Gay divorce

Thanks to the numerous rallies, petitions and fund-raising efforts, it would seem there are two fronts in the fight for gay marriage: advocates who want it, and conservatives who want to quash it. Lo and behold, there’s a critique coming from the gay left, arguing that the gay-marriage movement has actually hurt the gay-rights movement. It’s a lively, fiery debate often steeped in lefty economic policy. We chatted with queer Chicago writer Yasmin Nair, one of the organizers of Against Equality and the author of the introduction to the new provocative anthology Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage (AE Press, $8). It was the most amicable discussion about smashing capitalism in history.

If there’s an overarching argument here, it’s that the gay-rights movement has focused so much on marriage, it’s let other important issues fall by the wayside.
Yes, absolutely. It has taken funding away from queer youth issues, homelessness issues.

But what do you say to the argument that there are other people fighting for health care, and no one else is going to fight for gay marriage?
The first response I would have is, Yes, and look where health-care reform is. I think if this whole gay-marriage movement had begun in a spirit of wanting to work with other struggles, like health care, or assuring that these basic benefits should also go to unmarried people, we would have had a different approach. The best example I can give you is what’s happening in Massachusetts, where you can no longer, in many companies, get benefits for domestic partnerships. After gay marriage, since everyone can get married, you can no longer get benefits through domestic partnerships. You have to get married. The movement over and over has refused to—

But companies that offered that were few and far between.
Yes, but now it’s also true in Connecticut. The movement over and over has refused to stand up for those most vulnerable. It’s essentially made the argument that married people are better than unmarried people, and that’s what’s so troubling about the gay-marriage movement within the U.S.

I wonder if there’s an issue for the accessibility to these arguments, that they presume people want to “smash capitalism.”
Many of us do want to smash capitalism. [Laughs] This is not queer theory. We provide an economic, materialist critique of how marriage works to provide economic benefits. We understand that not everyone will want that critique of capitalism, but we want to offer that. Because gay marriage is so wrapped up in the language of affect—love, etc.—what hasn’t been said before is how gay marriage affects how our society sees people in economic terms. The family has become the locus for how we determine who gets what benefits.

What about the argument that marriage would normalize homosexuality, which could lead to less homophobia?
Normalcy always comes with conditions, right? Our argument against that is, a lot of straight people don’t want to be married, either, so if you connect normalcy to marriage… A friend of mine came up to me years ago and said, “What are you doing? I’m a single straight woman, and it was okay to be single and straight, and you guys are ruining it for me.” And there’s the issue of what’s normal, why do we want normalcy, why is normalcy a good thing?

But there are so many people who still don’t accept homosexuality, and if gay marriage could help—
To that I would say the problem there is not the issue of gay marriage, it’s the issue of denial of homosexuality. People always say we need to let people know that we are just like them.

Sure, but that’s an ideological argument. Practically—
Practically, we shouldn’t be teaching children to accept homosexuality as normal, we should be teaching them to accept people who are not normal. I also think that underestimates people’s capacity for understanding a multiplicity of families.

Don’t you think people are fighting for gay marriage, simply because they want to get married?
Yes, and I have no problem with people wanting to get married. Many of my friends and lovers are married. [Laughs] If this were Canada, where basic rights are already in place, I’d have no problem with [the fight for gay marriage].

Nair and Against Equality speak about their book Saturday 9.

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