On June 26th, 2015, people across America celebrated when the Supreme Court ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, deciding that the Fourteenth Amendment requires all states to grant same-sex marriages and recognize same-sex marriages granted in other states. It was viewed as an important moment in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights in the United States, and yet it is clear that the fight is not yet finished. Eight years after Obergefell, the 2015 ruling is still being questioned by Justice Clarence Thomas, while the GOP continues to make a coordinated attack on transgender people.
While marriage equality was the mainstream emphasis of many queer rights groups in the 00s and early 10s, such as the Human Rights Campaign, for many activists, the goal of equality has never been enough. Founded in 2009, the Against Equality movement has critiqued and challenged the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement's focus on achieving legal and social inclusion within existing systems of power and oppression. Their central argument is that simply seeking equal rights and inclusion within the existing societal structures is not enough to achieve true liberation and justice for queer individuals. Instead, members of the AE movement aim to “reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility”.
The AE movement emerged as a response to the increasing focus on mainstream issues such as marriage equality and military service within the LGBTQ+ movement, which has led to the exclusion of more radical and transformative goals. In the book Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion, the authors outline the ways equality movements have continued to support the link between the conservative tradition of marriage to the access of basic human rights like health care and economic security. As Yasmin Nair says in one of the book’s early essays, “… the family is the best way to advance capitalism, as the base unit through which capitalism distributes benefits.” They go on to say that “a queer radical critique of gay marriage exposes how capitalism structures our notion of ‘family’ and the privatization of the social relationships we depend on to survive.” Nair and other activists associated with the AE movement seek to challenge the assumption that assimilation into existing institutions and systems is the best path to achieve liberation and justice for queer individuals, as assimilation often reinforces existing power structures and leaves intact the inequalities embedded in society.
Queer in Struggle, St. Louis, Missouri, Library of Congress
In 2010, NPR sat down with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, a queer activist and author of That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation. In that interview, Sycamore told NPR
Gay has become a narrow identity based in accessing straight privilege, whereas queer, to me, includes a wider diversity of people. And it also includes a politicized standpoint that means, you know, challenging the status quo and creating new ways of loving and living with and transforming our lives and one another, and also challenging the violence of traditional institutions.
Like Sycamore, members of the Against Equality movement promote a more radical vision of queer liberation, calling for a fundamental reimagining of social and economic structures. Similar to the pre-respectability political movements of the 60s, such as the Gay Liberation Front, Against Equality is an intersectional movement where the liberation of queer people is viewed as inseparable from the liberation of all people (especially in light of the invention of straightness). Ultimately, it is not possible to liberate queer people without liberating all people from capitalism and the cis-het paradigms that uphold it. To imagine a world of queer liberation is to imagine a world transformed.
When you begin to realize the full, radical potential of queer liberation, it makes more sense why conservative groups (Democrats among them) have been against a fuller vision of queerness. It’s never been about who you love or desire, but about protecting the values and traditions that reinforce capitalism through social atomization. This is why equality became the dominant message for so long, backed by wealthy benefactors: assimilating queer people into the status quo of marriage and family provided a sense of progress while, at the same time, excluding the more radical and transformative goals that threaten capitalism.
The Against Equality movement envisions a society that goes beyond assimilation and inclusion, striving for a world where all individuals can freely express their identities, have their basic needs met, and participate fully in political, social, and economic life without fear of discrimination or oppression. It is a vision of queer liberation that acknowledges that none of us are free until all of us are free. This June, it is worth examining what Pride means beyond the corporate-funded parades and #LoveIsLove hashtags of Rainbow Capitalism, and instead, challenge ourselves to reflect on the ultimate vision that queer liberation has to offer us.