I’m feeling a little schizo.
See, part of me thinks, ‘Wow! First we get a moderately kick-ass ruling from the Supremes last week, and now we’re officially accepted adored acknowledged in the marketplace of the Moral Majority. The moon is in the seventh house, let the good times roll, we’re entering a new era of queer equality!’
And then I stop to consider: the Fourteenth Amendment, which was intended to provide legal equality for people of color, was passed in 1868–a cool 100 years before I was born in a state still racked with racial tensions. And race relations remain so dicey that the same Supreme Court that handed us a victory also found Affirmative Action programs still necessary to ameliorate social inequalities. All of which is to say, as my grandmother might put it, “We got a long row to hoe.” I mean, sure, we can knock boots in the bedroom, but there are bazillions of other rights we don’t have yet–and unlike people of color, homos don’t even have an amendment to constitutionally guarantee the ones they’ve been given by certain forward-thinking states, municipalities, and corporations.
And there’s something even more troubling in Wal-Mart’s decision–something that offers a glimpse into the distant-but-conceivable queer future. In choosing to (a) provide blinders for “provocative” magazines like Cosmopolitan (Reese Witherspoon is now provocative?) and simultaneously to (b) prevent discrimination against homos, Wal-Mart is folding the queers of this great nation into its own insipid morality scheme–a scheme which says, in essence, what we’ve known all along: that most homos are as dull and boring as any bourgeois, mall-walking heterosexual. And that’s fine, I guess…but it’s also very, very depressing. A nation of “we’re-just-like-everyone-else” Log Cabin Republicans isn’t exactly what I had in mind… But then again, it might help cut down on some of the bad Judy Garland impersonations.
Sorry to get all Cassandra on your ass. It’s just the way I’m wired.
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