Whatever your view of proposed changes to the Marriage Act in Australia, you can probably agree: you are tired of hearing about proposed changes to the Marriage Act in Australia. If you are for these changes, you’d perhaps just rather our parliamentarians do their job, join similar liberal democracies and pass ‘em, already. If you are opposed to these changes, it is quite likely that you’d rather all discussion of them ceased.
This is not to suggest that many are not very sincere in the support or dislike for these changes. I suspect most people of great sincerity; if they say they care about a particular matter, it is very likely that they do. It is also likely that there are those, like myself, who feel some discomfort in committing to a side. Sure, I voted. I mailed the survey slip in weeks ago, and I found my decision easy. Taking any other position than the one I did on changes I know are inevitable and will have few consequences seemed churlish.
This change was never going to be fun for everyone, because changes to institutions never are.
But, I know there will be consequences. A positive one is the happiness of others. A non-existent one is that vulnerable children will be seduced by evil teachers into planning their same-sex weddings in the first term of grade two. A negative one—no, don’t get thingy with me before I’ve finished; don’t tell me I’m persuading others not to vote because (a) most of the votes are in and (b) nobody pays attention to the thoughts of a grump like me, especially when she delays their revelation to the third paragraph—will be felt in queer culture itself.
This change was never going to be fun for everyone, because changes to institutions never are. Of course, the change, which will occur, is made a heck of a lot more difficult by a mail survey and a very long debate. We talk often of how this change might negatively affect religious groups—already exempted from discrimination legislation—and, strangely, the baking industry. We talk often of how this change may positively affect LGBTIQ people—some people even boldly claim that it will immediately reduce acts of self-harm.
We talk very little about how it might negatively affect some LGBTIQ people.
This is my queer view (which I have been very careful to precede with a lot of dull words that very angry people are now bored by): our queer culture is at risk of being lost.
We talk very little about how it might negatively affect some LGBTIQ people.
There were, and there are, kinship systems in queer communities. Transpeople offer each other not just handy hints, but material support during transition; you that you can see this hinted at in a show like RuPaul's Drag Race. Gay men, and practical lesbians, made extraordinary moves to support HIV positive men in the time, just twenty years ago, before antiviral therapies—you can see this barely addressed in a movie like Dallas Buyers’ Club. So many people I know or knew have offered others shelter, uncritically accepted that being an oddball was a strength.
Now? We all have to make like we just want our day in two white frocks, or what-have-you. And make like this is all we ever wanted, and that no queer person ever had, ahem, relations more than once a decade, never with more than one partner.
Personally, I feel most comfortable as a monogamous lady. I feel precisely as comfortable living in a culture where no one must declare, “Yes. We’re all very monogamous in here.” We have been coerced to say, for the sake of marriage, that we are all upright citizens who will not dishonour our official vows. All we want is a certificate, we say. We want to be just like you.
A person must be careful to appear acceptable, to erase any public expression of a culture that is not just like the dominant one.
This gives me a sense of the frustration my Muslim pals must have lived with for some time: let’s all pretend we are, all 1.2 billion of us, just like you. This gives me a sense of the frustration my Aboriginal comrades have lived with since settlement: don’t take my children away, I will bring them up to be just like you. A person must be careful to appear acceptable, to erase any public expression of a culture that is not just like the dominant one.
The politics of acceptability demands that a person must, for much of the time, deny the very history that made them. In the effort to be non-threatening, there is threat to the stuff of oneself. I mean, of course, we all must make some effort to accept the terms of the dominant culture and I am not going to appear at a Bachelor and Spinsters ball in an old ACT UP t-shirt from the nineties and call everyone there, “breeders”.
But, I will say that remaking oneself every day to fit the dominant culture is at least ten times as painful as waxing one’s legs. Yes, we must all bend ourselves to the shape of the dominant culture. But, please, not to the point where we are broken.
