Last November, Ryan Conrad began archiving a small collection of essays on the web as part of an attempt to create a record of a queer radical movement that has consistently been against gay marriage. In the wake of Proposition 8 in California and Question 1 in Maine, cities and towns across the U.S saw straight and gay liberals and progressives angrily asserting the rights of gays to marry.
In the midst of the affective and emotional cacophony about the “right” of gays to marry as a simple expression of love, gay marriage was portrayed as part of a progressive/left agenda, and few people seemed to notice that the national gay marriage campaigns are in fact deeply conservative . For instance, the argument that committed gays ought to be able to marry in order that their spouses might receive health care reinforced the spread of privatization by affirming that the state has little to no responsibility for people’s well-being.
Even fewer seemed to notice that several queer voices were dissenting from the newly strident emphasis on gay marriage as the only way to gain “full equality.” Many of these voices were questioning the very notion of “equality” and making critical and nuanced critiques of the complicated and problematic ways in which issues of economic inequality and race were erased in the drive to make gay marriage the only worthwhile cause of the “community.”
As Against Equality transformed into a collective project and more critical perspectives were added to the archive, the responses we received from readers made it clear that we were filling a giant vacuum in the public discourse on gay marriage. Over and over, we heard from people who were deeply grateful to have access to the constellation of essays we gathered. It became evident that not only were large numbers of queer and trans folks angry at where the gay marriage campaigns were heading, they were interested in finding concrete ways to resist it. To make these conversations more accessible to folks offline, we compiled a sampling of archived essays into an anthology. We issued a call for art, and the result is the fantastic postcard series we make available with every book order.
A year later, our first book Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage is a reality, we have nearly sold out of our first press of five hundred, and we have just concluded our first book tour and are planning the next one. Our discussions and the work of collective members and contributors are clearly making a deep impact. We have begun the process of filing an amicus brief with a few other like-minded queer and trans social justice organizations in the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger case, and will be submitting a piece to the inaugural edition of the new international journal, We Who Feel Differently. Plans for the second book in the series critiquing militarism and the fight to overturn “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are underway, and our digital archive, which is as important to us as our book projects, continues to grow.
Our book tour was especially gratifying for us because we not only learned that the work is making an impact, but that queers and straights everywhere are taking the critiques we offer back into their organizing and daily lives. In our own work, as activists who work on issues like queer youth homelessness, the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic, immigration reform, school violence, and the prison industrial complex, to name a few, we feel more emboldened and assured that the possibility for a queer, and truly radical and just world, still exists. We thank you for making this possible!
xo – the Against Equality Collective
