“Beyond Gay Marriage; A Radical Queers Critique of the Gay Marriage Movement and the Mainstreaming of Gay Politics”
Produced by Lisa Dettmer for KPFA.org
Today’s mainstream gay movement is a far different movement than the radical politics of the 1960’s. While many have assumed that gay marriage is important to most Queers this documentary will challenge that myth and will show how the emphasis on gay marriage is part of the loss of a radical Queer critique that was once part of LGBT politics. Lisa Dettmer produced this documentary, which discusses the current LGBT political landscape and what kind of political work radical Queers are dong today. ~KPFA
EXCERPT: “There’s this mythology that gay men are wealthy. The reality is is that gay men are twice the national average to live in poverty. We are poor. Poor Queer people who are working for mininim wage jobs, if they can get work at all, they don’t have access to health insurance themselves. Some people might have an illusion that poor gay men will suddenly get married to some wealthy doctor or lawyer and be taken care of, but the reality is, for the folks that I know, there’s not a lot of upper middle class gays coming down to the Tenderloin [San Francisco] and swooping up a homeless disabled person with AIDS living on $843 a month and suddenly going to take them under their wing and provide them with all the benefits of marriage and access to their corporate health insurance plan. I don’t see a lot of that happening. So regardless if whether those people over there get marriage rights or not, nothing in our lives today here in the Tenderloin is going to change.” ~Brian Basinger, AIDS Housing Alliance of San Francisco co-founder, on the funding diverted to support the marriage equality movement