Today as soon as I heard about the Supreme Court Same Sex marriage decision, I tweeted this:
It’s become an unvarying tradition on Left Twitter that any advance for same sex marriage elicit a deluge of oh-so-correct complaints about how oppressive the institution of marriage is; about how same sex marriage, like the LGBQT movement in its entirety, is for rich white dudes; how the oppression of queers is nothing compared to the oppression of Black people, women etc; how queers are supplicating themselves before patriarchy and “pinkwashing” neoliberalism; and finally, the ever popular variations on “While the Supreme Court was deliberating same sex marriage, [a manifestation of a genuine problem] happened 2000 times per minute.”
This bullshit is aided and abetted by a small, select group of the best and coolest LGBQT people on earth who, because they’re so cool and all, prance like dancing bears for straight people in their timeline by avidly pissing on wedding cake themselves, and fostering the bullshit history and the same stupid generalizations about queer people from which, in the tradition of social network self-abnegation, they obviously exempt themselves.
I’m not a big fan of marriage, it’s not for me, but then I also have no dire need of the benefits it confers. I don’t have a husband who wants to immigrate, for instance. However, my marriage politics have nothing to do with how degrading and bigoted I find these habits on the left, as well as mind-numbingly stupid in their obvious ignorance of movement history and plain old facts about who and who doesn’t get married. It all makes for a flagrant, preening show of stupidity, meanness and ignorance, and if I were a kinder person, I would find it embarrassing and pitiful instead of disgusting.
There’s a whole lot I could say about this tendency on the left and the mythology it promotes, and I may at a later time, but I’m just going to restrict myself to one thing today, so that people can see for themselves what this shit looks like.
It couldn’t have been more than an hour after my “cue,” that writer Joe Catron tweeted this to his 28,000 followers (it’s big, text follows):
I’m going to put aside how I read the cartoon, and say that this is objectionable just by virtue of the comic being a cherry-picked, theretofore unknown trifle that Catron clearly knew absolutely nothing about before he used it to generally admonish “gay white people” with the cringe-making “just no” trademark of the self-adoring finger-waver. Catron’s tweet was the first I’d ever seen the cartoon and if there was a gay memo expressing official endorsement, I missed that too. I must have also missed Catron’s rationale for assuming that a gay white person drew it.
Half a minute’s research revealed that the cartoon is the work of a beloved Argentine cartoonist — Liniers — who by all accounts is heterosexual. Since the first draft of this post, I’ve learned that Liniers drew the comic originally in relation to the Sochi Olympics and homophobic Russian laws. He reposted it to mark the Supreme Court decision. So, to summarize: gay white people weren’t any more implicated in whatever great injury this comic was doing to the human race than Catron himself.
In fact, by propagating it, Catron is vastly more implicated. But it was for a worthy cause: inciting awful people to wave their fingers at a dehumanizingly abstracted group in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision about which many were pleased. Imagine how stupid it would be to now tweet, “No white straight people, just no”, now that we know the cartoonist isn’t gay. But the reductive generalization was about queers, so Catron can continue to be repulsively pleased with himself.
Apparently cartoonist Liniers is woefully behind the times in the whole finding/repudiating connections between oppressed groups thing. Poor chap will need to get up to speed on the capricious U.S. Twitter outrage machine if he wants to avoid this in future. Pro tip, Liniers, if you’re reading: for now, all but the most nuanced appeals to the idea of common struggle are strictly forbidden. Had you previously compared Chelsea Manning to Nelson Mandela or Ferguson to Gaza, you’d already know this. You may think you reposted the Sochi cartoon to mark one human rights milestone with another but, in fact, you were appropriating Blackness for the purpose of trivializing it. I mean, what’s more trivial than homophobia? Solidarity is erasure! Catch up, fella!
Unsurprisingly Catron’s tweet to his impressive following elicited the hoped-for response: a long stream of piss directed at wedding cake, and well, queer people generally, for not knowing their exact, precise place in the food chain of concerns. Spoiler: the bottom apparently, because being gay is super easy!!!
So pleased was Catron with what he’d done, he left no doubt that, as assholes go, he’s got the whole asshole thing down, by building a Twitter shrine to himself with every RT of his amazing tweet to which some scolding or outrage had been attached. To get the full measure of what a nasty, self-promoting, divisive creep this guy is, I’ve archived it, with some additional commentary here. If you’re as impressed as I am, please tell him. Send him some pictures of your own.
While Catron was building his RT shrine of finger-wagging creeps and victim Olympians, the outrage machine was chugging away at Liniers, who couldn’t understand why his cartoon had elicited so much anger. He posted the tweet below that has all of 28 faves as of this writing. The outraged bigot machine isn’t big on accepting apologies or correcting its errors. But where building solidarity is concerned, nothing can touch it, amirite? I mean, this shit is useful.
Before I close — congratulations, newlyweds and spouses-to-be. I wish you could get the right to immigrate, health insurance, college tuition, hospital visitation, social security etc some way other than through an antiquated institution that privileges only one form of family, but alas the Left has failed you. Perhaps that’s why it jeers now and why white, male reactionary showboaters like Joe Catron pit us against other oppressed people, instead of letting you celebrate one small good thing.
The Rancid Honeytrap 
Liniers’ tweet is wonderful, but *of course* the first response (at least in my view) is someone yelling at him for “hiding behind artistic expression”. Not just yelling at him, but @’ing his username at the end so everyone got to see the performance. “Artistic expression” is GREAT when it’s Charlie Hebdo, I guess, and Africans and Muslims are being attacked, but god forbid some leftist solidarity try to celebrate what is, actually, a pretty big deal.
I don’t know how Joe Catron identifies, but I’ve seen other tweets attacking the cartoon from those I know are hetero and cisgender, and the sheer nasty *discipline* of that makes me feel sick and angry and alienated as all get out.
Do me a favor. Send him a link to your comment. He should pilloried for this. I don’t want to be everyone’s proxy for telling these assholes off.
I don’t find this shit any more lovable from queer people, so I don’t care how anyone doing this shit identifies.
He created the official image for this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/argentine-women-call-out-machismo.html?_r=0. Nobody accused him of coopting anything
I don’t see an image and therefore don’t get your meaning.
Here is the image: http://vientosurnoticias.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/liniers-marcha-femicidio.jpg My point was that in the most important mass mobilization of Argentina in the last few years, a mobilization that focused on issues like domestic violence, machismo, femicide, etc, the organizers (all women) asked a man to create the image and nobody found it strange.
I guess I am just thinking out loud. Even though I have lived in the US since 1999, this kind of fake incidents still surprise me.
That’s not really analogous. The issue isn’t that he’s a straight guy. It’s that he “appropriated” Black struggle to draw a connection to queers. The Horror!!!
The episode is even dumber than you explained: https://twitter.com/porliniers/status/614507666958864384
“@xMissTanisa I originally did it for the Sochi Games (explains the snow) since most winter Olympians are white..Sorry You Took it like that.”
I don’t know what point you’re making here. If you’re going to bang on Liniers, go away and don’t come back.
Far from it, I’m banging on the hate train. The cartoon isn’t a response to SSM it’s a recycled image from the winter olympics but no one thought to create a shit storm back then. I can imagine some on the bandwagon would have even supported the image in its original context. People have seen whatever they want to see in the image and that goes for my previous comment. I’ll meet your request and step back.
If he saw this tweet, he would probably ask what an “ally” is https://twitter.com/brownblaze/status/614569702480699392
P.S: Tarzie, this is my first time commenting on your blog. I don’t know if you have any policy regarding links to tweets. If so, please let me know
I’m a bit taken aback by this- and not just by your pretty shocking adoption [hope I’ve misread] of the ol’ liberal rhetoric: ‘state has sanctioned equality in a state institution, therefore equality for all!’- you know, that sort of thing [forgive me if I’ve stretched your post somewhat!]. Its as if they’ve put a spell on you, waving the flag (rainbow flag), talking about love and all this holy matrimony…
Is it not valid for qpoc- or indeed any queer persons, to whom the federal legalisation of SSM and its supposed monumentality does not do for- to identify the SC’s decision and the left/media furore of blanketing positivity that comes with as being such– a pile of crap, so to speak? The cartoon represents an approbiation of black american struggle in the US, to that end it is reprehensible; faulting black people- especially qpoc- for taking against the minimilisation of their struggle as poc in the name of celebrating what is- lets face it- a token gesture towards qp is just not on. The same issue would arise were Rev. Al Sharpton or another one of those charlatons to post it; it doesn’t matter the individual who posted it; it matters the people to whom it purports to represent. A lot of what you wrote reads like reactionary drivel, which doesn’t exactly go for the mantra of rancidity you expouse.
I think the heart of the matter here is that the nominal reactionary bullshit peddled- “Didn’t you know there are more important things goin’ on than just SSM; it doesn’t mean anything, marriage is for losers”- is being made synonymous with real claims of oppression and subjugation by the gay rights movement; the valid points made by qpoc and otherwise marginilised qp that marriage- the oppressive, exclusionary instittion- is being insidiously positioned as a way to whitewash the enormity of ongoing state violence, oppression, against lgbtq peoples- in the US and elsewhere where their bombs and fascist coups reign; and thereby with the grievance agaisnst the nominally self-congratulary white, ostensibly rich, US liberal and their reified sense of supremacy. I digress. Gay rights are wrong. So wrong.
Sorry if I’ve misread the post and/or mistook where you were punching, its late here across the ocean.
Yeah, well y’know they’re all devils!!!
I didn’t defend the cartoon. I admonished Catron for waving his finger at gay people over it, as if collectively responsible. I’m not gonna argue about the stupid comic. I know how these fracases become a little universe for some people, but not me. And since in your universe, I have no right to an opinion about the “appropriation” of POC, I know better than to take this up. Please reread my post: I did not endorse the cartoon, so don’t argue as if I did.
Since I didn’t endorse the state, same sex marriage or the comic your exceedingly dull lecture is for someone else, not me. Please reread and put aside your obvious desire to make a speech.
My point is simple: this bullshit is homophobia running undercover and if you endorse it, fuck off. I detest this bullshit.
UPDATE: Oops I added some text and I guess now I’m kinda defending the cartoon. If I’m gonna be accused of something, I might as well go ahead and just do it. Appropriation theory deployed in this way is extremely stupid. Sorry, not sorry, professor.
Great post. Honestly, when I first heard the news, I wasn’t sure how to take it. I initially thought about the Jennicet Gutierrez incident and how annoyed I was going to be by everyone congratulating themselves about homophobia being a thing of the past (like when Obama being elected magically ended racism). Fortunately, I then went and talked with a lesbian friend and saw how happy she was and wondered how I could possibly have been anything but happy at the news. I mean, regardless of my personal opinions of marriage, I understand that it is really important to most people and there are a lot of tangible economic benefits to getting married. Anyway, thanks for writing this.
Very nice of you say so. Thanks.
So earlier, you called me an asshole for siding with those who shit on gay marriage. After reading your post, I now know that our disagreement turned on what was meant by shitting on marriage. So I guess what I want to do is clarify my views and let the chips fall where they may.
My scepticism of the movement is directed at those in the mainstream: the HRCs, the Clintons and their neoliberal ilk who have packaged gay marriage as a step forward, while actively working to undermine the political and economic autonomy of families by dismantling what is left of the paltry social safety net — rendering/co-opting the gay marriage movement into a movement that will bring benefits to those who are well off and at best do next to nothing for the general population. Given the context in which this event appears (a context where social security is on the chopping block, employer benefits are dwindling thanks to the ACA, and so on) it is very difficult not to direct scepticism at the mainstream’s, who have as you have accurately put it failed the newlyweds, presentation of this event as a victory or a step forward.
P.S. you’ve alluded to the fact that the history of the gay marriage movement as presented by the AE crew is grossly inaccurate. In the interest of understanding your position and your criticism of me further, as well as getting clearing up our beef, and more importantly dropping any incorrect ideas, could you point me to a more accurate history? Thanks.
I don’t disagree with anything you wrote in your second paragraph. What I object to is how the instrumentalization of LGBTQ oppression by neoliberals gets blamed on LGBTQ people in a way that the instrumentalization of the oppression of women and POC does not. It’s like we’re more complict, when in fact, everything we know about sucking neoliberal cock for no benefit, POC and women taught us. We have a lot of catching up to do to be even ten years behind. Is that impolitic? Good!
As I told you on Twitter, the history is readily available. When you look into it, rather than winging it with shit like, “the SSM movement is a rich white dude thing” it will be right at your fingertips. In my experience, privilege and desire to be in the sexual vanguard go hand in hand. Working class queers seem to like marriage quite a lot, and no wonder, since they have more to gain from shared benefits.
Catron & your post after this one are just painful to read. i mean, cringe-inducing. let’s all put our commie/class warrior caps on for 2 seconds & give some tho’t to “working class queers.” there’ll be plenty of time to point out all the problems with this, like, e.g., for obvious comparison, all the problems that followed after the legal victories of the civil rights era. in my neck of the woods, just for starters, any gay person will now no longer have to move out of VA into DC or MD to get married. that’s not a small thing.
“Working class queers seem to like marriage quite a lot, and no wonder, since they have more to gain from shared benefits.”
Depriving queers of marriage has obviously been a way of refusing to acknowledge their humanity. You’d think that the left would understand this, and rejoice in their victory. Yet another sad example of how the left gets engrossed in abstractions and can’t relate to the real world needs of people.
I completely agree. The upshot is, the people that do all this fingerpointing are all privileged as far as I can tell. Grad students, academics…half the privilege white dude stereotyping comes from privileged white males. this stuff gets more and more bizarre.
But I also think the “leftier than thou” and “engrossed in abstractions” assessment misses how much this is simply about homophobia. Queer issues and queer people are discussed very differently from other issues. There’s far more criticism and way more condemnation and stereotyping. It has the quality of starting with a conclusion and working backwards. I think Catron’s thread and his own behavior were rife with just plain old bigotry. What’s leftier-than-thou about plucking a cartoon out of nowhere and scolding queers in toto for appropriation and making cracks about disco balls?