Equality California keeps on sending us videos of gay families: gay parents pushing kids on swings, gay parents making their kids' lunches, the whole gay family safe inside the walls of their own home. The message is clear: once you have children, your life instantly transforms into a scene of domestic bliss, straight out of a 1950s movie. Instead of dancing, instead of having casual sex, instead of rioting, gays have gone and had children! And now that they've had children, they won't be bothering you anymore. Once they can be at home with the kids, there's no reason for them to be political, after all.
As young queers proud to be raised in queer families and communities, we're a bit confused. First of all, whoever said domesticity wasn't political? Wasn't it just a few years ago that feminists taught us that the personal is political? That cooking, cleaning, raising children and putting in countless hours of physical, emotional, and intellectual labor should not mean withdrawing from the public sphere or surrendering your political voice? We were raised by queers who created domestic lives that were always politically engaged, who raised kids and raised hell at the same time. What makes Equality California think that an official marriage certificate is going to make us any less loud and queer?
We're seeing the marriage equality agenda turn its back on a tradition of queer activism that began with Stonewall and other fierce queer revolts and that continued through the AIDS crisis. We reject the agenda that gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality. We are seeing this agenda fracture our communities, promote certain family structures as the norm, pit us against natural allies, support unequal power structures, obscure urgent queer concerns, abandon struggle for mutual sustainability inside queer communities, and disregard our awesomely fabulous queer history.
Children of queers have a serious stake in this. The media sure thinks so, anyway. The photographs circulated after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's 2004 decision to marry gay couples at City Hall show men exchanging rings with young children strapped to their chests and toddlers holding their moms' hands as city officials lead them through vows. As Newsom continues his political career, these images of children and their newly married gay parents travel with him, supposedly expressing how deeply Newsom cares about families. These photos, however, obscure very real aspects of his political record that have torn families apart: his disregard for affordable housing, his attacks on welfare, his support for increased policing and incarceration that separate parents from children, and his new practice of deporting undocumented minors accused – not convicted – of crimes. As young people with queer parents we are not proud of the "family values" politic put forth by these images and the marriage equality campaign. We don't want gay marriage activism conducted in our name.
We think long-term monogamous partnerships are valid and beautiful ways of structuring and experiencing family, but we don't see them as any more inherently valuable or legitimate than any other family structure. We know that many families, straight or gay, don't fit the standards for marriage. In fact, we see many straight families being penalized for not conforming to the standard the government has set: single moms trying to get on welfare, extended family members trying to gain custody, friends kept from being each other's legal representatives. We have a lot in common with those straight families, perhaps more than we do with the kinds of gay families that would benefit from marriage.
We believe that the argument for gay marriage obscures the structural, social, and economic forces that break families apart and take people away from their loved ones. Just for starters, there's the explosion in incarceration levels, national and international migration for economic survival, deportation, unaffordable housing, and lack of access to drug rehabilitation services. The argument for gay marriage also ignores the economic changes and cuts to social services that make it nearly impossible for families to stay together and survive: welfare cuts, fewer after school programs, less public housing, worse medical care, not enough social workers, failing schools, the economic crisis in general.
The way that the marriage agenda phrases its argument about health care shows just how blind it is to the needs of the queer community. It makes it seem as though the queer community's only interest in health care is in the inclusion of some members of two-person partnerships in the already exclusive health care system. Actually, the question of universal health care is urgent to queers because large groups of people inside our communities face incredible difficulty and violence receiving medical care, such as trans people who seek hormone treatment or surgery, people who are HIV-positive, and queer and trans youth who are forced to live on the street. We believe that health care is a basic human right to which everyone is entitled, not one that should be extended through certain kinds of individual partnerships. Instead of equalizing access to health care, marriage rights would only allow a small group of people who have partnered themselves in monogamous configurations to receive care. If we accept the marriage agenda's so-called solution, we'll leave out most of our community.
As the economy collapses, as the number of Americans without a job, without health care, without savings, without any kind of Social Security net increases, it's easy to understand how marriage has become an instant cure-all for some. Knowing that many in our community have lived through strained or broken relationships with their biological families, through the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, through self-doubt about and stigmatization of their relationships, we understand where the desire for the security promised by marriage comes from. However, we see the promotion of gay marriage as something that tries to put a Band-Aid over deeper sources of insecurity, both social and economic. With marriage, the state is able to absolve itself of responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, as evidenced by the Human Rights Campaign's argument that with gay marriage, the state could kick more people off of welfare. If the HRC got its way, the queers who do not want, or are not eligible for, marriage would be even less secure than before. We don't think that marriage rights activism can go along with other kinds of social justice activism, because the legal and economic structure of marriage undercuts the kind of justice we want for everyone. We're frightened by the way the marriage agenda wants to break up our community in this way, and we're committed to fighting any kind of politics that demonizes poor people and welfare recipients. We challenge our queer communities to build a politics that promotes wealth redistribution. What if, rather than donating to HRC, we pooled our wealth to create a community emergency fund for members of our community who face foreclosure, need expensive medical care, or find themselves in any other economic emergency? As queers, we need to take our anger, our fear, and our hope and recognize the wealth of resources that we already have, in order to build alternative structures.
We're fed up with the way that the gay marriage movement has tried to assimilate us, to swallow up our families, our lives, and our lovers into its clean-cut standards for what queer love, responsibility, and commitment should look like. We reject the idea that we should strive to see straight family configurations reflected in our families. We refuse to feel indebted or grateful to those who have decided it's time for us to be pulled out from the fringe and into the status quo.
We write this feeling as if we have to grab our community back from the clutches of the gay marriage movement. Queers are sexy, resourceful, creative, and brave enough to challenge an oppressive system with their lifestyle. Our families are tangled, messy, and beautiful – just like so many straight families who don't fit into the official version of family. We want to build communities of families that can exist – that do exist – without the recognition of the state. We don't believe that parenting is cause for an end to political participation. We believe that nurturing the growth, voice, and imagination of children as a parent, a family and a community is a profoundly radical act. We want to build networks of accountability and dependence that lie outside the bounds of the government, the kinds of networks that we grew up in, the kinds of networks that we know support single-parent families, immigrant families, families who have members in the military or in prison, and all kinds of chosen families. These families, our families, work through our collective resources, strengths, commitments, and desires, and we wouldn't change them for anything.
Martha Jane Kaufman and Katie Miles are queers raised by queers. Kaufman grew up in Portland, and currently lives in Boston. Miles grew up in San Francisco, and currently lives in New York. The full text of their statement can be found at http://queerkidssaynomarriage.wordpress.com/.