Election Day = Binders full of Women

What happened on Election Day was as significant for women as it was for so-called “minorities.” A big win for women and people of color.

As I sat with my friend Ivy Bottini that night watching the numbers play on the big screen, I jumped with joy as Democratic woman after woman trounced, or narrowly beat, their male opponents running for Senate seats. Even before 8 p.m. California time,
The trend was clear; women were pissed and were voting for women. Five out of seven Senate races were emerging with victories for the Democratic women who were up for election.

“There’s something happening here,” I leaned over and whispered to Ivy as the seven o’clock hour began to disappear—“what it is ain’t exactly clear. But I hear a rumble across the country." A Democratic rumble! A binder full of women was sweeping the Senate.

Finally the coalition we liberals have been trying to RE-build for a decade—the coalition of people of color, labor, women and gays—not to mention youth—was taking shape that night. This is the coalition that swept JFK and Bill Clinton into office.
But this was the coalition that had also disintegrated throughout the Reagan and Bush eras. Is this Coalition of the Left here to stay? People of color have done their job—coming out in huge numbers, so its only gays and women who need to stay aligned and active.

Gay and lesbian, and all queer activists have been saying for years now that gays have to crawl out of our own self-defined exclusive identity politics and take up our rightful position in the ranks of the new, new, new liberal and progressive movement. We are a natural part of this coalition if we understand that the Democratic Party is far more likely to embrace full equality faster if we are loud and active.

The “something’s happening here” election on Nov. 6th also marked a long sought sea-change in our fight for marriage equality. By popular vote three states finally turned the tide. In Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts, we won!  Over the last two decades gays have lost state-wide equality initiatives 32 times. That’s a lot of money down the drain some might say. But democracy moves by increments. I believe gay rights have achieved critical mass in the national consciousness. I for one never thought I’d see the day when a gay issue (marriage) became THE straight-liberal litmus test.

Obama won his election, true. But women, gays, people of color, and labor won too!  And my, it feels good, doesn’t it?

Lesbians Leading the Marriage Fight …I don’t think so!

A rebel dyke’s thoughts on marriage

I was shocked to read in Don Kilhefner’s last column in Frontiers IN LA, that he believes lesbians are leading the same-sex marriage fight. Part of me wants to say, “And what’s wrong with that? White-gay-men have led almost every fight in our movement for the past 40 years. And the other part of me wants to ask, “Where did you get this crazy notion?”
In his article, “The Same-Sex Marriage Steamroller” Kilhefner says, “Let me respectfully suggest that the same-sex marriage issue is largely a lesbian-led one.” As evidence for this odd conclusion, he cites an article printed in the New York Times that “indicates that nearly 70% of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts are between women.”
I don’t doubt that lesbians are getting married far more than gay men. This is nothing new. Dykes have been more into commitment, home-building together, and nesting than gay men’s more freewheeling lifestyle -- decades before the ‘marriage’ issue wound up on the front burner of our political agenda.
But to cite the fact that lesbians are more inclined toward marriage than gay men as evidence that the marriage issue is “largely a lesbian-led one” is a sloppy and sexist conclusion. It is true that there are lesbians in the leadership of the marriage fight, but for every gay woman in leadership, I cite gay male names and organizations like Geoff Kors of Equality California, Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign, Cleve Jones, blah, blah….
And yes, for the first time in our history, some organizations also have lesbian leadership like Torie Osborn, Kate Kendall, and Jenny Pfizer, and our home-grown maverick, Robin Tyler. So, for the first time in the 40 year history of the LBGT struggle, perhaps the marriage fight is truly co-gender in its leadership. And I realize that to some men, equal leadership might feel like lesbian domination but this is not fact.
Kilhefner goes on to say that “if something was so far out of balance in favor of gay men’s issues, our sisters, right so, would and have in the past, fervently pointed it out to gay men.” To that adjudication I say – the LGBTQ movement has almost always been out of balance in its pursuit of issues that affect gay men. In the radical 70s the movement was led by gay men who sought to eradicate laws inhibiting gay men’s sexuality. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the male leadership’s single-issue was fighting AIDS. And in this century the energy-field has been all about the T, as in transition and transgender. So there has never been a decade in which an L word issue has dominated. Until, perhaps now. So please guys, don’t get all hen-pecked over the fact that dykes are co-leading the marriage fight. We lesbians have been with you and supporting your issues for a very long time.

And as to marriage itself, I do heartily agree with Kilhefner and Ivy Bottini’s recent essays that our LGBT movement is in danger, not from lesbians, but from our co-gender leaders who think that marriage is the only issue on the gay agenda. I am a lesbian who does not believe in state-sanctified relationships. And I know thousands of lesbian feminists, like myself, who are not getting married because we believe that the vow we make to each other in front of family and friends IS the most sacred and important.
I do believe that we LGBT folk might be over-narrowing our movement into a single-issued struggle that will not serve us in the future. I saw the Women’s Movement almost die because it focused all of women’s liberation on the ERA Amendment (which never did pass). The Suffragette Movement (for women to get the vote), did disappear from the map with the passage of the 20th Amendment. The Black Civil Rights movement became narrowly focused on the Civil Rights Act (1964) and after it passed, that movement lost much of its steam. So history does tell us, a single-issued movement can be quickly cut off at the knees. Social movements are strongest when they put forth a broad range of goals.
I worry, along with Bottini and Kilhefner, that the over-focus on marriage weakens the broad health of our struggle for full equal rights for every lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer person not just in California, but in the whole world. We should be sending money and troops (organizers) to small towns in America and countries in the world where gender-variant people like us are in jail. We should be in the streets protesting the discharge of women and men from the armed services. We should be right there, with legal defense and money, when people are murdered on the small streets of the Midwest. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be caught up in the luxury of quibbling over which year to return to the California ballot. As long as we are divided, that’s a signal that the time is not now. But now is the time to build and strengthen our political, social service and cultural institutions. Yes, we will win the right to marry one day soon. The real question is -- will we endure as a community long after the last vote has been cast on marriage?