It has been a difficult week for those of us who live in the crosshairs of many margins. This is the thing, this is the thing, not about being black and queer, but recognizing you ARE black and queer, and living, as my friend Rickey L. puts it, intersectionaly; pushing my personal marriage politics aside, it is hard for me to join in all the beautiful celebrations of the invalidation of Prop 8, and the striking down of DOMA (section 3), to see the ruling as "the most important day of our lives" when just yesterday the SCOTUS struck down important parts of the 1965 VRA -- and Texas and Mississippi promptly took advantage of this -- and kicked an important Affirmative Action case back to a lower court.
I would say this is similar to how I felt when President Obama was first elected: Yay for the U.S. having a black president, and crushed by the passing of proposition 8. Many gay people, supposedly, felt the same way; there were slews of op-eds about it, and magazines covered the irony of the passage of a discriminatory proposition in California the same night we embraced (a little bit, momentarily) diversity on a national level; gay pundits went on TV shows to talk about it, Dan Savage wrote, for me, an infamous blog post (which he then removed prior to going on media outlets) about it accusing/blaming black voters for prop 8's passage, and all of this was usually tied to the racial progress made by electing a black president. I wrote all that as a way of saying: This has happened before so I hope people understand where I am coming from, a conflicted place, but looking at Facebook and Twitter and many of the op-eds rushing out, which only seem to celebrate today's ruling without contemplating what yesterday's rulings possibly means for many of us, I am scared that they wont; I am scared that for many I, and others like me, will just be seen as "stick-in-the-muds," and our confliction will be misunderstood.
Living intersectionaly is not an either/or state. It is, as Anti-Intellect observes, about needing all of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Marry and the invalidating of Prop 8, and so much more (I must confess, I am happy that now people seem to be paying more and more attention to other LGTBQ related issues). It is not picking one issue as more important than another. Which leaves me wondering, do I go out and twirl for all of the couples who now are going to enjoy a thousand plus rights previously, and wrongfully, denied to them, or do I wail because of yesterday? Do I twirl while screaming? I don't know. What I do know is that, while many of my gay brothers and sisters (of all colors celebrate) for me, living an intersectional life, all the court did was free some of my chains and move oppression from standing on my neck to standing on my back, so I still cannot get up.