does as much damage to the LGBT communities as the phobes do and it has got to stop.

-marc

@marc

Are you all going to cower in a corner feeling like victims until nobody doesn't like you?

Who are you calling "you all"?

And thank you, Brian, for your interesting take. There have been some humanizing developments from this whole thing, not to mention a huge visibility factor that's changed our public narrative from "sickly" to "family."

I'd also just like to throw out there that in fact it was the conservative push for a federal anti-marriage amendment that galvanized this fight and took it to a different level. Rovian tactics that pretty mush ensnared us and dictated our activist course for the past 5 years, rather than, yes, focusing on non-normative discrimination. But what were we going to do, but start fighting back, even if it resulted in raising tons of money for "the church" and a few spiteful setbacks.

I'd also just like to throw out there that in fact it was the conservative push for a federal anti-marriage amendment that galvanized this fight and took it to a different level.

Wrong. DOMA was backlash was due to lawsuits initiated by conservative homosexuals in the early/mid 1990s seeking marriage rights in the states, namely the impending legalization in Hawaii.

Rovian tactics that pretty much ensnared us and dictated our activist course for the past 5 years, rather than, yes, focusing on non-normative discrimination.

Wronger. Your use of the passive voice betrays your ignorance of our own history. Hyper entitled and privileged elements of our community picked these fights selfishly because they did not take the time to consider the consequences on others of their actions because they really did not give a fuck.

If you're going to pick a fight and your opponent brings a gun to that fight and all you have is a knife, then you can either stay around and get shot, or you can figure out how to find a gun or more people with knives then they have bullets to make it a fight you can win.

Or, you can go to the political gym, bulk up on some organizing muscle, and follow a program that will make it so that nobody wants to fight you. But unlike the ads on television that promise eight pack abs in six weeks, that takes years of disciplined training to accomplish.

Some organizing work has been done, but I think we have a 0-31 decision that such work has not been sufficient to win any contest. It is time for the intellectual authors of the marriage movement, both attorneys and those who would posit themselves as campaign consultants, to do what any fighter who has taken 10 years to rack up a 0-31 record would do.

-marc

Marc, you're older, so maybe you see things differently than my generation.

Most of us didn't give a crap about gay marriage until 2004 (not DOMA, the proposed constitutional amendment). And a lot of us who considered ourselves radical certainly didn't. Do you think we all suddenly fell under the spell of your "rich gays"? No, we got played by all sides. As someone who worked in the gay press in the early 2000s, I can assure you that same-sex marriage on equal footing with the rest of our concerns -- in fact, we were more riveted by the Gay Games/Out Games split and whether LOGO TV would launch than forming a state-by-state strategy to "win" marriage equality (a term that was pretty much unheard of then.)

Sure, Canada winning it in 2003 fired the fight -- and gave Bush an in for paranoia politics. That's what I meant by galvanizing and taking things to a different level.

And please learn what the passive voice is.

If you know your history, Then you would know where you coming from, Then you wouldn't have to ask me, Who the 'eck do I think I am.

Bob Marley, Buffalo Soldier, 1980.

In the 1990s, like in 2004, marriage became an issue because conservative elements made it an issue, not because LGBT wanted our limited resources to prioritize same sex marriage.

In the 1990s, it was rich gay men funding lawsuits.

In 2004, it was Gavin Newsom (who is still listed on his baseball card as a het) consuming the gay corpse of the progressive Gonzalez campaign by making a play for District 8 by throwing the gays a major crumb.

And it must not go without saying that Newsom's winning of District 8 with that play held all sorts of negative implications for progressives at all levels. It has cost several progressive ballot measures that Newsom has opposed.

Newsom's opportunistic grand gesture gave the GOP a target with which to mobilize voters in 2004 to arguably elect Bush II to his first legitimate term. And it ended up with us losing Prop 8 last year.

More people have been displaced from San Francisco and have been killed in by our tax dollars in South Asia because of the consequences of that play on same sex marriage. The consequences of playing high stakes public policy poker cannot be misunderestimated.

Do you think that Newsom, given his personality, gave a flying fuck about the consequences of his actions after he'd been reelected and had D8 in his pocket to sink progressive ballot measures?

And all this to expand access to an institution designed to propagate the legitimacy of property rights! Progressive, my ass!

As someone who worked in the gay press in the early 2000s, I can assure you that same-sex marriage on equal footing with the rest of our concerns

The professional gay apparatus, advocates and the press, do not necessarily represent the gay community. The press represents the priorities of their publishers, editors and reporters and they tend to cover the advocates who represent to varying degrees their membership.

So my point holds, Newsom's action did tip the balance in favor of same sex marriage amongst the LGBT community where it had been supported to varying degrees but was not a priority for many. But Newsom's play happened before public opinion was beginning to align with the newly minted LGBT consensus.

To paraphrase the President, the arc of the legal time lines has not bent towards justice. You got played and we're still suffering from that.

One thing I learned as a young activist working around hippie fossils from the 1960s was that old folks tend to think that they can do the same thing over and again and it will eventually work, or that they can do something that worked 20 years ago under different circumstances and it will work again because it worked before.

At this point, both young and old activists are caught in this trap. This fossil is not telling folks what to do, just that what they're doing is not working and it is making things worse. Stop it. Don't do anything more.

Immediately the community must demand that every lawsuit and bill on same sex marriage which might have resolution at the ballot within the next five years must be abandoned now.

Yes, Marc -- I'm earning well into six figures writing about alternaqueers for the Guardian. How beholden I am! Heaven forfend anyone be a writer or editor out of radical passion, regardless of what their "segment" wishes to hear.

That said, I think your points about the economics of this struggle raise some really good points, beyond your legitimate gripes about the foregrounding of property rights.

There's an argument that same-sex marriage does indeed have economic benefits for poor queers as well. Or, at least, they won't have to lie as much by pretend marrying the opposite gender to receive them. And don't all lawsuits have to have "rich" people behind them. OR at least rich institutions backing the plaintiffs.

But wait: I'm not sure about the economic stations of some of the major same-sex court case plaintiffs, but the fact that several couples had to sign on to both the Massachusetts and California cases certainly says that it wasn't just isolated pairs of rich queers going rogue. It takes a middle-class village, apparently.

I admire your strong feelings that this is the wrong fight. Meanwhile ENDA, an inclusive one, seems to be moving forward, and the hate crimes bill has been signed. All while a lot of money has gone toward marriage. So I'm not sure if I see how other things are being lost on the legal level during the fight for marriage.

Now, if all that money could go to queer youth shelters and meth recovery and affordable LGBT senior housing, it certainly would be something. But you seem to think that "rich gays" are willing to be interested in that, even IF we had federal same-sex marriage recognition. Which is a bit laughable. Equality doesn't mean that people aren't self-absorbed.

"We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you're going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you."

-- Harry Hay

Marke B, perhaps I was not clear. My point was that what the LGBT media covers is not necessarily an accurate reflection of political sentiment in the LGBT communities they would speak for. That is, because the LGBT press covered same sex marriage extensive did not mean that a majority of LGBT felt like we had skin in that game.

For instance, the BAR recently celebrated Captain Greg Corrales appointment as Mission Station Captain because Castro merchants like him. Of course, any cop with a record of racism or sexism comparable to Corrales' record of homophobia or discipline would never be made district Captain again. What would you believe was more representative of LGBT sentiment towards Corrales, the BAR's coverage of Castro merchants or the thousands of moderate income queers living in the Mission? The media always frames.

Under no circumstances would I claim that BBB was paying his staff six figures, I mean, seriously.

Lawsuits do not fund themselves, and they are essentially bottomless pits, vampire squids that suck out any available money. The lawsuits that initiated same sex marriage in the 1990s were not funded by grassroots groups. To the contrary, they were the patrician projects of conservative, white, male A-Gays, a political fox hunt as it were. Tally Ho!

In this case, it is as if the A-Gays were Dick Cheney, the LGBT communities are Harry Whittington, and we're all going quail hunting in South Texas.

The marriage campaign started in the mid 1990s, and it was led by conservative gay white men. Even the "game changing" Newsom incident was one led by a moderate/conservative straight (at last report) white man, hardly an initiative originating from progressive queer San Francisco. Yes, as the movement became more mainstream within the LGBT communities after ten years, we began to see a broader participatory coalition.

After 2004 or so, coverage from the gay press or not, the community came to the point where the majority of us had skin in the game.

But if you look at the leadership of EQCA and the campaign team that lost Prop 8, as I did at the event held last March at Michael Petrelis' behest, they don't look or think like our community. At least Kate Kendall had the integrity to apologize to the community for her mistakes. Would that others similarly situated had such an other-centered epiphany.

Same sex marriage does bring some important economic benefits, but not everyone will avail themselves of them. To the contrary, everyone who is not one of those wealthy gay white conservative men will need to compete for a job and will need compete for housing. When the money and talent are equal, then we need laws to ensure that the balance is not tipped against LGBT because of bigotry in securing the basic economic necessities to live.

Similarly, very few of us will choose to join the military, a job with the well reasonable known side effect of death. That should be an option, but I remain of the mind that the ban on LGBT service members is a Good First Step towards a military solely comprised of straight, white, christian, conservative men to serve as cannon fodder for a brutal, criminal empire.

A community's values are reflected in the way that it prioritizes its agenda, just like a people's values are reflected in the public budget. Either that priority list can reflect sentiment of a community, in which case we'd be ordering our agenda with workplace protections, housing protections, marriage, adoption and then military, or we can allow those with the most resources to leverage their privilege to force their way to the front of the line.

In San Francisco, in California, marriage is all that is left for us to fight for, fortunately. But in the flyover, where I was a gay teenager in Texas, such is not the case. For a community that is tying itself up in knots to be perceived as the most willing to fall on a sword to prove the extent of their commitment to ensure that LGB don't get any rights until T can come along, I find it an utter disconnect that we relatively privileged LGBT here who have rights don't offer up the same consideration to folks in the flyover by putting off the divisive and destructive marriage fight until we can win basic federal economic rights for the most vulnerable queers.

I've been lucky enough to have met my life partner, who I still call my husband, 20 years ago (six weeks after leaving Texas!) at a punk show at the Gilman Project in Berkeley. Sure, we support same sex marriage and even got married by Mark Sanchez in 2004, mainly to break the law and bust through a phalanx of fundie Christians at City Hall to do the deed. But once marriage became legal in 2008, it was just not that big a deal. You don't need marriage to legitimate a relationship, and marriage cannot in and of itself legitimate or even stabilize a relationship.

I really fear that younger queers are seeing this fixation on marriage as cause d'jour, and are all running off to tie the knot in their early/mid 20s, and are going to have a rude awakening when the story book fairy tail does not have a happy ending.

I prefer gay politics back when it was all about sucking hard dick, not about performing philosophical gymnastics to subsume homoSEXuals into a gender based model. The thing that scares opponents to same sex marriage is the notion of two or more erect cocks in flagrante delicto, not whether there is a penis under that dress.

Funny oveheard: after the MOMA Avedon exhibit, having a Blue Bottle at the sculpture garden, overheard a tourist teenage girl asks parents "But why did that woman have a penis?" concerning Candy Darling. Of course, who would give Candy Darling a second look when Joe Dallasandro was naked in his glory?

I've heard it said that since we have chosen marriage, that we are implicitly giving up on the more sexed up aspects of gay culture. So not only did same sex marriage bolster Newsom, it elected Bush and can easily extinguish what HIV could not: le difference homosexualle, and that would be a complete conservative Victorian victory.

-marc

these comments by marc, who is a friend, are his usual smarty-pants way of showing how brilliant he is and getting so far afield from a central topic, i can't recall what his damn point is. what the fuck does he want?

to show how intelligent and hip he is and reference candy darling and joe dellasandro. what the fuck do they have to do with anything? not much, except to remind us marc is incapable of sticking to a few points that make sense.

i doubt many average queers care about all the nonsense on this thread and how marc thinks he is bringing some solutions to gay problems is beyond me. i've heard him trash my efforts this year on things like the feb town hall on prop 8, jamaica boycott actions, gay iraqi actions, demanding and getting a meeting about folsom street, and yet i NEVER see marc doing any real organizing.

he is great at telling what i'm doing not right, but when i look for any real community engagement - meetings, speak outs, vigils, press conferences - marc ain't doing shit.

but lord can he write and talk forever about theory. actually getting something done offline? having a fruitful discussion that doesn't turn into a 'marc is so politically and culturally smart' lecture that leaves me with a sense of feeling engaged and not talked down to? rarely happens.

frankly, i usually find myself so derailed after talking to him on the phone, where he makes his grand pronouncements and goes off on tangents related to andy warhol or some such unrelated thing, that really don't want to speak him again unless it's about the weather.

i wait for the day when marc actually does some community organizing that is engaging and puts his many many many words and theories into practice.

after the 31st first loss in maine, i'm not only over the hot air from HRC, solmonese, NLGTF, gay inc, but also the hot air from marc.

it is so easy to see marc's bullshit. here's an example:

>This fossil is not telling folks what to do, just that what they're doing is not working and it is making things worse.

he's supposedly not telling people what to do. then his next sentence reads:

>Stop it. Don't do anything more.

um, mr. queer smarty-pants, you ARE telling people what to do when you tell them to stop! get over your damn self and enormous ego. marc, you really could give cleve jones a run for the money in the massive 'i know what's best' ego contest.

so, marc, who claims he is not telling folks what to do, then issues once of his cleve-esque decrees:

>Immediately the community must demand that every lawsuit and bill on same sex marriage which might have resolution at the ballot within the next five years must be abandoned now.

who the fuck put marc in charge of what to do on lawsuits? i guess marc did.

hey marc, guess what? i'm not gonna follow through on your demand, but if you want to follow your own damn advice, get in touch with ted olson and david boies and persuade them to do what you want.

you know what i'm immediately demanding? that marc actually do some real community engaging and organizing, instead just running his mouth online.

Michael, I did not trash your efforts to hold a meeting this past February.

But in our phone conversation this morning, I did intimate that the meeting with the Prop 8 perps had little impact on the decision of those people, whom you forced to confront the community, to go to Maine to pick a fight that we got clobbered in as if Prop 8 never happened.

I can understand why that upset you. But lashing out at me for not solving our problems is not going to solve the problem at hand.

When people are taking actions on their own and those actions end up hurting others, those on the receiving end of hurt are under no burden to tell those who are hurting them how to pursue their project in a way that does not cause pain to others as we demand they stop hurting us.

I don't know the answer to "what is to be done." All that I know is that our community has an abundance of wisdom, wisdom which is being left on the table by A-gays who pay/get paid to run marriage into the ground, instead of serving as a component of a democratic process for LGBT to chart our own future. How we get there, I don't know. But we can't stay here.

-marc

MPetrelis wrote: "i can't recall what his damn point is. what the fuck does he want? "

Marcos' point, to me, is to show that the gay rights movement has been appropriated and severely mislead by pro-establishment / status-quo gays who wish only to obtain bourgeois respectability; that ownership, profit, and middle-class comforts are more important and desirable to basic human rights. I totally agree with Marcos, and I am saddened by watching yuppie gays spit on the groups who allowed them to make the money they do now whilst wearing designer labels to make sure that everyone knows they have “arrived” and pat themselves on the back for voting for the Democratic Party. The fact that the Castro merchants and residents refused a GLBT youth shelter in the Castro area speaks volumes.

Marke B. wrote: "There's an argument that same-sex marriage does indeed have economic benefits for poor queers as well."

This does not sound anything different from when the Bush administration touted marriage to the low-income and poor population with tax cuts and refunds. It is at its core, conservative and reactionary.

Marriage, the ultimate institution of the ownership society.

-marc

@Michael Worrall

This does not sound anything different from when the Bush administration touted marriage to the low-income and poor population with tax cuts and refunds. It is at its core, conservative and reactionary.

Let them eat wedding cake, indeed.

Michael, yes, I think in this forum we can all agree that state-sponsored marriage, with its discriminatory distribution of taxbreaks etc, is the real bugbear here -- I've written about that several times (witness my contortions at their most exposed here: http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=8742).

But, you know, practicality -- which is the subject at hand in this particular instance.

What we've been doing has kept on not working for some time now and taking this repeated pounding is doing damage to our souls.

We need to figure out what to do next. But before we do that, we need to figure out how we got to a place of 0-31 failure so that we can make a plan to get it right.

The real question is who "we" will be. If it is the same people, then like Michael is angry at me above, those whose marriage project led us to a humiliating string of defeats most likely take ownership of their projects and their roles, and interpret any criticism of the projects as a personal attack.

Clearly from Maine we know that they did not learn from Prop 8 or from the February community meeting, I really doubt that their judgment can be trusted to guide us forward at this point, although we should pin them down and dissect them for a post-mortem.

What we are lacking is a democratic forum for LGBT to express our views amongst ourselves on long term strategy, on setting priorities, on how our campaigns are waged.