What’s #Love Got To Do With It?
Last month marked the first anniversary of same-sex marriage in the US. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision, a deluge of rainbow filters swathed the profile pictures of our Facebook friends, while a chorus of hashtags trumpeted the notion that #Love had finally won. Nothing could have appeared like a more morally upright triumph and, for many couples facing hardships due to lack of legal recognition, it was. The message was clear: At long last, after years of struggle, the LGBTQI community had finally obtained ‘equality’ — ‘marriage equality’.
But as I scrolled through my newsfeed, I grew outraged by this parade. As a linguist, I am interested in how our use of language affects issues of social justice. How is language used by those with power to maintain an unequal society? How does language shape the social world around us? ‘Homosexuality,’ for example, used to be spoken about like it was a disease. The more it was spoken about in this way, the more people believed it — including those ‘diagnosed’. Language is powerful. So, as more and more people began to speak about LGBTQI rights as defined by marriage rights, I had to ask: what does ‘marriage equality’ really mean in regards to true equality for a diverse LGBTQI community?
For years, powerful lobbyist groups like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) have dominated the discussion of LGBTQI equality in both the mainstream media and in Washington. In the year leading up to the SCOTUS decision, HRC issued 396 press releases each concluding with the following claim: HRC strives to end discrimination against LGBT citizens and realize a nation that achieves fundamental fairness and equality for all. In September 2014, they explained how this “fundamental fairness and equality” was to be achieved. In a press release titled #LoveCantWait: Why America Needs Marriage Equality Now, they claimed “same-sex couples experience legal, financial and emotional hardships solely because they can’t get married”.
While this statement was backed up by a series of legal facts, the crux of the argument hinged on the stories of “real Americans” whose lives had been ruined by marriage bans. Begging the question of what constitutes a “real American”, HRC presented us with “loving” and “committed” couples — couples who, coincidentally, also own property, receive healthy pensions and even fight in America’s wars.
What #LoveCantWait failed to represent, however, were the millions of LGBTQI people who live in poverty. #Love did not speak for those experiencing racial and economic inequality. It did not speak for those with unequal access to health care, particularly those living with HIV/AIDS. It did not speak for LGBTQI youth homelessness, criminalization and mass incarceration of queer youth (especially those of colour), immigration and detention centres, as well as the epidemic of violence against Transwomen (again — primarily of colour).
In an effort to break down their words in my own nerdy linguist way, I searched all 396 press releases for terms that related to these very real problems experienced by the majority of the community. Aside from the word ‘Transgender’ (which appeared most often as a part of the acronym ‘LGBT’), none of these issues were present. While 40% of all homeless youth identify as queer, the most powerful LGBTQ advocacy group in the US mentioned their struggles a total of 0 times. While queer people of colour were leading the fight against police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement, their contributions to social justice didn’t even receive a nod.
The claim that same-sex couples suffer injustice “solely because they can’t get married” is categorically false. It hinges on a representation of LGBTQ Americans as white, middle-class, cis-gender gays and lesbians who experience no other inequalities beyond the right to marry. At best, this group represents a fraction of the LGBTQI population. Their goals, however, define mainstream LGBTQI advocacy.
Why are other issues like racism, police violence, youth homelessness, gender inequality, access to healthcare, economic inequality, mass incarceration, immigration and trans justice so overwhelmingly absent from the conversation regarding LGBTQ social justice? Who was advancing an agenda that effectively silenced these other critical issues affecting our community? How did same-sex marriage come to seem like the common sense choice for the LGBTQ rights movement?
Backed by corporate donors from Chevron to Goldman Sachs, HRC has been the single highest contributor to political campaigns of any so-called single-issue lobby group in Washington. This political influence is complemented by a marketing campaign that has landed the HRC logo everywhere from bumper stickers to Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign. This means that the HRC is armed with a unique platform to influence both public opinion and public policy. While their brand of equality has not gone unchecked, their influence is without rival. But what message was HRC sending to the American people about the fight for true LGBTQ social justice?
This time last year, #Love was not the only winner. The real winners were those who had succeeded in making their agenda — same-sex marriage rights — appear to serve the interests of all queer people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, or economic class. Their victory lay in creating and publicizing a myth of social justice that measured ‘equality’ solely against the right to marry — not simply as one step on the road to true equality. #Love never had anything to do with it.
HRC and the mainstream media are not alone in promoting a vision of queer people as homogenous and social justice as being about #Love. Our own media markets a brand of LGBTQI equality that is easy to swallow because it focuses on weddings and the multi-billion dollar industry behind it. But a chic grey tuxedo means nothing when one can barely afford the clothes on their back. The automatic transfer of property after a spouse’s death is of little concern when one simply has no shelter. Access to a partner’s pension or health insurance, while certainly a right to be fought for, means nothing when one is unemployed or working multiple jobs that don’t provide benefits at all. And when we claim a victory for ‘equality’, we must ask what that means in a country where people of colour can be killed by the police with impunity and incarcerated by the millions — a country where Omar Mateen can purchase an assault rifle and kill 49 Black and Latinx people at a LGBTQI nightclub.
If social movements are defined by the words that we use to describe them, then the mainstream LGBTQI movement has made it clear: their social justice does not include you unless your primary concern is ‘marriage equality’. Even if marriage was supposed to be a silver bullet that achieved a mythical trickle-down justice, how exactly would this resolve the myriad of other issues experienced by those fighting for their rights at the intersections of sexuality, race, class, and gender?
We have to remember that struggles for racial justice, gun control, economic equality, indigenous rights, Trans justice, equal access to healthcare, sustainable housing for all, environmental protections, a reformed justice system — they are all connected and they affect all of us. The struggle for marriage rights was important, but not so important that these other crises are simply removed from the discussion and left for someone else to deal with.
If we can’t learn to love and respect our own diversity then we don’t get to call ourselves a community and we certainly don’t get to celebrate our ‘pride’. We need to be asking ourselves just how equal we are if equality is only for the few at the expense of the many. Recall the great poet, activist and theorist, Audre Lorde who wrote: “There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives”. As we celebrate the notion that #LoveWins, let’s take a moment to think about what equality really means, what it really looks like and how it could be achieved for all citizens.
