Federally recognized gay marriage is more than a decade old at this point, but it’s young enough that many of us can remember a time before it was codified by law. Even scarier is the fact that the coming administration could easily remove it as a right before long. It’s a sobering reminder that whatever rights queer people enjoy now can always be taken away, depending on who’s in power.
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Sarah McBride has come under fire for her response to Republican bathroom bills. It isn’t perfect, but she shouldn’t be the target of our ire.
But there’s another sobering reminder floating around that puts the current anti-gay, anti-trans wave in context. On BlueSky, journalist Melissa Gira Grant recently brought up an important point about the fight for gay rights, and it’s something we all need to take into account while gearing up to fight even worse anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the coming future.
I wish more people covering politics knew/remembered that marriage equality was the compromise project of what began as a gay liberation movement, not its completion
— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagiragrant.com) November 27, 2024 at 8:20 AM
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When the movement for queer liberation began, we wanted so much. What kicked off officially with the Stonewall Riots and continued through the 70s, 80s, and 90s was a fight not just for the right to be out of the closet, but a bid for basic human rights and representation. Gay marriage became the symbol of what we were fighting for in the early 2000s, and it was an important win for a movement that always had a much broader scope.
Now, queer people are remembering that gay marriage was only part of the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, a battle we’re still sadly fighting all these years later.
As one user wrote, responding to Grant, some queer people were against marriage as a representational goalpost because of the assimiliationism it represented.
many such cases
— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagiragrant.com) November 27, 2024 at 8:24 AM
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To better understand what was happening in the years before we won the right to marry, Grant suggets reading the collection “Against Equality” from 2014. Another good reminder is Lee Edelman’s “No Future,” which investigates the political idea of children as pawns in the right-wing scheme to make queer people out as dangerous, as well as the idea of queer assimiliation within the broader American family structure.
And if you’re interested in learning even more about queer organization and radical resistence models from the past, there’s happily no shortage of literature.
As queer people, we deserve the freedom not just to marry, but to be truly protected as spouses, adults, single people, workers, and voters. And we shouldn’t stop fighting until we achieve those protections for everyone in our community.
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