Stonewall Obama

Forty percent of homeless youth in New York are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered. Recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the darling of the centrist/bipartisan NYT-reading Washington cocktail set, cut funding for homeless shelters to the tune of seven million dollars. A few days later, President Obama announced his long-awaited Damascene conversion to support for same-sex marriage. Bloomberg joined the rest of the Obama fanboiz in patting the President on the back for caving into pressure from rich liberal campaign donors coming around to the progressive side of the issue.

I agree with everything in this article in Jacobin magazine (which, BTW, is a great read) attacking the pro-marriage lobby. The focus on winning the right to marriage has a certain Booker T. Washingtonesque quality to it, that is, it is based on the idea that LGBT people should conform to the norms of white/straight/bourgeois/Protestant society in order to be accepted. It is also often accompanied by the homophobic idea that LGBT people need the stability of marriage lest they fall into more promiscuous lifestyles – an argument that Andrew Sullivan, among others, is particularly fond of. The same-sex marriage crowd opt for mainstream respectability over serious social change, and then brazenly appropriate the symbols of earlier, more hardcore, LGBT struggles, as Bloomberg did when he connected Obama’s change of heart to Stonewall. As the article notes, “Stonewall was not a wedding, it was a riot.”

The motivations of Obama, Bloomberg, and other elite liberals can be glimpsed by reading the arguments advanced by the City of San Francisco during the California Supreme Court’s deliberations over the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative which banned same-sex marriage in the state. The political rulers of the city of Harvey Milk and of the White Night Riots had the opportunity to present the case for same-sex marriage through the language of rights and equality. Instead, they chose the language of managerial neo-liberalism, focusing on how much tourist revenue San Francisco would lose if gay couples were to wed in other cities where same-sex marriage was legal. Big city mayors like Bloomberg are naturally more concerned about attracting wealthy, white, middle-class gay couples than about the welfare of the homeless LGBT youth whose funding he slashed.