You know, you'd think that someone who wrote an essay about queer people selling each other out for cishet approval would agree with this, and to a certain extent, I do, at least in the outcomes and effects, but this excerpt contains a number of deeply wrong and deeply fucked up things to say.
The big pushes for marriage equality and military service were responses to things done to us. They weren't the malicious behavior of a bunch of second-rate, shitty gays (holy fuck, what the fuck, measuring people's artistic prowess and social importance by how much they got laid? James, what the fuck). The push for marriage equality got bigger and louder because of the AIDS epidemic. Because we were denied entry into the hospital rooms and funerals of our loved ones. Because sometimes all families left behind when they cleared out everything in a shared apartment was a fucking box fan. Because people lost their homes when their partners died. Because people were buried under the wrong names, or unclaimed by family and unable to be claimed by the people who loved them.
The push for military service equality? That happened as a pushback against active campaigns to out queer people and drive them out of military service. Like it or not, military service has become (by intent on the part of the Department of Defense) a way out of poverty for a lot of people, and queer people? Well, we tend to be poorer than others. Protecting people's ability to serve in the military meant protecting that path out of poverty for a lot of queer people, meant protecting health care, meant protecting housing, meant protecting lots and lots of things.
A friend of mine was expelled from the military under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He'd been in almost long enough to have a pension, and he pissed someone off who knew he was gay. When I talked to him about it when DADT was repealed, he was still bitter about it -- he and his now-husband couldn't at the time get VA loans or any benefits for his years and years of service. There are at least a hundred thousand people who were expelled from military service for being gay from WWII until its repeal in 2011. Most of those people still have their records showing an other than honorable discharge, and so they and their families are not receiving benefits to which they are otherwise entitled.
Again, this push was a pushback against an active Republican campaign to drive queer people out of public life, one which was used by Republicans in order to stir up their base into a froth over the concept of gays tainting the pure American way of life. There were accusations of gays attempting to undermine the military in the 90s, lots of talk about how the very presence of queers in that space would sully it immeasurably, ruin the American way of life. (Lots of talk about 'combat readiness' and I heard people talking about not wanting 'faggots in foxholes.')
Is there a problem with respectability politics in the queer community? Yes. Does that problem with respectability politics undermine our ability to make meaningful change? Yes, absolutely. But we need to refrain from this absolutely fucking asinine and totally untrue reframing of the narrative to blame respectability politics for decisions made out of desperation by people under attack, and we one fucking hundred percent do not need this gross "the survivors were the losers who didn't fuck" narrative, as if one's sexual prowess has anything to do with one's worth as an artist or a human being.
That's fucking disgusting, and James Somerton should be ashamed for even thinking that, much less putting those words in that order and putting them out into the world. My worth as an artist -- and yes, a queer artist -- has nothing to do with who I fuck or how much I fuck or how many partners I fuck. It says a lot about the art world and who gets to rise to the top in it -- the pretty, the popular, the fuckable -- that people think so, though.
Yes, the community has a problem with respectability politics -- I have been loudly saying so for years -- but the response to that can't be grading people by their transgressiveness and fuckability. It just creates a new metric by which you can be found a Worthy Queer.
And we sure as shit need to not reframe the desperate actions of people trying to protect their livelihoods, their homes, and their access to health care from an active and aggressive onslaught of Republican politicians using them as wedge issues as the petty and frivolous concerns of a bunch of no-talent suburban sissies. That shit is just as fucking exhausting. Authentic queer liberation must include the ability to be fucking boring if one desires without incurring whatever this dramatic and ahistorical bullshit rewrite is.
