All the other times I can think of that people won rights in this country, it was because people radicalized their churches or unions and then linked them up into a movement.
But when I try to look up how gay marriage happened, I’m finding things crediting liberal organizations or important lawyers, if it’s not just passive voice implying the states just started legalizing gay marriage for no particular reason.
So like… what was the actual organizing principle behind that? Who did the pressuring? I figured a bunch of you would know, so I’m asking.
It was brute forced through the courts.
One by one. Pride parades, organizng that way, constant badgering of the dems for decades. After decades of ignoring grassroots, the real grassroots did it themselves. The national DC groups kept kicking the can. Prolonging their cocktail party grifts.
… I ahh 
mean being “P r A g M a T i C”It is why I stopped giving to the Human Rights Campaign / ACLU. I learned a LOT about thier games and their fake “we’re fighting for you” grifting bullshit.
I learned a lot about the Dems “We hear you. We see you. Not now. Shut up. Sit down. Wait your turn.” It is why I fucking HATE that 🎶 We shall over CuuuUUUmm. Some pragmatic day 🎶 song. It’s placebo for all that can kicking.The Don’t ask Don’t Tell military ban. The excuse they kept making was “we need more studies! It hasn’t been studied enough!” So I sent Sen. Carl Levin over 60 years of independent and governments studies provong that gays in the military do not pose a threat to unit rediness or cohesion. It was more of a risk banning gays because of society’s negative impression drives depression, secrecy, increased risky behavior. The only thing really holding it back was the Politicians and their own political risk due to what amounted public ignorance and sterotypes.
To my suprise Sen. Levin sent a real response (positive) and not a canned one.
Did the government’s job and research for them to nullify their lame ass
exuses.As for inside the military, besides the national negative sterotypes that were being fed by hard line KKKristian groups like the American Family Association, and Focus on the Family. (Colorado springs) or the Mormons (tons in the military) or Catholics or Baptists. It was the military Wives club making a huge stink about it. That was because the spouse holds the social rank of their serving spouse. Many had a hard time “HAVING A MALE INVADE FEMALE SPACES” or having to yield to a gay man. But I think deep down they knew we cooked better and threw better parties, but it was the Wives club holding back progrees in the military. “We need more studies and surveys!”
After decades of pragmatic can kicking people started to self fund, organize local and state to sue the state governments to drag the politicans who were always for our rights kicking and screaming.
It is tragic that I see the country let trans rights get dragged down virtually unopposed. But grifters need a grift and they don’t have a grift without
suffering to exploit.If you are in the mood for some reading I highly reccomend Deboer vs Snyder: A case study in Litigation and Social Reform. PDF
It was a real “Fine. I’ll do it myself” working around the instuitions and brute forcing through the instutions. It gained momentum where the system ran out of excuses.
David Geffen threw a bunch of money at it in CA and once the legality was worked out there it was easier to do in other states. Top liberal politicians were against it out of fear it would hurt them with conservatives. Obamna refused to say he supported it until it had traction. Hillary was saying marriage is between a man and a woman on CSPAN during the Bush admin. You can find a video of it with Neera Tanden sitting behind her. One it took off they came around to support it. So it was a grassroots thing with wealthy people in California backing it.
The big thing I always point to is that it took dragging the Democrats left, kicking and screaming to get it through. And even then it had to be done through the courts not the legislature, which the Democrats then immediately gave up nationally to the Republicans.
It’s hard to appreciate how jarring it was/is to go from all these liberal darlings flat out refusing to accept gay marriage to being slay qween gay icons somehow. But they took so much credit for it and today maintain that it was all them. These fuckers have the audacity to put rainbow lights on the White House now like they’re not internally cringing at the thought. It’s not easy to say this but I kinda wish we had the social media and smart phones we have now because the receipts would be incredible. It’s like Iraq War support but somehow more memory-holed.
A faction of the empire thought they could pinkwash imperialism and saw it as a benefit, so it didn’t run into the kind of resistance it could have done or would do today. All imperialist foreign policy was to be framed in the moral framework of spreading better ideals.
Framing policy this way worked, briefly, before there was pushback from the radical side of the gay community itself. Now those ruling class factions no longer believe in it and they no longer have a reason to support lgbt rights.
Sorry, that’s just putting the horse before the carriage. The moralizing of foreign policy started more than a decade before gay marriage became legal in the US, in the wake of 9/11, driven by the neocons in the Bush II administration, and it originally focussed on “democracy” as the moral principle to be spread through imperialist violence. The ideologies behind this were Kantianism, especially Kant’s writings on eternal peace, Fukuyama’s “end of history” narrative and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, none of which had anything to do with queer rights even in the most remote sense.
Expanding this idealist approach to foreign policy to include spreading gay rights through regime change was a much later development in imperialist propaganda that happened after gay marriage became legal and homophobia as a mandatory cultural stance was denormalized. It only became a campaigning strategy after corporations had already latched onto large-scale pinkwashing in the mid 2010s. Yes, there was queer marketing before, Subaru realized a decade before other corporatios rolled out the rainbows in June that their cars were bought by lesbians and that they could expand that market, but advertising to gay people at that time was a lot more targeted and subtle than “just slap a rainbow on everything” because at this time you had to avoid straight people noticing that the brand was popular amongst queers.
Rainbow imperialism as a stance among straight people also never was that important outside of a few employers in the US MIC and Israeli PR. There is a discursive tradition of homonationalism that later developments tied into and that started around 9/11 within reactionary strata of especially communities of cis gay men and TERFy lesbians, but that was mainstreamed islamophobia seeping into queer communities, not queer emancipatory movements shaping imperialist discourse. The simultaneous exclusion and fetishization of Middle Eastern men among cis gays was a thing ever since orientalism had existed, but it wasn’t something people outside of gay spaces were even aware of. These were conversations siloed off from the straights almost entirely.
The idea that gay marriage became legal to then justify imperialism with it is honestly laughable. It was way too much of a contested issue in mainstream policy back then to parade it around like that. The whole line of reasoning doesn’t sit well with me, it reminds me way too much of reactionaries describing queerness as a “western cultural import”.
Also blaming the abandonment of rainbow imperialism on “the pushback from the radical side of the gay community” sounds like the typical hogwash from transphobic gays who blame us for “pushing things too far” and “endangering queer rights by demanding too much”. Abandoning rainbow imperialism was, from the beginning, driven by homophobes in the MIC who had never been happy with these developments in the first place. They didn’t need to listen to radical queer activists for that.
The idea that gay marriage became legal to then justify imperialism with it is honestly laughable. It was way too much of a contested issue in mainstream policy back then to parade it around like that. The whole line of reasoning doesn’t sit well with me, it reminds me way too much of reactionaries describing queerness as a “western cultural import”.
Alright but see it from my perspective, it was literally the Tories who legalised gay marriage in the UK, not the labour party, not the left, not a significant grassroots queer movement, not even really a particularly strong liberal-organised movement. They just did that, despite more than half their own and half the country opposing it.
They didn’t do that because they’re good people. Or because they thought it was the right thing to do or any shite like that. They’re the tories, they did that for interests.
From the perspective we get over here we can only analyse it from the viewpoint that I’m raising. The tories did this shit in 2013, america then did it in 2015, the timing of these things happening together isn’t a coincidence.
If you’re going to say they did it for a different reason, we need to come up with some possibilities that aren’t “the tories were just being good people for once” because I do not believe that shit.
they may have done it because a liberal queer liberation movement (of any focus) is no threat to the donor class, since it doesnt attempt any form of economic liberation.
so they might as well enact it, score some good boy points and throw a bone to their gay friends.
I agree that the sudden sweeping legalization of gay marriage in the west was a curiosity. I’m no scholar on it but I’d like to pose a few thoughts based on what we have witnessed since it transpired:
- Immediately spawned the widespread, contemporary “deep state” critique within right-wing camps.
2a) Immediately solidified progressive-minded people as well as many oppressed minorities as staunch liberals and backers of western empire. Let’s not forget this was between the election and re-election of Obama (first black president).
2b) Further, following on the heels of these bourgeoisie enabled victories - the Trans movement, which has always been around, starts to get an enormous amount of time in the media limelight (Suddenly everyone has to know about Caitlin Jenner and have a virulent opinion on the matter). On top of all of that, Bernie Sanders receives inexplicable media attention as a firebrand socialist around this time rather than getting the typical “media-blackout”. Now we’ve got the red and blue reactionaries pearl-clutching!
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Imperialism becomes pink-washed.
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Targeted/Algorithmic advertising becomes widespread.
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The western political atmosphere trends towards “polarization”.
—Now for my offered speculation based on the above—
Based on what was accomplished I think the strategic goals were to:
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Pink-wash imperial aggression: (Targeted advertising is important here): A progressive will receive information about how Israel (etc) is LGBTQ+ friendly democracy (and their opponent is oppressive regarding LGBTQ+ rights) while a conservative will receive boilerplate islamophobia. Domestically, support for warfare is obtained by playing both sides.
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Stoking fascism at home: I think this one is fairly obvious - the progressive victories regarding race, sexual identity, and gender expression (coupled with bourgeoisie media’s absolutely cynical commentary on it (driving people into the arms of both the Democrats and the Republicans)) enabled a retrograde pivoting of the Overton window in the long-term. Progressives have been taught that too much change is happening too quickly, so the trans movement must act as the sacrifice made to appease reaction. The Conservatives have been taught that the Anti-Christ occupied the White House and worked with a cabal of ((influential technocrats)) to deliver their beloved Christian empire into the hands of Satan.
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As if having a healthy dose of fascism wasn’t enough, the “polarization” has delivered the perfect media framing for Democrats to feign an inability to combat it.
—Final conclusion—
Victory at home and abroad for the bourgeoisie at the typical small cost of short-term concessions in exchange for long-term political dominance.
We didn’t even get a green new deal as a consolation prize.
So I might totally be misremembering, but I seem to recall a
episode guest briefly mentioning that a 
transgender billionaire kind of hijacked the much more poly queer culture I saw growing up into the monogamous gay marriage movement.Jennifer Pritzker maybe?
The more I think about it, I think the context may have been a tangent discussing how the rich hijack movements because I think they were talking about defending transgender people being in the military and how that redirects the energy of a typically subversive culture towards being pro-military.
Edit: so now I’m thinking it was a gay billionaire (or millionaires) behind gay marriage, trans billionaire (Pritzker) behind support of transgender folks in military.
big gay lobbied through super pacs
To begin, the reasoning here is not meant to denigrate the hard right of the queer community for their rights. Both that heroic work and my theory below can exist simultaneously.
Conspiracy brain here, but gay marriage happening while the US empire was building up marketable means to destroy the world always seemed a bit coincidental. Queer folk were fighting to get rights, mostly in disparate groups and movements with a few very good and principled attempts at higher organization around and rich people were starting to be a liability to empire if they were supportive of LGBTQ+ rights instead of the benefit they are based solely on relation to physical means of production. The US government saw a way to strategically let one oppressed group gain their rights (a loss for empire in the short term) in order to later be able to leverage later (more wins for empire long term).
Now how many attacks are justified with the (correct but misplaced) critique of the country lacking LGBTQ+ rights? It’s not always the number 1 way, but it muddies the waters enough for queer allies to not want to take part in critique or opposition. And how many terrible domestic political things have been supported at least partially because of token queer people coming out as supportive? (This is an actual question, I don’t follow too much on internal policies so I would love feedback. Probably Anti-Trans shit would be an example)
So conclusion is: I have no idea really how it was organized or if it really succeeded due to its organization. I have doubts, actually, and think that the organization likely could’ve been better and that success was more likely a strategic choice by the empire as opposed to it succeeding by its own efforts.
Now Cuba, there I’d love to read a deep-dive on how it was organized to make the new constitutional rights!
