We're Here

Out in San Francisco, Prop. 8 was still the hot topic with my fag friends, and a few of them seemed genuinely bewildered by the silence of the incoming Obama administration on the matter, as if months and months of stated opposition to gay marriage were just a play for Ozarkan slack-jaws, who, once safely in the fold, would lose interest in distant California and the sodomitical goings-on out there, leaving the Black Reagan free to personally adjudicate every Adam-and-Steve nuptial in the Bay Area. Ha ha! I don't credit Obama's opposition to queer weddings with any greater degree of sincerity, mind you. He is, after all, a politician. The truth is that fags don't matter. What are you gonna do, vote Republican?

To me, the tepid face of queer activism became even more embarrassing during the whole charade of a California countermovement, replete as it was with straight celebrities making teevee ads full of bland encomiums to love and diversity. Sexual liberation, if I may use that outré phrase, was sacrificed at the alter of me-too bourgeois respectability, with predictable results. Everyone remembers Martin Luther King for his campaign of non-violence, but what they forget, what they choose to forget because his real radicalism terrifies most Americans, was that he was the man who stood before America and called in a debt, told the nation that the check was due. The power of his nonviolence was in the dramatic role he cast himself: this one man holding back a seething tide of implacable rage. Behind the entire civil rights movement lurked the specter of violence held in check, but not forever.

As an "issue," gay marriage hardly interests me. It's a dead-end item. Nonetheless, I regret the lame, whiny face of American queerdom, which has grown so tasteful and boring in its middle age.