a) this, at its heart, but I want to add

b) the "dunk on gay marriage advocates for caring about marriage, which is a straight thing, for straight people" is a terrible influence (that I don't think this tweet is advocating! but which I see everywhere) that gets people hurt https://twitter.com/AllyBrinken/status/1264217631248302082

(e.g. disabled queer people for whom marriage is very much a civil rights/health/end-of-life rights concern; queer people who want to be parents; young queer people who want the same tax benefits the government provides straight people trying to construct life together)

in the same zip code is less-binary trans people saying "smash the binary altogether" or making blanket statements about Men or Women being Bad, or anprims saying that having access to e.g. GRS shouldn't be necessary for anyone b/c -they- don't care, therefore caring is bourgeois

there is something bright and weird and imo sacred about the queer experience, beyond any trauma that we collectively experience, and i've felt the pain of feeling like i had to dim that bright weird holiness before a society that was not shaped conducively to my well-being.

however, as the meme goes, we live in a society: there are things - social constructs, fake things if you will, but fake like money is fake, so actually very real - that we have decided are important elements of the architecture of our consensus reality.

always feel free to disagree, if you can make that work for you - but tiny enclaves aren't always going to be available, or they may be available and seem safe but that seeming is false. and there are threats that can only be faced and handled at the scale of a society.

so, it is not always foolish to care about the context in which you are operating; it is not foolish to desire legitimacy using the same words that straight people use, just by virtue of them being the words that straight people use.

a gay marriage is still a marriage, that is gay. no amount of being a marriage can possibly hope to contain or still or dim the joyous homosexuality of the occasion.

ask yourself what does, and does not, dim the strange joyous light of our queerness?