Why Gay Marriage Matters - A Personal Essay
Dedicated with love to Nicole D&amp;#8217;Anna, who yelled her lungs out in the Albany.
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So it&amp;#8217;s finally over - the long debate, the back-room machination, and  the stinging memory of the embarrassing defeat a few years ago when this  motion last came before the New York State Senate.&nbsp; Gay marriage is now  legal in the State of New York.
If you&amp;#8217;re a regular reader of this blog, my argument in favor of gay marriage will probably be familiar to you. It&amp;#8217;s  fairly simple:&nbsp; oppression consists in privation.&nbsp; As I have noted  before, I consider a social group *oppressed* if for any reason members  of that group are precluded from or else undergo different consequences  as a result of any action to which other social groups have access.&nbsp; If  heterosexuals can get married and homosexuals cannot, this is a form of  oppression.&nbsp; In theory, I could stop there; my argument is essentially complete.&nbsp; But I also support gay marriage for a less philosophical, more selfish reason:&nbsp; I&amp;#8217;m not an American citizen.I  have an EU citizenship, and I have Israeli citizenship.&nbsp; But I don&amp;#8217;t  have American citizenship.&nbsp; I&amp;#8217;ve been living in this country for 4 years  at this point; I&amp;#8217;m here legally, on a visa.&nbsp; But my visa is temporary,  and it is contingent on affiliation with an academic institution which  can sponsor me to stay here.&nbsp; To say the very least, the academic job  market is not particularly strong at the moment.&nbsp; Being a young academic  is hardly a position from which to enjoy job security, and the  fellowship that I am currently on, which allows me a fantastic degree of  freedom to write with extremely minimal teaching responsibilities, ends  in a year.&nbsp; Which means that a year from now, next summer, I could find  myself in a position of having to leave behind my entire life here - my  wonderful friends, my beautiful apartment, and my incredible partner -  due to a particular form of oppression, namely, the fact that the  federal government in the United States doesn&amp;#8217;t recognize same-sex  partnerships for immigration purposes.&nbsp; Oppression consists in  privation; if my partner and I were a heterosexual couple, this wouldn&amp;#8217;t  even be an issue.&nbsp; He&amp;#8217;s an American citizen, and I would get to stay in  the U.S.&nbsp; But we are not a heterosexual couple.&nbsp; We are members of an  oppressed group which does not enjoy the same rights and privileges as  other groups.&nbsp; Now, it&amp;#8217;s worth taking a second here to look at the reasons that  many queer activists and theorists consider gay marriage to be a  secondary priority, or else not a priority at all; famously, several  major voices in queer theory have come out against the gay marriage  agenda.&nbsp; For the purposes of my argument, I&amp;#8217;m going to divide the  queer-theory opponents of gay marriage into two groups; two groups that  are very different from each other, and which follow very different  theoretical agendas, coming together primarily on the question of gay  marriage and its (un)importance .&nbsp; Any unilateral division of individual  theorists into distinct &amp;#8220;groups&amp;#8221; is a form of reductionism, and thus  prone to error, but for the sake of my argument, I believe that the  lines of cohesion are clear enough to distinguish between two groups,  the Proud White Perverts and the Edgy Homonationalists.&nbsp; These two  groups, the members of which would probably see themselves as having  significantly distinct concerns and agendas, are nonetheless united in  their blind arrogance and their inadequate reasoning.&nbsp; Briefly, these  two groups of thinkers cluster as follows:&nbsp; on the one side, we have the  Michael Warners and Lee Edelmans of queer theory; those who espouse  &amp;#8220;non-normativity&amp;#8221; for its own sake from a position of significant  privilege.&nbsp; On the other side, we have the Jasbir Puars of the world,  who understand their work as challenging the regimes of normativity  which produce queer subjects, the thinkers who think that they&amp;#8217;re  invested in queer identity beyond the limit of the family, the limit of  the immediate social group, and the limit of the state.&nbsp; Right.&nbsp; Let&amp;#8217;s  start with the Proud White Perverts.&nbsp; Those who fail to understand that  resistance is futile, as I have pointed out many times, and who instead  think of themselves as resisting some abstract, absurd structure they  call &amp;#8220;heteronormativity.&amp;#8221;&nbsp; Thus Lee Edelman in No Future writes that  &amp;#8220;queerness names the side of those not &amp;#8216;fighting for the children,&amp;#8217;  the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the  absolute value of reproductive futurism&amp;#8221; (3).&nbsp; As if there were any necessary or automatic link b