Join me in an incandescent rage

I don't care about gay marriage. Not really. I am terrified that my girlfriend of nearly 12 years will wanna make me get married and I don't really like commitment. Seriously though, it's not something that ever really set off any political rage switch in me. When I was growing up so few of my friends had married parents, perhaps subconsciously I didn't think that "marriage" was a civil right worth fighting over.

As the campaigns for/against Prop 8 in California raged on last year, I still found it hard to give a shit and the only thing that really bothered me about the outcome was the speed with which black people were blamed for its passing. Recent rulings riled, but did not get to me; after all, just allowing gay marriage isn't gonna stop many people from remaining second class citizens.

All-in-all, I figured that the gay marriage debate could never leave me feeling like I had to douse myself with kerosene and set myself on fire. Well, fuck me if I didn't come across something that has highlighted to me just how important this fight is.

Read this: The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage

It's supposedly a critique of gay marriage that isn't bigoted or biblical in origin. It's actually an insidious, homophobic bag o'shite masquerading as high brow intellectualism. This article is so disgusting and patronising in it's denigration of gay people. Quite simply, it argues that we are not part of a kinship system and no rules or traditions that bind heterosexual marriage apply to gay marriage.

An example:

Second, kinship modifies marriage by imposing a set of rules that determines not only whom one may marry (someone from the right clan or family, of the right age, with proper abilities, wealth, or an adjoining vineyard), but, more important, whom one may not marry. Incest prohibition and other kinship rules that dictate one's few permissible and many impermissible sweethearts are part of traditional marriage. Gay marriage is blissfully free of these constraints. There is no particular reason to ban sexual intercourse between brothers, a father and a son of consenting age, or mother and daughter.... If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill's daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can't be fitted into the kinship system.

It is repellent and viciously homophobic and so much worse than some fuckhead fanatic screaming about homosexuality being an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. This person actually believes they have reasoned out a rational, sociologically based argument against gay marriage. In actuality it is just right wing, heterosexist, crap. Take this bit:

These four aspects of marriage are not rights, but obligations. They are marriage's "a priori" because marriage is a part of the kinship system, and kinship depends on the protection, organization, and often the exploitation of female sexuality vis-à-vis males. None of these facts apply at all to love between people of the same sex, however solemn and profound that love may be. In gay marriage there are no virgins (actual or honorary), no incest, no illicit or licit sex, no merging of families, no creation of a new lineage. There's just my honey and me, and (in a rapidly increasing number of U.S. states) baby makes three.

What? Really? REALLY? No evidence to support a single statement in the whole article. None. On the contrary there is vast amounts of evidence to dispute virtually everything in it, most especially the sexist and false idea that marriage is there to protect the sexuality of women (fucker has never heard of rape WITHIN marriage).

Gay marriage is different from straight marriage in that one involves gay people and the other involves straight people. That's fucking it. Beyond that of unassisted reproduction (something that is rapidly becoming unavailable to many heterosexual couples as infertility rates rise) any additional argument about the difference between gay and straight marriage is socially constructed BULLSHIT.

It's because of people like the author of that article that gay marriage needs to be legalised globally as soon as possible. It's time to end any type of pseudo-intellectualised critique of queers as being somehow okay, but not okay enough.

It's not just a game.

I have resisted the urge to comment on the story about the Kenyan man who hanged himself after Arsenal's semi-final exit last week. In part this has been because I have way to much work to do and should be devoting my writing energies to more important things. However, I can no longer let this pass.

I think it is a completely naive person who understands nothing about depression and despair who believes that Sulieman Omondi killed himself because Arsenal lost a football match. The initial reports from the BBC and other news outlets were made with a tinge of wry humour - African fan, so wild and deranged with grief over the loss of a match he kills himself, they said. Much of the reporting included comments about the passion for football in Africa and how fights and brawls have cast shadows over televised European matches in many African countries. This story, it seemed, epitomised just how out of control an African man can become.

This portrayl of African men as overly-emotional, with wild, uncontrollable passions set off by the smallest (or craziest) things is a long established cultural meme. It dates back hundreds of years and is a stereotype established in stark contrast to Anglo-Saxon notions of male supremacy based depictions of cold, calm, ruthless efficiency - i.e. the British stiff upper lip. To be in possession of one's emotions, to control them and suppress them, is a valued expression of male business acumen and denotes an level of intellectual supremacy.

While I am not going to go as far as to say that the reporting and commentary on this event has been racist, I would suggest that the stereotypes and controlling images described above have had an impact on the way this story has unfolded. The idea that Mr Omondi might have killed himself because he feared for his life after making a large bet he could not honour or because of existing pressures and troubles, did not appear in those initial reports. The complex issues surrounding depression and mental ill-health have not been discussed by those bloggers who continue to write about Mr Omondi as if he was an emotionally unintelligent fool who could not discern the difference between football and his own life.

In all walks of life men and women take their own lives for reasons most people cannot understand. Desperation can make people do all sorts of things as can depression and other mental or physical illnesses. To suggest that Mr Omondi took his life because of a football match is overly simplistic and is perhaps a way for us to make peace with an act many do not understand and could never contemplate. However, it does not do to make light of the plight of this man. For whatever reason he decided his life was not worth living and that is where the tragedy always lies.

United we stand for what?

So I came across this site via Twitter: http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com/

I have been following their Twitter account for a while and was thinking about dumping them because their take on things is so U.S. focused that I find their tweets a) boring and b) really fucking irritating. The other day their twitter feed picked up their "Word of the Gay" (another thing that has been trying my patience) as "Ginger beer". They had poorly defined this as being insulting when it's just cockney rhyming slang for "queer" and as such to be seen as empowering and reclaimed if one wishes. So, I go off to their site to post a pissy correction and I notice their site slugline:

Queers United: The activist blog Uniting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexual, Asexual community & Allies in the fight for equality.

I mean, come the fuck on. Where exactly is the "Intersexual community"? Or the "Asexual community"? What legislation or media endorsed, society wide discrimination exists for the "asexual community"? What exactly does being "asexual" mean anyway? Supposedly this image below helps you identify whether you are "asexual" or not.

Whether this is a real thing or not, I really don't give a shit; but what I do what to know is what "asexuality" has to do with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender political activism and why there should be one unifying cause for them all. Maybe I am just turning into a mardy old cow, but it seems to me that the whole Western gay civil and human rights movement has been hijacked by idiots. Rather than campaign for the rights of LGBT folk in places where homosexuality is outlawed and queers face an increasingly harsh and oppressed existence, people jibber on about issues that have no political or even sociological basis for activism.

The whole hysteria on Twitter over AmazonFail is indicative of just how far wrong Western LGBT activists have gone. In this case people were outraged and mobilised with amazing speed over the supposed discrimination of LGBT communities by Amazon. The story remains unclear but it seems that Amazon's algorithm for tagging books as "adult" or not was either hijacked or messed up. As a result thousands of books tagged as "gay" or "lesbian" disappeared from the bestseller rankings and did not show up in searches. Amazon customer services at first said this was policy in order for the site to remain "family friendly". People were annoyed and outraged that a book with zero sexual content but merely talking about homosexuality would be deemed as "adult" and, quite rightly kicked up a fuss. Then Amazon spokespeople said that there had been a "glitch" and that the books were unintentionally tagged, i.e. there was no policy. This was not the end of the outrage however and many people still maintained a boycott against Amazon and suggested that the algorithm was homophobic.

Now, I am all for highlighting corporate irresponsibility and boycotts of big business whose activities impact on the human and civil rights of communities. I urge everyone to join the BDS movement against Israel (- reports show that this tactic is working in Europe). However, there is something rather bizarre about calling for a boycott of a company that doesn't have a policy to - or indeed a persistent, inadvertent mechanism for - discriminating against LGBT people. What is equally bizarre is that the discriminating practice in question - poor visibility of LGBT folk - is something that is practiced by every major television and news network out there. Demonstrative homosexual activity is non-existent on mainstream television here as I am sure it is in the U.S. Sure, there are gay characters in soaps and dramas, but you rarely see them kiss or display the samekind of affection and intimacy as heterosexual characters.

Strangest of all though is the reaction to Amazon as though it is a state run utility or indeed a Nation State in and of itself. The victory dance of activists over the issue hitting the mainstream media within 24 hours was understandable; issues such as these often take months to work their way into wider media psyche, so this was a real achievement. It's testament to the power of social media like Twitter, obviously, and it all occurred at a time when Nafta Flu was incubating in a pig so it was good enough to make the news.

But a tiny bit of perspective allows us to see this for what it really was: at best a corporate entity bowing to the purchasing power of queers and their allies. At worst? A trite little distraction that allows people to feel safe and smug about victory in a battle that never was. Maybe I'm being cynical - perhaps people will draw strength from this and go forth and fight state sponsored discrimination and intolerance. Or perhaps people just don't recognise or understand the difference between fighting transnational businesses and fighting sovereign states any more and think one is as good as the other.


(Incidentally, this is by far and away THE WORST flow chart I have ever seen. What precisely is the point of all those boxes when it seems that the ONLY criteria needed to define asexuality is whether a person experiences sexual attraction?! Idiocy!)