You Didn’t REALLY Care About Gay Marriage
9 years ago

You Didn’t REALLY Care About Gay Marriage

There’s something you should know about me: I’m pretty disgusting. My current apartment is barely salvaged from fermenting by my brother/roommate, who seems to have surgically attached a Windex bottle to his hand. But before I moved in with him my place was a fetid Carcosa, so my mom/enabler would be on me every day about getting a cleaning lady. Every conversation had about 25 percent cleaning lady talk. When would I get one, where could I find one, and a fair amount of begging. It got to the point where I knew I was eventually going to get one (I couldn’t find one that would work for ‘Rowdy Gentleman’ t-shirts) but I just didn’t want to keep talking about it. So I made one up. I gave her a name (Marianella) and a schedule (every other Wednesday) and a cost ($50). This freed up our phone calls for actual conversation. Anytime it came up, I would just say that Marianella had come the previous Wednesday. It was great. It’s not that I was opposed to getting a cleaning lady; it’s just that it wasn’t that important to me at the time. Ironically, since I saw getting a cleaning lady as an inevitability in my life, it meant the least to me. Like a letter, stamped and addressed, needing only to be dropped in a mailbox, it sat patiently in the back of my mind.

***

A couple days ago, I tweeted the following:

My buddy texted me, “do you really feel that way?” To which I replied, “yes.” So, there we were, texting back and forth, him arguing about the importance of it all. Me arguing that few people REALLY cared. Of course I support the legalization of gay marriage, just as he does. But so do nearly 75 percent of people born after 1980. It’s in this obviousness of direction in which my argument exists. Like a stamped and addressed letter waiting to be mailed, it was only a matter of time.

That doesn’t limit its importance. But allow me to put the rainbow-hued Instagram posts into perspective: If you’re a heterosexual in America under the age of 35, then you stumbled backwards onto a scale already heavily tipped in the favor of gay marriage equality. You are a product of timing, not grace. That war was won years ago by gay Americans who actually risked something. So, yeah, I have a natural aversion to the #lovewins posts by straight young Americans because they carry with them the glib, self-congratulatory, self-promotional tone that’s inherent in social media. While we all may have felt empathy, that’s mighty different than showing actual care. None of us attended the rallies. None of us wrote to Congress. It’s in the cavernous gulf between action and celebration where I hear a single echo over and over: “me…me…me.” I’m happy gay marriage is legal, but I’m happy in the way I might give a little fist pump on my couch, or clink a glass with a gay buddy. To plaster your feed with rainbows is to turn this all into a cartoon. To pretend you were more invested than you were is to cheapen its impact.

***

I have an actual Marianella now. Her name is Bebe. She comes every other Tuesday. I’ve vowed to keep things a little cleaner. (I’ve also vowed to stop racially stereotyping my fictional maids.) It feels good to have the thing done; to have the maid hired, the mail sent, the conversation with my mother finally honest. I’m glad we are where we are. It’s satisfying, but it’s not surprising

But satisfaction and triumph don’t deserve the same response.

Life can be full of real pain; and there’s a difference between empathy and care. Let’s not confuse them.

Image via Shutterstock

  4. RyanAClarke

    Reading this, I thought back to 2008 when my University campus was a battleground between four campaigns: the two presidential campaigns, and the campaigns for and against the gay marriage ban ballot initiative. With respect to the author, *you* may not have attended any rallies or knocked any doors, and *you* may have not written your member of Congress, but many of us under the age of 35 did just that. Whether it was opposing Proposition Eight in California, Amendment 2 in Florida, or organizing support for the countless Human Right’s Ordinances in municipalities across the country, the fight for equality and non-discrimination continues in ernest, and many of *us* still care.

    9 years ago at 12:08 pm
    2. Frat_Von_Tittyfuck

      Damn son, that’s a whole lotta gay you’re speakin’ right there.

      9 years ago at 9:07 am
  5. Royalewithcheese

    While I’m for gay marriage because why the hell not? I was most happy for the fact that now libs can’t use gay marriage to make republicans look stupid and distract people from the fact that libs are terrible at foreign policy and economics.

    9 years ago at 12:21 pm
  7. zaphod

    You’re right that most people didn’t actually *do* anything in the same sense as the activists who fought for decades to get here.

    You’re wrong when you say that putting a rainbow flag on social media isn’t enough, or doesn’t matter.

    When you say that support is “obvious” among young people, you makes it sound like it’s as inevitable as the weather. Yes, of course the reason we got here today is thanks to the struggle of everyone from Stonewall to Harvey Milk to ACT-UP and even Huey P. Newton. But all that wouldn’t make any difference if the public didn’t go along with it.

    It’s called a zeitgeist. The national mood. Society is made up of individual people, and it’s the collected actions and attitudes of all those individuals that adds up to the mood. The “obviousness” of things like equal rights for all Americans.

    When a candidates wins an election, it’s not just because of the activists that got out and worked for them. It’s the votes. When a business succeeds, it’s not just the executives who wrote the strategy, it’s all the consumers that bought one item at a time.

    A #LoveWins hashtag or a rainbow profile pic is a vote. It’s how each person adds to the zeitgeist, and it’s all those together that make a world where equality is “obvious.”

    9 years ago at 12:35 pm
    1. Oral Hershiser

      This is a really underrated comment, and brings up an important point that jtrain (who I generally love, and think is great) missed. While posting on social media like facebook, instagram and twitter is indeed a narcissistic endeavor, there’s a LOT of shit that goes on behind the scenes at those companies that shapes the way money moves, and the way politics work.

      When a movement like gay marriage gains traction among such a large majority of the population, all the behind-the-scenes marketing and advertising executives see that and react accordingly. It becomes a self-perpetuating machine, because those ad execs are the ones that get Corporate America on board with the idea, which of course leads to commercials and ad campaigns supporting the idea (to appeal to what McDonald’s/Coca-Cola/etc. now know is the vast majority of their target audience), which in turn leads to more regular Americans becoming aware of the issue and supporting the cause on their social media accounts (and in some cases, even leads to regular Americans supporting the cause in the sort of risk-bearing way that jtrain rightly argued is more important).

      The point is that even narcissistic self-centered “support” of the issue on social media does in fact help the cause. I’d also argue that some of the social media supporters genuinely do/did care, but that’s besides the point in a #notallmen sort of way, so I’ll shut up now.

      9 years ago at 5:30 pm
  8. Capt. Ron

    This whole “#lovewins” sham is a big myth. State sponsored marriage has nothing to do with love. It’s about receiving associated benefits for buying into a system of structure. So unless you’re professing your love of unformity… spare us from the hyperbole.

    9 years ago at 12:44 pm
  9. Fratty Pebbles

    I don’t understand why they can’t just call it something else. Give them the tax benefits that a marriage has, but it’s not marriage. Marriage is a CHRISTIAN union between a man and a women.

    9 years ago at 12:47 pm
    1. Oral Hershiser

      LOL, seriously? So Jews can’t get married? Atheists? Next time think, even if just for a second, before you post.

      9 years ago at 5:34 pm
  11. Bigcat98

    Majority of Americans now love to act like there involved in the worlds issue. Whether its boots on the ground in the middle east or gay marriage, people pretend to act all invested in Americas issue to look good to others and to gain fucking attention. They share all the bullshit videos and post rainbow pictures and next week they will forget what happened. Its crazy how an issue that effects less than 5% of the American population can take over every ones lives for a week.

    9 years ago at 1:25 pm