I Smell Trouble in Gay Marriage Paradise

The seismic blast set off by the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage is the Roe v. Wade of our generation, the Brown v. Board of Education of our parents’.

Religious institutions, schools, and charities crouch in fight mode to ward off pressures to perform same sex weddings or threats to eliminate their tax-exempt status.

LGBT activists and allies maximize every bit of momentum to push for federal anti-discrimination statutes in employment and housing.

But the most interesting reaction is within the LGBT community itself. Until SCOTUS handed down its gay marriage ruling, you could have been forgiven for assuming the LGBT community was a unified group with uniform goals.

Not so much.

Not once in the fight for what the LGBT movement called “equality” was there the slightest hint that equality was lacking inside the movement.

Even before the SCOTUS interns had run their little feet ragged rushing the decision to reporters, Twitter started blowing up with calls for the white, elitist, capitalist, cisgendered (i.e., not transgendered) gays and lesbians to step aside.

Wasting no time—not even long enough to slap a few backs—“trans people, women, people with disabilities and mental illness, Black and Brown folk, indigenous people, immigrants, sex workers and street youth” boldly declared it was time to hoist their own symbolic flag of protest. (And not the flag of sex toys that CNN mistook for the banner of ISIS in London.)

The image of the camel nudging his nose inside the tent comes to mind. To those outside the LGBT community, it would seem that the camel’s nose is so far inside the tent that gay marriage is legal in all fifty states. Within the LGBT community itself, things look very different. In fact it’s only the LG camel’s nose that’s in the tent. The B and T noses want in too, and they’re not at all the same nose.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision, the B nose commentary on bi-erasure (being ignored and discriminated against by both straights and gays) and calls to “show your Bi Pride” spiked on Facebook and Twitter along with a pretty new Bi flag, three stripes; pink, violet, and blue.

More insistent is the T nose. In Boston and Chicago, “young trans and queer people—especially those that are Black, Brown, undocumented and experiencing homelessness”—disrupted Gay Pride parades.

The same Pride Parade that was LGBT before SCOTUS ruled, is now dismissed by B and definitely T as just LG, i.e., wealthy, white privileged, and cisgendered.

In Chicago, “Black trans and queer people” blocked major streets near Wrigley Field, calling it an intersection of “corporate greed, private exploitation of queer communities, hyper policing, and ground zero for violence perpetrated against trans and queer young people by the city of Chicago.”

“We cannot celebrate the passage of gay marriage” declares the public statement of the Black queer community of Chicago.

Ruh-roh.

That is definitely news to those outside the LGBT world.

In Boston, the mainstream Pride community, #WickedProud, is seen as “exclusionary to people of Color, transgender communities, low income communities, and small non-profit organizations.”

The marginalized subgroup, #WickedPissed, staged a sit-in that delayed Boston’s Pride parade by eleven minutes “to symbolize the 11 lives of transgender individuals who have been beaten down, slaughtered, and brutally murdered in the United States this year.”

With the stroke of a marriage license, gays and lesbians have become a little too mainstream. Now they might as well be The Man.

We could be forgiven for thinking the first African-American president would quell racial strife. We could be forgiven for thinking the legalization of gay marriage would strengthen the LGBT community.

On the eve of the SCOTUS gay marriage ruling, which everyone not living under a rock knew would go down the way it did, President Obama hosted a Pride event at the White House. Shortly into his fifteen-minute address, a 29-year-old transgender woman who refers to herself as “undocumented” began heckling President Obama about his deportation policies.

Jennicet Gutiérrez said she didn’t want to “celebrate” when “trans women of color are facing a lot of violence in the detention centers.” She spoke up, she said, “to raise awareness to the President … to send a message.”

President Obama scolded her for eating his hors d’oeuvres and drinking his booze while heckling him, then had security escort her from the room.

How did it get played and replayed in the Twittersphere?

That because she was transgender, she didn’t get support from the LGBT crowd, that some of them actually booed her when President Obama said, “Shame on you.”

Because they—the LG(BT) crowd—are The Man now. It’s time for new revolution.

As long as there’s The Man, there’s revolution.

Donna Carol Voss is an author, blogger, speaker, and mom. A Berkeley grad, a former pagan, a Mormon on purpose, and an original thinker on 21st century living, she is the author of “One of Everything,” the story of how she got from where she was to where she is. Contact: donna@donnacarolvoss.com