Heterophobia and the gay marriage debate
One of the most interesting thing I’ve found about the same-sex marriage debate in Australia is how similar the arguments put forward against it are whether they come from within our community or without.
Amongst our community, the debate has split the politically minded into two camps.
On the pro-gay marriage side there are couples who want to get married and believe they should have as much respect and legal protection accorded to their relationships as anyone else.
They want marriage because they truly believe that their relationships are equal to those of heterosexuals in every way.
You also have radicals who would not choose to get married themselves, but demand that couples who wish to get married should be able to, and that they themselves deserve the right to have the choice to refuse it- if it’s illegal then that choice is taken away.
In the anti-marriage camp the argument goes something like this- marriage has in centuries past been an institution that treated women like property, and the relationships of gay men are inherently more progressive, and true to human nature because of their fluidity than heterosexual ones.
No one can argue that marriage in centuries past was not an unequal contract, but to assume the same about marriage in the 21st century is a falsehood.
The heterosexual married couples in their 20’s and 30’s that I know have relationships based on equality where decision making is a shared responsibility- they are equal partners because they choose to live their lives that way.
The second argument, that our relationships are better than those of heterosexuals and that marriage as a “heterosexual” institution is thus inherently flawed is problematic on two fronts.
Firstly, those who push this argument make the insulting assumption that their definition of what it is to be gay is A: the correct definition, and the only possible definition, and B: applies to all gay men whether they agree with it or not.
It transforms homosexuality from a simple state of attraction to persons of the same gender and turns it into an ideology with a whole set of rigid assumptions about a person’s behaviour, and political and religious beliefs.
At the heart of it is the inference (in some cases not just inferred but stated outright) that those gay men who seek out stable monogamous relationships are in some way “sell-outs” and guilty of “internalised homophobia” by seeking to “conform” to so-called “heterosexual norms”.
The gay anti-gay marriage camp’s argument when boiled down seems to be this- “sharing that institution with heterosexuals would demean our relationships”, which is ironic because the main argument coming out of the Christian Right in opposing equality for same sex couples is this- “sharing our institutions with homosexuals would demean our relationships.”
I can even remember one letter published in the Sydney gay press that accused the community of too much “heterosexual thinking”- that’s only a hop, skip and a jump away from accusing people of “thought crimes”.
Though not fully articulated, this is at its heart an ideology of homosexual supremacism- that states that we are inherently better than heterosexuals in every way and that heterosexuals must be viewed as a monolithic and demonic “other” that is responsible for all the backwardness in the world and is the source of all our strife and woes.
This mistake is not without it’s precedents in history- Malcolm X, in trying to better the rights of African-Americans followed a similar ideology of black supremacism as a member of the racist Nation of Islam movement, until he himself moved on to realise that viewing all whites as the enemy was a recipe for everlasting conflict and would not solve his peoples problems- for which he was shot.
But furthermore, it ignores the fact that as a minority making up less than a tenth of the population, if the GLBT people of Australia have any rights at all in this country it is because of the many compassionate, empathetic and good hearted heterosexual Australians who have put their support behind our campaigns for equality.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feel frustrated that three decades on from decriminalisation we still don’t have full equality in this country and that reforms long passed in comparable democracies overseas still remain controversial here.
Nor does it make up for the fact that far too many right thinking Australians (both straight and gay) continue to put their bank balance before their hearts and consciences when they go to the ballot box.
If we are going to win this fight (and we will) we need to reach out to the rest of Australia- make them aware of the real issues of discrimination that still exist in our lives.
Ideologies of division that split us into “queer” and “straight”, and into “authentic” thinking gay men and lesbians, and so-called “wanna-be-heteros” will only set us back.
To comment on this story or to post a blog click here