Thinking About Yestergay

Reading around Obama's declaration of support for gay marriage yesterday. 

Sarah Schulman on prettyqueer makes an indignant call for the rise of a new liberationist movement:

Now that gay people are fitting themselves into a dysfunctional box in order to win approval, our futures will surely be as strewn with disappointment, legal battles and failure to conform that heterosexuals endure, even with their constant advocacy by film and television, and the profound privileges given to them by their families. In this way we are living in the gay version of the 1950′s. But the 1960′s are just around the corner. Inevitably these conservatizing trends will again explode into a new sexual revolution, collective living, and a desire for liberatory feminism. I just hope I live long enough to see it.

Listening to Tony Kushner's joy on Democracy Now:

I don’t think that the absolute apotheosis of—I mean, the most radical implications of LGBT liberation are not the right to serve openly in the military and to marry, but I guess I’ve become more of an evolutionary than revolutionary leftist over the course of the last 20 or so years. The powerlessness of the left, our inability to actually do things like stop the bombing of Baghdad, to really begin to do work, to—serious work, difficult work, to actually do something to stop the terrifying pace of climate change, and to advance our own interests—it’s become, you know, sort of unbearable to me.

And Dr. William J. Barber, a black preacher in North Carolina, speaking out against the recently passed Amendment 1 in the state:

And as always, the future comes from the South. In this case, Argentina, where the society and government leads us in the U.S. by decades: 

Adults who want sex-change surgery or hormone therapy in Argentina will be able to get it as part of their public or private health care plans under a gender rights law approved Wednesday. The measure also gives people the right to specify how their gender is listed at the civil registry when their physical characteristics don't match how they see themselves. 

Now that's beautiful.

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