Congratulations fellow queer Californians! We’re now deemed respectable people by the state government. This means we now have many of the legal priviledges and responsibilities that have blessed and plagued the straight folk for centuries in the modern world.
This also means we have a lot of planning today for the big gay day. When San Francisco started honoring gay marraige back in 2004, a flood of queer couples bolted en masse to city hall to get their commitment ticket. This is a unmistakeable moment in history of queer people taking back space normally relagated to the straight community.
As we queer folk know, the space which you may inhabit and exist unabashedly as your queer self are so very vital to our lives and community. We live in a world where we can only flourish in garborhoods, queer community centers, and sateillite queer bars/hangouts. So many spaces in the world are unabashedly heterosexual, which is fine in some respects–straights have to live and work somewhere–but what seems particularly problematic is when the church, city hall, and outdoor spaces commited to weddings remain spaces only for hetrosexual matrimony, placing our form of love as unholy, illegal, and unnatural. Indeed, that is the point of weddings historically: to show a man and woman blessed by God, the state, and the Earth.
When I first visited San Francisco in January 2008, one of my friends remarked that she once saw the most beautiful gay commitment ceremony in the palace of fine arts. This stuck out to me immensely–that one of the foremost landmarks in San Francisco so prized in wedding photos could be taken for the queer community. The same is true for the rush of queer couples on city hall to get married in 200–they made this civic space queer. Lastly, one must mention and thank the efforts of the United Church of Christ to respect and sanctify the love between queer people, to the point that many churches would not grant opposite-sex marraige until same-sex marraige was legal. In all these ways queer folk are striving to take back the churches, civic centers, and outdoor spaces never granted to us.
