[lettertodaddy]

Just a quick note before I dash off to work. They decided to block logins to this site the other day.

One of the things that makes me feel like an outsider these days is the assimilationist politics of groups like the HRC and Marriage Equality USA. When I was younger, my queer friends and I were all about trying to create alternative notions of family. The idea that the family you chose was just as viable and important as the nuclear family you were born into. Family could take on all different shapes and sizes: it could be a partnered couple, a triad, a free-for-all multilayered polyamorous collective, or it could be just you and your cat. But the foundation of that was trying to break down the patriarchal, heteronormative concepts of marriage and family that have been used to punish queer folks for eons.

I was married (to a man), but even then marriage didn't sit right with me. I probably got out about 8 years too late, but it was that experience of being "heterosexually" married that made me realize that I'm more interested in dismantling the institution of marriage and remaking it into something radically different.

I came out of that relationship looking for similar rhetoric from queer communities and thought leaders, but now all I see is people fighting to be "as good as" straight people, fighting for assimilation, fighting for their slice of the two-parent, two-kids, house in the suburbs, subaru in the driveway, and mortgaged up to their eyeballs American dream. I'm left standing on the sidelines thinking "this is not what I was fighting for."

I am not out to malign anyone who wants this sort of arrangement for themselves. My issue is that if I'm seen as not being on board with marriage equality, that I'm looked at as some sort of traitor to the community. And I'm not sure what that means for my continued participation in it, or whether that means I've overstayed my welcome.

Did the process of rethinking and reshaping queer community that we've been going through for all of these decades lead us to whitebread, non-threatening, average lifestyles? What becomes of those of us who don't want that?