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