The Failure of Marriage Equality and the Colonisation of Queerness

An old friend, and old letter, an old battleground.

I’m sitting in the hospital room of the man I called up to explain why “gay marriage in Australia fuckin’ sucks”. In the brown vinyl recliner next to me is his partner, also a writer, scribbling in his notebook. Now that the nurses have extended his bed he can stretch out and drift into sleep. This gloriously large man, solid and beefy, is living proof that the Body Mass Index is a joke. As he gently snores, bathed in hospital twilight we watch the rise and fall of his barrel chest.

Less than 24 hours from now a doctor is going to peel away a section of his scalp, open up the back of his skull, and excise the unwelcome passenger attached to his brain stem, just behind his cerebellum.

Someone will dig into his astonishing mind.

Four years ago, I asked to do the verbal equivalent. I called him up so I could dissect his thoughts about the 2017 plebiscite to recognize gay marriage in Australia. If you haven’t lived under the Westminster system, a plebiscite is essentially a referendum but non-binding and for non-constitutional matters… a referendum that a government can ignore the results of if they choose.

I was about to start writing a play about a gay couple where one of them transitioned to being a woman. I knew in my core that it needed to be provocative. Problem was I just hadn’t quite nailed how this transgender character would feel about how she’s fundamentally changing the nature of her marriage from being between two men to being between a man and a woman.

His response to my request?

“Sure, if the character is more like me the more compelling they’ll be, obviously.”

---

Below is the distillation of the notes I took during that dissection. I’d condensed that sprawling, hours long discussion into an email to my publisher that I was sure was going to scuttle the project before it even began. My first professional commission, not a single word yet written and here I was already calling into question the brief.

Why would I do something so risky?

Because every other person involved was a cisgender queer who regularly used the phrase “Love is Love”, the slogan of the pro-gay marriage side in the plebiscite, as a shorthand for the themes of the work. I hated that slogan even more than I hated the “It’s Okay To Say No” chants from the other side of “the debate”. I needed to address this. I needed to let my colleagues know that as a trans person how alone and unseen the words “Love is Love” make me feel.

This discussion went on to spark what I think is one of the best things I’ve ever written. A 288 word monologue. A sarcastic, bitter rant about the privilege of conservative cisgendered gays. This is how I found the voice of that distressed and angry trans woman that later I was honoured to embodied on the stage.

So here it is, despite some trims for clarity, the letter I thought would end my writing career before I’d even started it.

---

April 11, 2021

“Heya. Just wanna talk about something that keeps coming up in our discussions about Marriage Equality as a theme. Great that it’ll be a focus in the funding applications but I want to make you aware of my feelings and explain why I don’t like the Marriage Equality movement as it exists here in Australia.

Simply? It isn’t enough.

When I try to articulate how I feel about Marriage Equality I always think about people who say things like “I don’t see race”. It only seems to ever be said by a privileged white person, only ever used when someone is defending their lack of knowledge or care to understand the nuance of a minority’s lived experience. And it’s almost always accompanied by the phrase “I don’t care if you’re black, white, red, purple, green… etc”. Notice how they always add some random colours at the end? That lovely little “reductio ad absurdum” to try to undermine anyone’s protestations that “black lives matter” by equating it to something silly like “purple lives matter”?

While racism and homophobia are two very different (and very shitty) evils that exist in the world, they get to exist because of the same foundation. For me, the words “I don’t see race” rhymes with the words “I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom”. Both are statements couched in the same denial of understanding that people’s lives can be fundamentally different than yours AND still be valid.

It’s also the essence of “white colonialism”. When the progressive tide turns against the conservative majority, when people push back against tradition, the conservative powers that be get together and dole out a little bit of privilege. Not too much. Just a dash here and there so some minorities, or subsets of minorities who will sell out their community. Just enough to shore up the voting numbers to keep the game going, to keep the graft up, to slide in “just one more term!” and all the benefits that come from a well-maintained status quo.

Once upon a time in this country you couldn’t get a job if you were Italian or Greek. Hell, when I arrived here, this British colony, the Irish were not yet “white” in the current conception of the word, and I’d routinely treated as a sub-class because of my ethnicity. But times change, new racial boogey-men are found, and those who were considered “ethnically other” are now “white”.

Queer folk have it the same.

The slow creep of our queer family being turned into the new battalion of conventional white people to help perpetuate the status quo in this country. The Australian equivalent of the “Log Cabin Republicans” exists here. Hell, a conservative MP, who consistently voted against increasing the protections of LGBT+ people, got to stand up in parliament minutes after the plebiscite results were announced as a landslide “Yes to Gay Marriage!” and publicly proposed to his now husband waiting in the gallery. A beautiful moment for the recognition of queerness: Two rich, white, conservative men with extraordinary power and privilege making the moment of relief after months of legalized anti-gay hate campaigns all about them and their happiness.

The entire thing felt like the colonization of queerness to me.

I’m sure for that minister and his husband the statement “Love Is Love” rings true. I’m sure that when they look at the heterosexual relationships around them they see no difference to theirs, no reason why they should be discriminated because “they’re just like straight folk” (wealthy, white, able-bodied).

But here’s the thing about queerness that’s overlooked. It’s nothing like straightness.

The big secret about being queer that the straights don’t seem to realise: The love a queer person feels for another queer person is not the same kind of love two straight people share. Two straight people loving each other, having their flavour of love validated in every piece of media made in the last century? Getting to enjoy the luxury of walking down the street hand-in-hand, of kissing, of celebrating their pairing openly? This is not the same as decades of only ever seeing queer people in media suffering because of their deviancy. It’s not the same as being pelted with eggs thrown from passing cars, of beatings in alleyways, of hiding any sign of affection for someone for the fear of being found out. “Being queer” is not simply the same as “being straight but with a different configuration of genitals”. We’ve spent so much time pleading “we’re just like you” in order to win some rights we’ve forgotten that we are nothing like them, not really.

“Love is Love?” No. “Love is NOT Love.”

This is a marketing slogan, an empty platitude that says “I’m not going to bother learning about the specifics of your lived experiences. I’m only going to care about the parts that resemble MY straight experiences because that’s the only thing that has value to me.” It feels like being patted on the head by a straight person and being told, “See, you are just as valid as we are.”

The plebiscite was a mockery of the fight for queer rights and I think that if we’re going to platform it in this show it’s a disservice to the community to treat it as anything other than what it was: a way for a conservative government, in the most spineless fashion, to pass a tiny facet of queer protection legislation without any of the risk to themselves. To get a PR win and look good in the eyes of constituents they’d routinely refused to protect, and hopefully absorb a little more of the minority.

“But don’t forget, be a good minority or we’ll take the right away again!”

Here we are four years later (NOTE: 8 as of publishing this) and what’s different? Australia behaves like the job is done when it comes to the rights of queer people. The cis, gay queers got their representation and visibility and now the fight is over. I guess all those trans people, those young people, all those on the brink of suicide, all those victims of hate-crimes and gay-bashings, of slurs hurled from passing cars. I guess they’ll be fine now cause they’re legally allowed to marry someone that they love?

We needed a mile of legislation, but they only gave an inch.

Even then, it’s an inch that overwhelmingly benefits the white and the wealthy and the cis-male. Trickle-down human rights. They threw us a bone so that the non-conforming queers, the femmes, the fatties, the non-binary, the poly, would shut the fuck up for a decade or so. I am so damn happy that friends and family get to marry the person they love, openly and publicly… but we are more than than just this one expression of love.

This play… I’m so fucking excited about it… but I don’t think it should be about the good that Marriage Equality has done. At best I think that would be lip service to a traditionalist world-view and at worst a betrayal of queer comrades who continue to fight and advocate for more. I adore the idea behind this production and the fact that you have asked me to be involved is a dream come true.

But I don’t want to make queerness “respectable”.

Marriage Equality in this country was about giving the straights a reason to not have to understand queer culture. Queerness is about so much more than “who you can marry”. It’s a culture of more than just meme’s, more than Drag Race references, more than rolling your eyes at the slightest inconvenience and flouncing around a café. More than “a lifestyle”, more than “a preference”.

Queerness is more than just “love”, it is an act of resistance, of protest.

God, I hope I’m not throwing a handful of spanners in the works here? I don’t know if any of this will be helpful in any of the grant applications, and highly suspect that this sort of discourse will be too dangerous for funding bodies. But it’s how I feel… I don’t want “queerness to become more mainstream.” I want “the mainstream to become more queer”.

---

This was the provocation I hurled into the writer’s room of a play that had yet to even take shape. I’d never have been able to articulate it if it wasn’t for the long detailed discussions with man lying in the bed next to me. The man waiting to find out if the unwelcome passenger within his skull will be the end of him.

His magnificent mind changed me, fundamentally shifted something in me which I then took and used to change others. None of this, none of these words of mine would exist if it wasn’t for him.

–S