Come to my window, and go ahead and drag me out for tax evasion

Exhibit A that the "No on 8" movement has gone totally Walden.

From The Chicago Tribune:

How mad is Melissa Etheridge about California's rejection of gay marriage?
Mad enough to withhold her taxes.

The rocker, married five years to actress Tammy Lynn Michaels, posted a
fiery blog Thursday about the passage of Proposition 8, which limits marriage to
heterosexual couples.

"I am taking that to mean I do not have to pay my state taxes because I am
not a full citizen," Etheridge wrote at thedaily beast.com. "I mean, that would
just be wrong, to make someone pay taxes and not give them the same
rights."

The idea, she wrote, also could extend to other gay Californians: "I am
sure Ellen [DeGeneres] will be a little excited to keep her bazillion bucks that
she pays in taxes too."

Somewhere Ellen is like, "Godammit, Etheridge. Maybe you would stand inside your hell and hold the hand of death, but I've got celebrities to interview and mini-cheesecakes to pass out."

--Punch

16,000 gay people afraid to divorce, intimidated by other gays

The passage of Proposition 8 has had one unexpected side effect. A special group within the LGBT movement—the almost 20,000 gays who were married in the few months between the Supreme Court decision that made it legal and last week’s elections that made it illegal—have reported receiving unusual amounts of pressure. Sam Brown, who married her five-year girlfriend Janet on the beach, received a letter from a former UPS colleague who had been unable to convince her own girlfriend to tie the knot on such a short deadline: “Yeah, it just said. You guys might be the only ones, so don’t mess up.” Brown said the intimidation didn’t stop there. At the capitol rally in Sacramento, she reported “getting the woogily eye” from several unmarried friends who forced her to hold the “My Vagina Is a Flower That Has the Right To Marry Like People Of Color” sign. Janet was not in attendance. Brown suggested this is not the first time Janet has avoided a rally: “She hasn’t come to Take Back the Night since college.” Sam isn’t the only one being coerced. Jonathan Coller, who got hitched to his much older trollish gentleman friend despite unanimous criticism from his young, hot friends and family, reports it is widespread, “yeah, we’re all feeling it. No one’s going to let us forget it. We literally can’t get divorced.” Basically.

--j

Yep, I'm Gay!

It’s hard to keep up sometimes with what’s going on with gays and the Right. What is grouped under “anti-gay” legislation results in seemingly confusing permutations that vary in severity and are only loosely related to marriage. In 2004, Kansas banned not only gay marriage but eliminated any rights queers might have to make contracts with each other (a social death). In this last election, Arkansas banned any unmarried couple from adopting or fostering children, but billed the initiative as anti-gay (not anti-everyone-unmarried). More traditional anti-marriage propositions passed in Arizona and California. (The surprise of California is quaint.) Understanding these permutations doesn’t just require an analysis of the Right’s political maneuvering, it requires an understanding of how we talked about queers and the language mobilized to describe and represent us.

Those of us who grew up queer in the mid- and late-nineties often feel we’ve inherited a political imperative – to be normal, but also to fight the fight we’ve been given. Talk about sexuality in the nineties centered around “choice” (as in, “why would anyone choose something sooooo haaarrrd?!?); and “normalcy” (as in, “I’m just like you. My love is just like your love”). See our spokesperson, Ellen Degeneres, on 20/20 in 1997.

Ellen also reminds us that almost all talk of homos in the nineties was figured through sexual practice and sex acts and not through gender or processes of cultural disciplining. In refusing the label “lesbian,” in fact, Ellen refuses something important about gender as an axis of her identity (remember how she only ever talked about being “gay”?). Something about discussing one’s “femininity” in the nineties was odious to many in the gay rights movement.

(Perhaps because, in 1997, femininity was the province of these ladies.)

So the nineties talk of queerness centered on sex acts that weren’t a choice and that we could perform with normalcy. No wonder we’re saddled with marriage now. And no wonder our contemporary protests often involve queers producing/affirming sex acts by choice and trying to recast them as rebelliously abnormal:
I do not mean to say that as political strategies they [marriage, dyke marches, talk of "choice" and sex acts] are wholly ineffectual. But we need a more historicized understanding of how we inherited the language we did, and the Clinton era is a good place to start.

And because Ellen Degeneres is, after all, the gift that keeps on giving.

--Punch

That Tina Fey makes some good points.

From last week's 30 Rock:
Donaghy: We're not the best people.
Lemon: But we're not the worst.
Both: Graduate students are the worst.

manifest destiny

Dick Cheney, November 3, 2004: “President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future and the nation responded by giving him a mandate.” [Bush won popular vote by 3.4%, electoral by 35.]

Barack Obama, November 4, 2008: “And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.” [Obama won popular vote by apprx. 8%, electoral by (most likely) 191)

--Punch

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

When Barack Obama spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention I was in Avon, North Carolina, a tiny town in the Outer Banks, with my girlfriend and her family. A few nights before his speech we witnessed a small miracle – tiny luminescent creatures pulled in with the tides, millions of them glowing in the whitewater as the waves crashed on the shore. The moon was new, invisible, and the sea spread out in blankets pecked with the light from the bodies of these creatures. Like stars at your feet.

The day after Obama’s keynote, in a gas station at the very edge of the country – just a thin band of earth, actually, a broken finger of land – in a state that hasn’t gone blue since Carter, the folks were talking. The Charlotte Observer and The Wall Street Journal newsstands were empty. The rain washed cigarette butts over the edge of a metal ashtray. Pickup trucks crawled by on the narrow road between the sea and the sound. A man with stubby legs and a red raincoat said to the girl behind the counter, “That guy is going to be the next president of the United States.”

He probably didn’t realize that as he predicted Obama’s success he also predicted Kerry’s defeat. He probably didn’t even really think he would be right. He was hoping out loud. Emily Dickinson, sweet recluse with a wild heart, said of hope:

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The traditional reading of Dickinson’s poem, of course, is that “extremity” means extremity of circumstance – the bird of hope asks for nothing even in times of crisis. Yet Dickinson was a great ironist, notoriously dense. When she writes, “never, in extremity,/It asked a crumb of me” she may mean that its not-asking is extreme, that hope asks for nothing in a way so complete that it is absurd. Extreme non-action.

In his victory speech last night, Obama assured the nation that there was much more work to do: “And, above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, callused hand by callused hand.” Consider what George W. Bush asked of us in his 2000 victory speech: “I have something else to ask of you, I ask every American. I ask for you to pray for this great nation.”

Hope may very well be the rupture into which meaningful change asserts itself. Hope may be the enabling condition for any number of things: love, recovery, work, politics, war. But as an action it is isolationist. It is very much like prayer. It is a recapitulation of the nineteenth-century concept of sentimentality, especially popular in the antebellum years: what we need, those forebears imagined, was right feeling. Feeling the right way is what will free the slaves; right feeling allows us to sympathize with any number of unintelligible others.

We live with this legacy. We believe we ought to take responsibility for what we feel, but we often do not understand at all the implications of what we do. This, in so many ways, is how contemporary racism works, how discourses about tolerance and self-help rhetoric work, also. Right feeling does not ameliorate wrong actions or produce right ones.

We ought to hear the words of our new president: “This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change.”

--Punch