LGBTQ Social Movements by Lisa M. Stulberg

Author:Lisa M. Stulberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509527403
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

After Marriage

When the nationwide marriage win was in sight, activists, writers, and a number of the mainstream LGBTQ civil rights groups began to ask: what comes next (see, e.g., Montgomery, 2015)? The HRC, for instance, published a lengthy report called Beyond Marriage Equality, which made a case for a focus on broad nondiscrimination laws concerning employment, housing, education, and public accommodations, among other domains. The report highlighted that only 18 states plus the District of Columbia have laws that explicitly prohibit public and private employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Three additional states bar discrimination by sexual orientation but do not include gender identity as a category to protect transgender employees (HRC, 2015, p. 31).25 There is, as of yet, no clear federal protection against workplace discrimination (Wolf, 2017). There has been some recent attention paid to the fact that LGBTQ nondiscrimination laws are not just a feature of large or coastal cities. One March 2017 analysis found that of the approximately 50 towns and cities that adopted nondiscrimination laws since 2015, all were in states that handed Donald Trump a victory in November 2016, and more than half had populations of 35,000 people or fewer (Stein, 2017).

Others, looking to a time when the marriage fight would be over, added that transgender rights should be a new priority in the broader LGBTQ movement (see, e.g., Capehart, 2015; Yoshino, 2015). Some on the Left called for the continued advocacy of a more liberationist agenda, one that would not rely on the state for the granting of justice and would celebrate difference and queerness, specifically (e.g., Stein, 2015). Historian Timothy Stewart-Winter (2015) wrote in the New York Times that queer people should leverage their historical role as outsiders for further social change – like trans rights, support for homeless youth, and Black Lives Matter – rather than abandoning this status once the marriage door had been fully opened: “Betraying our history – forgetting what it has meant to be gay – would be a price too high to pay” (n.p.). Some have urged, simply, that the marriage victory does not mean it is time to pack up the movement and go home to new spouses. Signorile argues that activists and optimistic community members suffered from “victory blindness”: “the dangerous illusion that we’ve almost won” (2015, p. 1).

It remains to be seen where the LGBTQ civil rights movement will next put its energy and resources and how it will connect with the more radical, liberationist strand of the movement or with groups that focus specifically on intersectional identities. We can see, however, that marriage politics are exemplary of the longstanding tensions between liberationists and assimilationists (Ghaziani et al., 2016) and of the longstanding politics of privilege.

Marriage is a necessary civil rights gain. You cannot be free if you do not have the self-determination to love and partner and build a family. There is also some recent research that shows that the very existence of marriage equality laws may

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