I don't know what about all this gay marriage, committed monogamous love, serving in the military, being "born with it," or raising up normal non-gay babies that has gay people all excited.

And I'm not against two people of the same sex, whatever that means, getting married to each other. But I've never thought that to be "married," I needed to have an official of the church or state preside over that ceremony. So I have never felt limited or saddened by my legal inability, as a queer person, to marry whomever I want. I want to get as far away from the State as possible. But if legal marriage is helpful to some people, I'm okay with that.

But an emotional issue it is not. Under normal circumstances, no one can take away your ability to love and make a lifelong commitment to another person. That is marriage, if such a concept is useful, and I think it can be.

Despite my lukewarm and not necessarily radical position on gay marriage, I have become more radical over time with regards to this issue. I generally say I oppose campaigns for gay marriage. The reason is simple. When I hear the arguments for gay marriage, it makes me feel uneasy. It makes me feel a little ill. It gives me the creeping sensation that something is wrong.

I disagree with most of the arguments used in support of gay marriage, for example.

I don't believe that being gay is necessarily inborn. It's almost a crime these days to say that, because saying it is a choice has been used against gay people for a long time. I think the argument that being gay is inborn is a reactionary argument; it's come about because of the religious argument for behavioral homosexuality, homosexuality as a sinful choice. Actually, the concept of life-long static sexual identity is very, very new. And that's not because this is the first time in human history that queers have been accepted. We've been accepted in various ways in many cultures, and to a higher degree in some cultures than we presently are. And yet homosexuality as a static identity, or orientation, is almost a new thing under the sun. It has occurred in pockets, but not as a cultural institution. However, heterosexuality as an institution is not necessarily the default, either. Whereas sexuality is about identity today, in the past it was often viewed differently. I also know that people's sexuality can and does change over time. There is little room for that in the "born with it" camp.

I don't believe that gay marriage does not change straight marriage. I don't agree with arguments that try to convince straight people that gay marriage does not affect them. They evidently feel that it does affect them, and I don't think arguments like these are changing people's minds very often. Gay marriage changes the definition of marriage. Marriage has been the building block of society; the heterosexual union is the basis for the nuclear family as an economic unit. The transfer of women as a form of property has been part of marriage in many cultures for a long time. Straight marriage is considered Biblically appropriate, smiled on by God as the ideal formation. This is a big deal. It's not important to me personally, and I think it's boring and harmful, but it is very important to many. Gay marriage is scary to homophobic and fundamentalist Christian straight folks because it actually says something about straight marriage. It means that straight people have been getting married for love, and not because of anything else I said in this paragraph. Gay marriage is the final realization of what marriage was already becoming. Gay marriage is the next stage in taking apart marriage as it was known for thousands of years in our cultural history. Gay marriage is intricately connected to straight marriage. Accepting gay marriage will not be simple for the people who oppose it. Simplistic arguments insult their intelligence and treat them like imbeciles.

I don't think that gay people should need to point out that gay couples usually raise straight kids or that their kids do just as well as kids of straight couples. This is literally painful for me to hear. Imagine how you would feel if you saw a modern video about anti-racism that pointed out that people of color's IQs were just as high as white people's IQs on average. We now know better than to trot out crap like that. Here's the thing: Homophobes actually think that queer couples are the agents of Satan, playing out a perverted family arrangement into which they have brought an "innocent child" who they will corrupt with their sexual perversion. This is an erotic, subliminalized rape script. This is the kind of image that moves armies. Messages of tolerance are pathetic in that context. The homophobic and fundie opponents of gay marriage aren't just confused about the truth. They don't need a gentle dose of facts and figures. They believe this story because they want to. It's important to them. We might want to think about why.

But there's one thing I hate more than anything about the argument for gay marriage, and it's the presumption that committed monogamous relationships are better. This argument can appear in various forms, but the most common is the simplest: Just showing long-term couples getting married. Emphasize their committedness and the length of relationship. This is a cultural status symbol amongst straights already, and that is why it is used to provoke an emotional response. But there are more insidious forms of this same idea: Many gay marriage supporters feel that gay people are promiscuous, or have been promiscuous in times past, because of a lack of official acceptance of their desire to form families.

This is an appalling and counterrevolutionary way to look at the beautiful cultural practices, institutions, and ways of loving that queer people have formed in the absence of official sanction (and often, not mourning that absence.) Here are just a few awesome things that some queers do:

- Cruise. Go looking for hot sex in public or in specific cruising areas. Use symbols to communicate sexual preferences at a glance.

-Define a huge, organically shifting range of gender identities and sub-identities, as well as sexual identities and names for body types

-Find ways to glorify tons of kinds of beauty, name them, and explore them in affirming communities

-Respond effectively and courageously to an epidemic without scare tactics, without buying into lies and fear from the state

-Help to build the culture of polyamory and teach how to communicate with multiple partners honestly

-Make open relationships normal

-Teach and learn consent practices

-Create free love spaces such as bathhouses

-Create amazing, subversive art, poetry, music and literature that is part of our cultural lexicon forever

-Make it safer for people of every kind to express a wider range of emotions, desires and sexualities

I am so excited and happy to be part of this community.

I'd like queer people to be able to teach straight people about their options. It's not that one thing is better than another, I'm not perpetrating another useless hierarchy. But people deserve more options for living their lives. So many people suffer in monogamous relationships, cheating on their partners, full of jealousy, because they don't know how to be poly. They've been force-fed an idea of how life must be and they have swallowed without chewing. Straight homophobic men live in fear of queerness, perpetrate physical and emotional violence on queers and on each other, and can't have the platonic intimacy that would make them happier. Men and women suffer under heterosexist beauty standards. I want to share this stuff. I don't want to absorb straight heterosexist values so that I can be "equal." It's not an equality I want. It feels like working my ass off to join the preppy kids' clique in high school where I'd be bored to fucking tears.

The last and perhaps the most interesting "myth-busting" argument for gay marriage that I'd like to look at is the idea that "no one would choose to be gay, because no one would choose to be oppressed." When I see this one, I just want to say, "Oh, honey." No one would choose an identity, lifestyle, or personal practice that might result in significant oppression? Certainly someone should pass that message on to millions of religious minorities, political and social activists, and revolutionaries. They have seriously missed the memo. If there is anything we humans are that is truly worthy of awe, it is our courage. We are almost pathologically courageous. It is an amazing, breathtaking thing. So, yes, if being gay was a choice, people would choose it even if it meant being oppressed, just as religiously oppressed people have chosen to continue believing even under penalty of death.

The gay marriage campaign misses the mark in so many important ways that I find it personally difficult to express my support for the legal right of any two people to marry. Because, yes, that is my position; I'm okay with gay couples being legally married. I can't abide by a campaign that draws on bizarre, inaccurate and counter-revolutionary ideas about humanity to make an emotional point about something I consider a fairly low priority on my personal radar. I object to the enormous resources that are brought to bear on the campaign; I object to the condescending campaign techniques that ignore significant cultural and psychological differences under the banner of "tolerance." But mostly, the gay marriage campaign makes me wonder if this is what we're going to settle for.