Post Election Hullabaloo over Gay Marriage:
Responses from a Brown-Immigrant-Queer
by Debanuj DasGupta

I am finally recuperating from the 2008 elections, my tired brown body has slept long hours, gorged on junk food and watched endless Lifetime movies. My brain is finally beginning to rewire itself. The Obama hats, badges and campaign materials have been neatly packed away, and I am getting ready to work with fellow progressive activists and policy makers to ensure we can hold the Executive Office accountable to economic and social justice issues. I had been working tirelessly in the swing state of Ohio side by side local unions, church moms, progressive priests and vegan queers to turn the state blue. And on the night of November 4th, surrounded by over 500 democratic minded activists from Ohio and across the world, I drank to the state turning blue and Barack Hussein Obama’s overwhelming victory. We were lush with the taste of victory; our painstakingly detailed field strategy had finally paid off, and a multi-racial, progressive-sounding man was now going to move into the White House. It was truly a celebratory moment.

The morning after the elections, the news of the passage of Proposition 8 in California, 102 in Arizona, 2 in Florida and Act I in Arkansas hit me, and I am still working on comprehending the political depths of those losses. As I turned on to CNN and avidly researched the exit polls, the results of one specific exit poll indicating that 70% African-American voters had voted in favor of Proposition 8 kept popping up everywhere. Many sections of the white middle class Gay and Lesbian community in California picked up those numbers and raged against the Black community, painting everyone in the Black community as homophobic and crippled by dogmatic Black churches. In the days that followed, a dominant rhetoric emerged within conservative sections of the Gay and Lesbian community, within which the interests of the Black community and other people of color communities were imagined as diametrically opposed to the interests of the Gay community. Particularly disturbing were endless posts on Facebook decrying the homophobia of people of color communities. National and local LGBT organizations started circulating email alerts regarding rallies opposing the passage of the anti-marriage ballots. These alerts have been largely silent on the emergent racist tropes.

As a brown, gender queer, immigrant whose life is triangulated by experiences of racism, xenophobia and homophobia these emergent tropes have been largely disturbing to me. I have experienced homophobia and sexphobia within my community of origin, and xenophobia and racism within Gay and Lesbian communities. Inherent in this apparent binary imagination of Gays Vs people of color was the profound lack of my own complex experiences of the intersectionalites of multiple oppressions. My first reaction was to remain silent and continue with my business of survival in the wake of a troubling mid-western economy. In these moments, I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s quote “...for it is better to speak up, because we were never meant to survive.” So in the spirit of Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, and many other LGBT and Queer identified warriors of color who have come before me, let me vent, “What the FUCK!!! A’int I a FAG?” Ever since my immigration to the US, I have worked tirelessly with other South-Asian LGBT people to hold my own community of origin accountable to its homophobia and sexism, along with fighting the rampant racism and middle class privilege of the largely white dominated Gay and Lesbian community.

After years of struggling and tearing each other apart, I have decided to shift my sphere of work from the LGBT rights movement to that of a larger economic justice struggle, particularly those of immigrants of color. Actually, let me rephrase myself, I have shifted my work from a movement that is rooted in liberal notions of equality to movements that fundamentally seek to re alter power structures of society. This shift came about not merely from a cultural understanding of racism and homophobia, but largely from my understanding that there has been a vast right wing conspiracy since the Regan era to build conservative base within multiple populations by keeping us engulfed in cultural wars against each other, while their economic agenda of privatizing every function of the government and deregulating the markets go unabated.

Sadly, the Gay marriage debate is deeply rooted in this cultural notion of equality, and has miserably lacked in its ability to connect with multiple struggles for justice. We live in a time when governments across the globe are shunning their responsibilities towards the neediest sections of their nation-states and have been rapidly privatizing their role as provider of economic security to diverse families and individuals. We live in a time when the notion of individual liberty and responsibility has been floated as the only mechanism to ensure one’s economic and social safety, and the care giving functions of the state have been transferred to private corporations and ultimately to the good nuclear family. The good family in such a context is the consumer family, which is able to negotiate with private corporations decent premiums on their health care and a solid stock market investment as their economic cushion, as well as able to consume a vast amount of technological to luxury gadgets and conduct its sexual intimacy within the state sanctified private sphere (read the private home with a good resale value). Families that are unable to participate in such transactions have been defined as the risky-bad-perverted-illegitimate family. In the context of the US society, these families are largely the racialized, poor and non-nuclear families.

The proponents and funders of the Gay marriage movement have pushed the idea that somehow if Gays and Lesbians were able to marry (just as heterosexuals), then we would achieve equality under law and in our love and families safely be able to access and share economic benefits. Little do they realize that many heterosexual families are also deemed unequal. In an era of privatization, the pool of those state sponsored economic benefits is rapidly shrinking, if not gone. What are we to do with a symbolic inclusion in an institution that has been rendered largely economically insignificant?

The answers that are propagated by the planners of the Gay marriage movement shed immense light on their real interests. They have noticeably stayed away from the discourses around privatization of the state and subsequent criminalization of poor (largely communities of color) and immigrant communities. Instead they have responded with stories about people’s love for each other and their right to live happily in a privatized world. They have carefully sanctified the images of the Gay and Lesbian couples on their literature by eliminating risky brown immigrant faggots like me, who live in a loving household with his best friend. The emergent Gay marriage agenda is therefore nothing short of a sexually and economically conservative-consumerist agenda. Thousands of loving LGBT people has been hoodwinked into believing that by achieving the right to marry, we would have achieved some illusive marker of equality.

On the other hand, evangelical, right-wing planners have been brilliant in their deployment of ballot initiatives ranging from anti-immigrant to anti-choice to anti-gay in an effort to build relationships and base within multiple communities and pit us against each other. California in the late eighties saw the passage of Proposition 187, which sought to ban undocumented immigrants from accessing any benefits from the state including emergency care services (Source: SSBB.com). In the battleground state of Arizona, we saw the passage of an anti-immigrant ballot initiative as recent as the 2006 elections (Source: Feministing.com) and (Source: Ballot.org).

These initiatives were largely funded and organized by nativist groups who were successfully able to create a conservative dent in the electorate. According to the U.S. Census, in 2006 about 35% of the California population were reported to be persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, 12.4% of Asian origin, 6.7% reported to be of black or African origin and 2.4% reported be of two or more races. This is a seismic shift from the late eighties and early 90's. A report from the California Governor's Office indicates increases in every ethnic group between 1990 and 2000, except a sharp 9% drop in the White Non-Hispanic population. In Arizona the Hispanic population grew by a whopping 80% between 1990 and 2000 and now accounts for fully one quarter of Arizona's 5.1 million people. While in Florida, the Hispanic population went from 12.8% in 1990 to an estimated 20.8% in 2008, and the Black population from 13.7% to that of an estimated 16.6% for the same time period.

These shifts in racial and ethnic make-up within these key states have produced very different kinds of voters over a period of time. A larger number of naturalized citizens, children of immigrants, and a more organized Black/African-American voting population are now up for grabs by both the conservative and liberal parties and issues. The conservative right sought to expand its relationship with this fast-growing constituency of people of color and immigrant churches and community organizations. Evangelical Christians backed by their corporate donors launched the campaign based upon the mission of restoring the sanctity of marriage. An idea that blows over well within communities with long histories of economic and sexual colonization and whose families have been rendered, in large measure, dysfunctional here in the US under intense economic pressures of neo-liberalism.

The evangelical-right and Gay-conservatives remain silent about their economic agendas and engage in cultural wars such as the sanctity of marriage and love, while police-brutality, criminalization of immigrant communities through inhumane raids, and rescaling of welfare rights have all been very silently and sometimes not so silently executed. If we are to win, we need to unmask the privatization, criminalization, and security state agenda. We need to reclaim our right to fuck, our right to health care, and most importantly move away from debates around the sanctity of marriage to a more inclusive agenda of universal health-care—resurrecting a loving state that is open to collecting taxes for the purpose of creating safety nets for multiple kinds of families. In building coalitions on these economic grounds we will be able to glue together a diverse electorate and constituency, just as President Elect Barack Obama’s campaign was able to achieve a diverse group of supporters in this past elections.