all writing is lies...good writing is lies skillfully told.

We're gonna talk a little about breastfeeding here. What, you didn't know I had strong, passionate views about breastfeeding? Like it's never come up? Yeah, well, this isn't one of my polished rants, not one of the old stand-by soap boxes I mount when I'm feeling anxious and need a good monologue to get me through. Partly because I feel - as someone who is not a mother - that I have no right to the fury of my convictions. Who am I to tell you how to act? I've never had the choices you've made.

And then we're gonna talk a little about messaging. Because sometimes strong, passionate views alienate the holy hell out of people who should be our allies. Or, at least, who should be given the opportunity to be our allies, but who aren't offered a way in.

I spent a great deal of time yesterday on the trying-to-conceive messageboards over at NW Cryo. It's a thriving community over there, even of people who used other banks, and it's one of those great places on the web where there are lots of queer people and lots of other people and everyone seems to get along. A question from a straight couple about whether to tell the child she/he is donor-conceived - which, from me, gets an immediate huff of "Straight people! You just can't trust them!" - gets, from the assembled masses of both lesbians and het ladies, measured, calm responses. Part of me would love to join this community; most of me recognizes that with my missing moderation valve it would be folly - I'd be there morning to night, constantly checking, constantly responding. It's why I've never joined any online community other than Facebook: the possibility of obsession.

So once a month or so I kill a day on the boards and it settles me down for awhile.

Some random link clicked-through from some random post ended me at a blog where a woman wrote an enraptured story about brestfeeding. You see these, if you spend time in ttc- and pregnancy-related circles online. Breastfeeding is life-changing, is necessary for bonding, is the greatest gift you can give your child! Breasfeeding is worth whatever the price you have to pay for it! No one exists who can't breastfeed: keep at it till you get it right (and call your local La Leche chapter for guidance)!

I have no quarrel with any of the above statements, taken independently. Brave non-gestational lesbian moms will point out the intimacy they observe when gestational mom breastfeeds baby. My friends breastfeed and report that - cracked, aching nipples and sharp little gums aside - breastfeeding is all of that. And more. My own mother is pro-breastfeeding, and my little brother is a breastfed kid.

That's right. I wasn't, though. And I've read articles blaming everything from my lifelong depression to my gluten allergy on baby formula. Perhaps it's why I'm short, or pale, or lactose-intolerant. Perhaps formula is the reason I prefer Stephen King to Charles Dickens. Maybe, if I'd been breastfed, I would be better at maths, or spacial reasoning, or maybe, if I'd breastfed, I'd be able to recognize the faces of people I've met dozens of times. Maybe I'd be more social, less inclined to spend whole days on my computers, in my head.

I could find an article or a study somewhere to blame my lack of early breastmilk (that miraculous elixir! that wonder-food!) for every single unacceptable thing about myself. And I'm okay with that, I suppose, because it's people talking, and quite often it's very excited people talking about topics that inspire them, stating opinion like fact because they know it in their bones to be true. Gods know, I can relate to that. It's how I think. It's certainly how I write. But here's the thing, and it's striking to me reading these posts about breastfeeding: when you make your beliefs into facts, your experiences into objective truths about the world, you risk alienating people with equally valid beliefs and equally applicable experiences. And the worst part? You're losing valuable perspectives and gaining nothing at all.

I shouldn't say nothing. Sometimes we aren't invested in debate or dialogue. The (white, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgendered) women's lib movements - all of them - often rested the weight of their empowerment on offering a single vision of the more equal future. Perhaps it was that *women could vote, or that *women could work outside the home, or that *women could marry whomever they chose and have babies and have careers and sacrifice nothing in their journey. (Please read "*women" where * equals "white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis-gendered", and please understand that these visions were not shared by every white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman.)

Inevitably there would be other, invisible women nearby, who were hearing the platform declared for "women" and feeling utterly irrelevant. Voting? How many black women in the South voted after the 19th Amendment was passed? Black men in the South weren't voting, and they'd got the legal right to forty years earlier! Work outside the home? Scores of working-class women marvel at the notion that working is a right, a privilege, when their hours toiled in factories and restaurants and school houses and caring for the children and cleaning the homes of those poor women who couldn't work themselves feel ever-so-much like survival, and less like the icing on the cake.

I'm glad I can vote. I'm glad that the working woman now includes, with far less judgement, those women who felt so awful about it before that they fought like hell to end the stigma of working mothers (we are all still fighting like hell to end the stigma of working mothers; well, and, naturally, the stigma of non-working brown mothers, who exclusively live off the dole, drive Cadillacs and trade their food stamps for crack - wait, exactly how hard are we working on that one, anyway?). I'm glad that the women I know in my generation feel empowered by their decisions to marry, not obligated. Mostly. These are battles that, to varying degrees, really have aided the struggles for equality. Without the insistence of rich white ladies that they retain legal personhood after marriage, we would not even begin to have an argument for gay marriage; Walker would have a much shorter ruling, were it not for his many recitations of gender equality within the bounds of married partnerships.

But let us not forget all the people on the sidelines, who never got a chance to raise their voices in solidarity, who were shouted down in meetings for undermining The Cause(tm). There are a lot of those people.

I like the breastfeeding advocates - I'm all for breastfeeding in public, without shame or derision. I'm all for women who are comfortable doing so breastfeeding anywhere they want. I don't think they should have to explain themselves, defend themselves, or even answer the polite inquiries of interested parties. And it harm none - breastfeeding, far from harm, seems indeed to provide only positive benefits to those involved and have a neutral effect on everyone else - do what ye will.

Still. When I read these lengthy hymns in praise of breastfeeding I think about my mom. The reasons often given for formula feeding are flippant - vanity, convenience - and don't seem to take into account the very real stories of women who didn't give in because they were weak, or because they didn't love their children enough, or because they didn't stand up to their doctors. Are these the only narratives we have?

My mom couldn't breastfeed me. She's a therapist now, she's seen a whole lot of people talk about the betrayals of self, the destruction of minor confidences that lead to tremendous holes in themselves - their self-worth, their faith in others. She figures she was young and nervous and it was all so goddamn overwhelming. She wasn't uneducated about childbirth (I come by my tendency toward obsession honestly). She read every book on the market and took classes and did Lamaze and meditation and gave birth without drugs of any kind. Our shelves were full of parenting books when I was a kid - How to Talk so Your Child Will Listen and Listen so Your Child Will Talk and Siblings Without Rivalry were my personal favorites. But she couldn't breastfeed me, for whatever collection of reasons and influences that make up all the things we can and cannot do.

And I can't read these essays without feeling that judgement - of those who are passionate, whose feeling are strong, who know these truths to their bones, that breastmilk is best - personally. Mom wasn't trying to keep her figure. She wasn't weak-willed. It just didn't happen.

I like that we're minimizing some of the motherhood myths lately, though we aren't doing it enough. I like that we're acknowledging that breastfeeding isn't always easy, and doesn't always come naturally. That's important. You can find the bloggers who write - movingly - about how they did not feel that immediate all-consuming, death-defying oneness with their newborn that is supposed to be so automatic, so normal. You can find married moms who sometimes envy their single-by-choice sisters, and the SMBC folks who occasionally want one night - one night! - where they can kick their partner out of bed and say "Your turn." This is important work, perhaps the most important work. The marginalized voices have always had a value unrelated to their numbers, a weight unrelated to their comparative softness. Because they tell all the other stories, they provide the depth to the popular narrative, the color, the true truths.

Often it feels like a sense of false equality is achieved on the backs of the people whose voices are fewer, and lower, but the ultimate paradox for any student of history is that you can't pick and choose. Do I wish the first wave contained fewer outright, unforgivable racists? Yeah. But we got here because of those white-supremacist women, didn't we? Would the word "transgendered" be in common usage if the gays and lesbians of the '70s, many of whom were hugely transphobic, hadn't done their part to fight for visibility and acceptance? Probably not (though Stonewall, certainly, should definitely be remembered as a very gender-bending activist event, and don't forget it).

My mom isn't an aggressive breastfeeding advocate, but when I read the stories of the women who are, they're oddly familiar. Many of those women didn't have an environment of support for their first child or children, didn't have someone telling them that it's perfectly natural to struggle at first, that breastfeeding, like any athletic activity, takes practice, and while we celebrate the people for whom it comes so easily, most of us will have to work at it. It's this experience that leads them to be so very vocal about it. And that's how we are: I write endlessly about queer identity, gender performance, activist movements and isolation. I feel passionately about those topics because they're in me and inescapable. Am I alienating not just the people I want to alienate - the out-dated among us who still think gender's a binary state, the ones who believe homosexuality is merely a nasty habit, like smoking or fucking goats - but also the people who might be my allies but feel somehow that the very strength of my feelings excludes their more ambivalent interest?

I don't know. And if I decided it was so, I'm not sure what I'd do about it. But you can be that when I compose my next rant, my next horror-filled, melodramatic, utterly-convinced-of-its-own-worth diatribe, I'll spare a moment to consider the folks whose voices aren't included.

I'm gonna make some shit up right now. 

I've been thinking a great deal about why this marriage equality fight is the one true pairing of the queer rights world: weddings and the gays!  What could be better?  For awhile I didn't think I ought to even comment, considering I don't want to get married and my identity is less-than-perfectly rooted in the rather exclusive name game of homo/hetero politics.  But perhaps that makes me the right person to rip this down after all.

ENDA, DADT, DOMA, Prop 8 - you can get lost in the terminology.  Add HIV, AIDS, sero-status, fluid-bonded to the mix and it's even more confusing.  Not that I'm complaining.  I wrap the language around myself because it's a comfort to me to have these words, terms, initialisms and acronyms to describe the world as I see it.  It's also a form of branding - the power of which lies in our ability to recognize something immediately and (when done well), to see something in that thing that applies to or reflects back our experience.

The irksome thing about the gay marriage crusade is that we have more objectively important shit to do right now, and it seems so trivial to me at times that this is the topic on which we've decided to focus.  ENDA - that's the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.  That's the thing that, if passed federally, would make it so that you could not be fired for being gay or lesbian or bisexual (whether or not you could be fired for being trans or something else along the gender-variant spectrum is constantly under debate in the race to throw minorities-within-minorities under the bus, but don't let me get sidetracked by a rant about the inclination that certain high-profile gays have to pretend transfolks don't exist; when I used to find my little brother annoying or embarrassing my mother would tell me to ignore him and he'd go away - the tactic of dropping the "t" off the end of the initialism won't work either, but it certainly seems like a bunch of HRC moms out there shared the same philosophy with their kids as my mom did with me).

I told you not to let me get sidetracked.

ENDA's goddamn important, and while we in California are fortunate to live under some very progressive laws, there are people throughout the country for whom ENDA - or the absence of ENDA - could have very serious consequences.

DADT is, of course, Don't Ask Don't Tell.  It's like ENDA, but for the military.  Repealing DADT would have the immediate effect of relieving our queer brothers, sisters and everyone else in the armed services from having to stay closeted.  All that energy spent cloaking pronouns and pretending interest in members of the opposite sex could go into, I dunno, breaking encryptions and speaking Arabic and firing weapons.  You know - defending the country.  Which is what queer people in the military feel pretty goddamn passionate about, if their willingness to live in the closet is any indication.  (And I love - love - that there are commanders who know they've got gays littering the place and do not trigger investigations.  But that's not living honestly, that's living lucky, and it ain't equality.)

DOMA.  Oh, DOMA.  Defense of Marriage Act.  Defending marriage from the impending army of 3-5% of the population, and then only those who are old enough, and then only those who are inclined.  Yes.  DOMA was passed in 1996 out of the fear that a couple of fags could potentially get married in one state, move to another and expect to be treated like human beings in an officially recognized matrimonial partnership.  This is what they had time to do in the federal government in 1996.  Those were simpler times.

And then there's all those healthcare issues - like how to get doctors to treat transfolk like people, and how to streamline the processes for alternative family building, and how to get anyone, anywhere, to talk about lesbian sex like it actually exists and is not just two broads playing another hand of poker or some fucking thing ("Do you use contraceptives?" "Um...noooooo....").  And whatever happened to curing AIDS, huh?  That shit still exists.  You know what else still exists?  Kids barebacking for fun and adrenaline.  Barebacking with poz guys, the extreme sport of male sexuality.  You'd think the disease no longer existed by the radio silence about it (though that's racism, too; young black women are currently the fastest growing group of new infections here in the States - which is to remain drastically silent about the young black, brown, yellow and yes, even white women everywhere else - but is the lgbt community jumping all over fundraising and ribbons trying to save their lives? that silence is fucking shattering).

Just to be indulgent, let's add this to the mix as well: the cries of those of us down here in the trenches of daily life, making ends meet, that our community is not represented by a bunch of cisgendered white people with money and prestige, no matter how well-intentioned they are (and their intentions are so rooted in mindless privilege that it is quite debatable, really, if you can make a positive value statement about them at all).  We need more racial diversity, more cultural diversity, more economic diversity, more goddamn trans people already, HRC, oh my god, what fucking decade are you living in?!

Sorry. 

So why are we focusing on the ability of two people to tie their credit scores together forever and ever amen?

There are a couple of things going on here.  I've started thinking about them as Impact, Relevance and Urgency, just to provide myself with a metric, of sorts, to work through these conversations.  Take racial or gender diversity within movements.  Women have always ceded their demands to be treated fairly to the greater good: black women did this during civil rights, First Nations women did so during the American Indian Movement, peace-loving women did this during the war protests.  Black women during all waves of feminism have been sidelined by the more - ahem - universal demands of white women ("Shh, we'll get to you, but until we get the right to work, pipe down!" "The right to work?  But we've been working for two hundred years!"). 

It just never seems quite urgent enough to these minority groups within minority movements to stand fast to their demands, and with good reason.  If you think your struggle will result in fewer young men being lynched, well, maybe you're going to accept some misogynist bullshit in trade.  Relevance is also an issue - it is hard when you are one of the few brown-skinned women in the room to make the case that freedom doesn't look the same to everyone.  And it is so very, very easy, when you are in a comfortable majority, to imagine that the lone voice is speaking as an individual and you, the majority, are speaking for the good of the whole.  It's so easy to be seduced by your privilege.

I think that the people giving money to fight Prop 8 - gays and straights alike - are not the people who are living in fear that someone will tell their CO about the snapshot that fell out of their pack, only for an instant, but long enough to be seen.  I think that although I can only assume almost all of those people are in favor of repealing DADT, very few of them consider it personally relevant to their actual daily life.  DADT is far more urgent than marriage equality - there are horrible, torturous examples of partners not allowed at one another's deathbeds and children not allowed visitation with non-bio-parents, but there are many more stories about servicemen and -women being beaten and blackmailed and succumbing to suicidal depression because DADT forces them to choose between two pieces of who they are: the person and the soldier (or sailor or airman or Marine).  As for the impact of a repeal?  Time will tell, but as far as movements go, perhaps because it is not seen as relevant to the widest range of people, repealing DADT would be evidence of acceptance, but in a relatively small realm.

So let's talk ENDA.  We can all agree about not being fired for being gay, right?  Right?  Sure.  But, again, if you're in charge of where the money goes - and if you're putting a lot of your own resources into the fight - the likelihood of you being fired for your sexual orientation is low, low, low.  I'm sure Melissa Etheridge completely supports passing ENDA.  I'm also sure that not passing ENDA isn't keeping her up at night.  ENDA's highly relevant - even urgent - but again, only to a subsect of The Community (TM), and only to a pretty freakin' low-on-the-totem-pole subsect at that.  As for its impact?  I can't imagine a single ripple for someone who is not a queer person currently a bit concerned about their job.  And the immediate families of those folks.  I predict that, once passed, the minute Rush Limbaugh stops talking about it ENDA will disappear from the American consciousness and leave no trace behind. 

I'm certain it goes without saying that the folks who are not seeking out medical attention because the physical configuration of their body doesn't jive with the visual configuration of their appearance don't get a vote on which are the big issues this political season.  Ditto the people still contracting, living with and dying of HIV and AIDS.  These are urgent goddamn things, but the wider world can fool itself into believing their relevance is low and the impact can be tolerated.

And then we're back to marriage.

I look in on this from the outside of it, peering through the glass (or maybe, depending, the bars), fascinated and transfixed.  I don't know when I realized I didn't want to get married.  There was no ah-ha moment, no sudden epiphany.  It was a long, painful journey to get to this point, the point where I can say that with a straight face and let go of all the dehumanizing little platitudes people so like to deliver to those of us outside the pale ("Oh, you still have lots of time!"  "You just haven't met the right person!"  "Just you wait and see - you'll come around!").  I'm careful with it.  I don't say I won't marry, that I'll never marry, for fear that if I wanted to I wouldn't be brave enough to face down my own previous certainty.  It could certainly happen.  I fell in love once, in a split second, and I never thought that was within the realm of possibility until it was.  So I'm not talking in absolutes.  But I am saying that marriage, the way it's set up, holds no appeal to me at all.  Even the precious few couples I know with marriages I respect, relationships and realities they are constantly building, constantly creating - I admire you guys.  All of you.  And I do not want to be a member of your club.

Why marriage, then, even for me?  Why did I cry reading the California Supreme Court's ruling, if they were ruling on something that is not immediately relevant to me at all?  Why do I read the trial transcripts like I'm searching for clues, like I'm solving a riddle, like somehow my obsessive energy might even now add some tiny thing to the momentum on the side of justice, equality and the arc of the moral universe? 

Because marriage impacts everyone.  Every.  Single.  One of us.  Were your parents ever married?  Were your grandparents?  If your parents were married and divorced, then marriage impacted your life.  If your parents never married and you fielded all those annoying questions at school for a million years of childhood about where the other parent was, or why they don't live together, or why you and your mom or dad have different last names, then marriage impacted your life.  If your parents are somehow still married, then marriage impacted your life.  If your grandparents are married, your aunts, your uncles, if you've ever met a married person, marriage has impacted your life.  If you've ever been to a wedding, if you watched Luke and Laura get married on General Hospital or you watched Prince Charles and Lady Di get married on television, marriage has impacted your life.  If you've ever thought about getting married or if it's taken you three decades to work out you don't even like the smell of marriage, marriage has impacted your goddamn life.

Yeah.  You see where I'm going with this.

You can't escape it.  I can't escape it.  Marriage is impactful, marriage is relevant, and it's both of those things across lines of race, class, culture, gender, sexuality, religion.  Atheists think about marriage.  So do feminists and economists and physicists and bulimics and lefties.  This is the thing.  This is the rallying cry.  This is why married celebrities in Hollywood will give money: because they understand that marriage is important, that it is more than merely contractual, more that merely symbolic; marriage, in this country at this time, transcends both legal and religious definitions of it.  Have you listened to the couples who got married after it was legalized here, in Boston, in Canada?  They don't know how to explain it, but it's different, it means something, they wake up the next morning and they feel married.

I started out thinking that no matter how relevant, no matter how much impact, the last thing you have to say is that marriage equality isn't all that urgent.  Put up against folks who aren't getting their antiretrovirals because they can't afford them and they can't get on their partner's insurance, or boys dying in war zones, unable to even murmur "Tell him I love him" before they go - come the fuck on.  We should at least admit that our priorities are fucked (and I say "we" to indicate the movement, not to my support of it).  But I've made the case too well, and now I'm stuck.  I think marriage equality might be urgent as well.  I think that if you remove this barrier to full personhood (and do let us be clear, that's exactly what it is), then the rest will necessarily fold.  Maybe not in minutes or days or even weeks, but in the foreseeable future.  In my lifetime.  Married same-sex couples showing up to the company Christmas party humanizes queer people everywhere, and the psychology of discrimination demands that those being discriminated against be kept safely othered (which is harder, one imagines, to do, when you've seen them across the punch bowl, and bitched with them about the boss copying his wife's ass on the brand new machine it took six years to get the company to buy).  Gay people serving openly in the military doesn't end aggression against gay people in the military or anywhere else, but when your shit depends on some fag or some dyke pulling his or her end, and when that person comes through every time, you may well realize that, in fact, they're a hell of a lot like you after all.

It is urgent that queers start looking a little more like people and a little less like freaks.  Even non-married queers like me would benefit from that, wouldn't we?  Our children would benefit.  Our parents, who had such incredible dreams for us, whose hearts were broken just a little bit when they found out that at least some of those dreams no longer applied - they would benefit, too. 

So.  Marriage.  We meet again.  And again and again.  And you're right, marriage, it's not just put-on, you really are important.  I don't like all the reasons why that is, or all the ways it manifests, but I will admit that you are at the top of the glbt equality food chain for a reason.  So I will support you and I will bide my time and when the inevitable occurs - when the gates open and all who want to may enter - I want you to remember this moment.  We have set aside some mind-bendingly important goddamn things to get this done, marriage.  It will be your solemn responsibility to use all that momentum, all those good intentions, and keep them focused where they are most relevant, where they will have the most impact.  This is not the end of the fight, marriage.  You are not the face of equality.  Remember that.