In the wake of the wedding website lawsuit, it seemed appropriate to remind us all that gay marriage has never been an inevitability and that we should simply divest from this made up “cause.” I’ve drawn from various older essays and my recently published chapter, “The End of Gay History or, This Is Not the World We Asked For,” in the new book Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies. This is still not the definitive history of how we came to this horrifying place. For that, you’ll have to read my forthcoming book (in progress), Strange Love: A History of Social Justice, and Why It Needs to Die.
On Friday, June 30, the Supreme Court ruled that Lori Smith, a wedding website designer, could refuse to create work for same-sex couples. I won’t deny that this is an awful outcome but I’m also not looking forward to all the hand-wringing about how this might threaten gay marriage (despite the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act). Whenever I hear someone cry, “Make no mistake, they’re coming for our marriages next,” I pour myself a wee dram and smile, “Well, yes, we can only hope.”
As this country—along with several others that have swallowed the hype around gay marriage—braces itself for some epic battle over gay marriage, again, it’s time to ask: What would a world without gay marriage look like? How did we get here anyway?
I have been writing about and against gay marriage for a long while (peruse this website and the whole damn internet using that search term plus my name, and you’ll see what I mean). The issue exploded into the mainstream in the early aughts and, as the century hurtled towards the end of its first decade, became the most pressing issue for mainstream gay organisations that worked hard to convince not just their own but straights as well that gay life without marriage was meaningless. Among the supposed advantages were the rights bestowed on married couples by the state, and life itself: it was argued that in a country without universal healthcare, gay marriage would allow gays and lesbians to gain health insurance through marriage. Everywhere, a tightly disciplined gay movement spewed out the same narrative over and over again: only gay marriage could create “full equality” for gays and lesbians (the “T” in LGBT was, at the time, rarely pronounced, only enunciated when it could be deployed for funding purposes; the “Q” was frequently excised altogether). Gay marriage would be the apex of civilisation itself. Without it, gays lacked secure, meaningful lives and their children would grow up as nasty little bastards, born of unholy alliances.1Evan Wolfson, the father of the modern gay movement, frequently made such conservative points.
Liberals and even many leftists were swept up in this hysteria, and it was difficult to move against the tide.
Sometime in 2009, my now friend, collaborator, and comrade in arms Ryan Conrad created a website in order to document a counterhistory and to make it clear that gay marriage had in fact always been antithetical to a larger queer imagination. Far from imagining marriage as an inevitability, LGBTQ organising and thought had, over centuries—not just decades—been concerned with dislodging the centrality of marriage and the more onerous but not impossible task of creating a world where people’s very lives did not depend upon entering an outdated and oppressive institution. Over time, we extended our critiques to the other two forks of the Holy Trinity of gay politics: hate crime legislation, which extended the reach of the prison industrial complex (opposed by us as an abolitionist group) and inclusion in the military (queer history is replete with opposition to US-led militarism and imperial hegemony). As we added essays on these topics, both queer and straight readers and activists everywhere clamoured for them to be made available in a more portable form. By then, the tide of gay marriage had swelled to a giant tsunami that threatened to wash away alternative histories of thought and action. Everywhere, people who knew and felt differently and who wanted to push back against the deadening and deafening message that gay marriage was the only way forward, were eager to read and disseminate alternative views.
In 2010, the Against Equality collective published our first anthology, Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage (the first of three that would be later gathered up into a single anthology, Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, edited, like all the previous books, by Ryan). We had now gone from being, in the eyes of the mainstream, some strange cranks out on the internet to people whose pointed critiques were now available in book form.
The backlash was swift, and began with threats.
One set of messages in particular was clear and to the point: I would be dismembered and returned to where I came from, some indeterminate “Arab” country. Ryan would be beaten up and killed. We would both be thrown into dumpsters, warned the letter writer. In the years to come, I’d try to make light of it: would I be dismembered while still alive (and, presumably, die from the pain) then thrown into a dumpster which would then be flown out? Or would the parts be fished out of the dumpster, placed in a trash bag, and packed neatly into a parcel? Or would I first be killed, then dismembered? So many questions.
Were Ryan and I the targets of extreme right-wing, anti-queer homophobes? No. We were being hounded by people who supported gay marriage. We had already experienced pushback, but never at this level. For instance: at the time, the website Bilerico (now mostly disappeared and folded into LGBTQ Nation) was among the three largest queer blogs, and Ryan and I posted our work there with some regularity, as did other queer radicals like Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose work also appeared in the AE anthology. The comments sections of our entries were filled with so much vitriol that the site’s administrators had to work in shifts throughout the day and night to contain the rank hatred and bile that people hurled at us. (There are copies of all this somewhere, in my internet vaults, but I’ll have more time to resurrect them another day.)
Our critique of gay marriage was simple and necessary: all the energy devoted to this issue diverted from the much bigger structural problems facing the U.S—at the time the epicentre of the battle—like healthcare, housing, and economic inequality. The fight for gay marriage is peak neoliberalism, the relentless and intense privatisation of resources: individuals are responsible for themselves, and only those willing to participate in the institution are allowed to enjoy life itself.
In a 2005 interview with Windy City Times’s Marie-Jo Proulx (also a co-worker and friend), Cheryl Jacques, who had just ended a stint as executive director of Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the biggest gay org on the planet, responded to a question about those who might not want to marry. The exchange is worth quoting in full:
MJP: The increasing push for equal marriage rights has left a lot of single LGBT people feeling somewhat left out. They are asking, ‘What about our rights?’
C.J.: I don’t draw a distinction between single people and coupled people. It’s equality for all. … What has happened is gay marriage has become the vocabulary for equality. … People talk about equality and they quickly jump to gay marriage because it would be fairly symbolic and representative of almost achieving full equality. Because with marriage rights come thousands of benefits and tax protections and so forth. So I can understand why single people might say, “That won’t benefit me.” But it will and here is how: whether they ever choose to get married or not, whether they have a partner or not, it’s symbolic of society moving forward and understanding that it’s right to treat people equally under the law. If we achieve marriage equality, as I fully believe we will, we will achieve workplace equality, our right to serve in the military, we will get hate-crimes laws passed, get fair and full funding of HIV/AIDS research. The rest will flow. … It’s all interconnected. We are all in this together.
MJP: But won’t gay partners feel like they must get married to gain benefits?
C.J.: I think gay couples will feel the same as straight couples. If you get married, there’s a host of responsibilities and rights and protections that come with that, and if you don’t those don’t.
Marry, or die.
No gay issue has ever been as galvanising as marriage. Today, if a new country were to be created somewhere in a tiny sliver of any continent, its constitution would have to uphold gay marriage as an inalienable right before guaranteeing anything else like, oh, healthcare or the right to due process. Gay marriage has been exported to any number of nations, including India and Singapore, as the ultimate sign of progressive politics. Are minority populations being systematically annihilated somewhere? Eh, sure, whatever. Did that somewhere also just guarantee gay marriage? Give it the Nobel prize, in something, anything! Gay marriage has become a handy cover for any number of oppressive conditions and economic situations. The United States has the highest number of incarcerated people, incredibly high rates of income inequality, and has lost the most number of people to Covid (and even that is a vast undercount) but, hey, it has gay marriage!!
Gay marriage was never anything but a conservative cause, but the real nature of its conservatism has nothing to do with social and cultural values: it is fundamentally an economically conservative movement because it’s about the hoarding of resources to benefit the few and in that it is the most neoliberal cause of all. Consider, as I have, repeatedly, the case of Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case that led the Supreme Court “to grant same-sex married couples federal recognition for the first time and rights to a host of federal benefits that until then only married heterosexuals had enjoyed,” as the New York Times put it. Windsor, a wealthy woman married to another wealthy woman, Thea Spyer (they married in Canada), had been left a widow by her wife in 2009. To bolster her case in the public arena, publications like the Times and the New Yorker hinted that Windsor was living in a filthy garret somewhere in New York, lighting matches to stay warm because the big, mean state had forced her to pay over $600,000, combining state and federal taxes. For the most part, the press only reported half that amount—the higher number would have brought raised eyebrows and revealed some inconvenient facts. As I pointed out in “How Gay Money Became Gay Wealth: A Fable”:
Windsor had to pay the taxes because the estate went over the exemption limit of nearly 6 million dollars. She was “forced” to pay less than 10 percent of that. Both she and Spyer retired at the top of their fields — she had worked for IBM, and Spyer was descended from old wealth. She owns an apartment in Greenwich Village, and a house in Southampton. Her net worth is, at a conservative estimate, 10 million dollars, a fact carefully kept from view while the case was in the courts.
Was it unfair that Windsor had to pay taxes that married heterosexuals didn’t have to? Of course, absolutely. But liberal and left media alike quietly avoided reporting on her wealth, leading credulous (and, frankly, profoundly gullible) gays and lesbians across the country to believe that their families too might be hit hard by such taxation when, in fact, estate taxes of that magnitude affect less than 0.1 percent of the number of people who die every year.
These facts about the economic underbelly of gay marriage have always been ignored, even by many who claim to be critical of the fight. Gay marriage has always been about feeding average gays and lesbians the illusion of their own wealth, making them believe that their “estates” were as much under threat as those of the Windsor-Spyers, the Zuckerbergs, the Buffetts. A materialist critique has rarely been articulated because even supposedly queer/leftist people and groups aren’t quite able to engage with it—it would divert from all the silliness and faux insurgency inherent in the belief that sexual practice is somehow linked to sexual politics. Queer lefties still hold on to the quaint and naive belief that polyamory is some kind of paradigm-busting alternative structure despite my pointing out, repeatedly, here and here, that it’s nothing more than an outdated idea that may mean some fun but little else. For Against Equality, sex was not the point. In a 2011 interview No More Potlucks interview with Josh Pavan, Ryan and I spoke about the real problems with gay marriage, and how no amount of sex could make it more radical:
YN: You can marry naked and hanging upside down from a hot air balloon and share your marital bed with multiple strangers every day – none of that will change how the state endows your marriage with benefits it will not give to the unmarried.
And:
RC: The entire framework that we use to understand our “resources,” like health care or housing or knowledge, etc. is of the economic model of capitalism and scarcity. Here in the States, through marriage we see the privatization of what we believe are collective benefits, like access to health care, to specifically classed family units. Instead of fighting for everyone’s right to live, like queer folks did so loudly and proudly here and elsewhere in the 80s, we see LGBTs now demanding that only married people have the right to these things.
Over the years, more people have become aware of the extent to which marriage is a punitive tool against the poor even as gay marriage advocates claim it as a levelling field. For those who are poor and on disability, for instance, marriage can mean the end of state benefits if a newly combined income increases above a certain threshold—and yet, both people might still be struggling because marriage is not a guarantor of prosperity. Gay marriage rests upon an idyllic idea of marriage: a single breadwinner (maaayyyybe two) making more than enough for a family, children in private schools and college, and so on. Meanwhile, millions of gays and lesbians who don’t fit that ideal are left out of the discussions about the benefits of gay marriage. Also left out: the millions of LGBTQ and straight people who are forced to marry to acquired lifesaving benefits like healthcare and immigration status. Gay marriage has effectively solidified the very thing that feminists fought against: an exploitative institution that renders people and children vulnerable to the whims and potential abuse of “heads of households.”
A widespread myth about gay marriage is that it sprang up from the grassroots. As the story goes: like pod people obeying the wishes of their alien gods, gays and lesbians appear to have been simultaneously lit by a widespread desire for a retrograde institution that the world was slowly beginning to dismantle. In fact, gay marriage as a “cause” was violently thrust upon unwary and unwilling populations and forced onto a national consciousness. In a 2010 essay, “Against Equality, in Maine and Elsewhere,” that needs to be read and taught everywhere, Ryan details the history of gay marriage in Maine, one of the poorer states in the country, where local queer organisations and activists had made it clear that marriage was not a priority. Instead, they wanted more funding for queer youth resources and HIV/AIDS work. What they got was marriage: both HRC and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now the Task Force) combined to give $400,000 plus staff time for what Equality Maine would go on to call “the fight of our lives.” And, in the background, with scarce resources funnelled towards this fictitious battle, organisations like the Maine Speak Out Project and the Charlie Howard Memorial Library closed their doors. As Ryan pointed out, “the few remaining LGBT youth advocacy groups across the state scrounge just to keep their doors open…The Department of Education has also announced that it will no longer be funding HIV Prevention Outreach Educators as of June 2010. A particularly horrifying scenario for the queer community here, as queer men account for 67% of people living with HIV in Maine.”
This story would repeat itself countless times, with minor variations, in different states across the country. As the “fight” for gay marriage gained momentum, liberals and even leftists were persuaded that this was the only issue that mattered.
Gay marriage was “won,” but at what cost?
In a response to the recent wedding website lawsuit, Pete Buttigieg, who will someday be a gay out president of the United States, if not the first, scoffed that “there’s something in common between this Supreme Court ruling and what we’re seeing happening in state legislatures across the country, which is kind of a solution looking for a problem.” He was referring to the fact that many such lawsuits are brought about by rightwing organisations who look for perfect plaintiffs and incidents to be deployed in their efforts to bring their politics to life. He’s right, but his words could just as easily be applied to gay marriage.2The twists and turns in the history of gay marriage lawsuits is beyond the scope of this essay: you’ll have to read my book The problem facing LGBTQ people in the United States or elsewhere is not that they can’t get married: the problem facing them and countless others is that the world is increasingly attuned only to the needs and desires of an elite, select few who want to ensure that their wealth remains a generational asset to be passed down across the ages. The Windsor case was about taxes and property, not about love being torn asunder. If it had been the latter, no one would have cared—but that it was the former is what has endeared gay marriage to so many conservatives, and it’s the reason why no one’s marriage is going to be threatened by what looks like a wave of opposition.
What if gay marriage had never happened?
Imagine a world where the great and deeply draining fight for HIV/AIDS resources had not ended up depleting the political and physical energy of so many queers by the end of the 1990s. What if we had continued to demand universal healthcare, as so many did during the height of the AIDS crisis? Imagine a world where Covid was, if not prevented at least greatly mitigated by an excellent system of healthcare and incentives for us all to remain home and healthy, without putting our lives on the line. Imagine what a different world we would be living in, even with Covid.
As I write in “The End of Gay History: Or, This Is Not the World We Asked For,” in the new anthology Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies:
What if we had not suffered that depletion of political energy with the fight over HIV/AIDS? What if the mainstream gay movement, now so large and ubiquitous that it’s referred to as Gay Inc., had not swooped in and distorted that struggle and turned the very fact that people were dying from a lack of healthcare into a reason to then deny healthcare to millions by demanding that it should be yoked to marriage? What if it had not, thus, reified the idea that it was perfectly okay to live in a world where employers, not the state, should be the guarantors of healthcare?
AIDS continues to be a crisis across the world: there are currently 38 million people living with HIV and its effects in poorer countries are devastating. In the U.S, HIV has become a racialized disease that also marks poverty and lack of access to resources. The mainstream gay community pays attention to AIDS when it’s a convenient fundraising trope (so, mostly around December 1, World AIDS Day). For Black men in particular, here and in Canada, HIV has become a tool of surveillance and punishment: Michael Johnson, whose case went unreported until Steven Thrasher picked up the story in Buzzfeed, faced 25 years of prison under laws that continue to target and criminalize Black gay men in particular for supposedly willfully infecting others. This is the gentrification of AIDS: white gay men get to do what they want behind doors while Black men’s sexual lives are placed under public scrutiny. In prison, where Johnson spent five years, access to medications can be volatile at best. HIV/AIDS, with its unequal and disproportionate effects based on race and class, is now further exacerbated by COVID, which has left prisoners everywhere deeply, hopelessly vulnerable.
That moment, when the idea of universal healthcare just slipped between the cracks and then disappeared from our radar until now, has been severely under theorised. Today, as this country deteriorates into a death spiral, we are seeing things get worse and worse. Medical bankruptcies are the leading cause of bankruptcies in this country. It needs repeating: at the time of this writing, the United States, ostensibly the world’s richest country, leads in Covid-19 deaths and infections. Medical care has never been so lacking, and the bodies are piling up.
It never had to be this way.
This was never the future we needed or wanted; this was never the world we asked for.
Gay marriage ruined everything, including the possibility of healthcare for all, the possibility that so many might not have died from Covid, the possibility that we might not still be living in precarious times where the most vulnerable—not just the sick but the poor and the underserved, the incarcerated, and millions of others—are constantly under threat.
What can we do now, as wealthy gay men and women—the A-listers among us—begin to beat the drums again, insisting that we need to protect their marriages?
I return here to Ryan’s words in his essay:
If we are to imagine queer futures that don’t replicate the same violence and oppression many of us experience on an everyday basis as queer and trans folks, we must challenge the middle class neoliberal war machine known as the national gay marriage campaign.
The world we have to fight for is not one where anyone can get married. The world we have to fight for is one where no one is forced to marry to get basics like healthcare and citizenship. Gay marriage was never the “fight of our lives,” and we can choose to end this war.
Marriage is violence.
For further reading, these books are essential:
Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion.
Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies
You can watch a recording of the book launch here.
Read (and memorise) Ryan Conrad’s “Against Equality, In Maine and Everywhere.”
For more of my work on gay marriage and queer politics, use those phrases as search terms on this website or anywhere on the internet.
Here are some starter pieces:
“Gay Marriage Hurts My Breasts.“
“How Gay Money Became Gay Wealth.”
“Polyamory Is Gay Marriage for Straight People.”
“Gay Marriage IS a Conservative Cause.“
“The Secret History of Gay Marriage.”
This piece represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it properly, using my name and a link, should its original insights (yes, they exist) be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work. If you’d like to support me in producing more of this kind of work, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list.