Marriage equality is now law in Australia. The first legal same-sex marriages will take place on 9 January 2018, after a drawn-out and often ugly debate during which the conservative right expended every arrow in their quiver in a last-ditch attempt to resist change. Maybe, as Prime Minister Turnbull believes, it had to go this way: that change is only possible when it's inevitable and can not longer be resisted. I don't believe that. Change is both desirable and necessary, and each moment of change resisted is a moment of unnecessary injustice.
On the website side of things, blogging is going to to slow down as we head towards Christmas, and I get ready for exams and winter holidays. So forgive the personal nature of this week's entry, but I'm going to tell you all a story about what marriage equality means to me.
Once upon a time . . .
I came to politics late. I was middle-class kid with scientists for parents who never talked about politics and never really showed an interest in social policy. They were prototypical Uninvolved. History was my gateway drug. The past was filled with heroic figures and world-shaking events in faraway places. To this day, "Lawrence of Arabia" remains my favourite movie: the capacity of an individual, no matter how flawed, to change the world was revelatory to a kid in the Australian suburbs. It probably helped that Lawrence was increasingly coming to be seen a queer figure. I obsessed over the Second World War (aided in part by my grandparents memories ), intensively studying the epic that shaped the modern world. I came out the other side something of an enthusiast for the Soviet aesthetic, a teenage 'tankie'.
Thanks to a scholarship, I was educated a private boys school in Melbourne. The atmosphere was blatantly homophobic, if not outright reactionary. Hard as it may be to understand only twenty years later, but it was a very different time: the internet and social media barely existed; kids didn't have phones and bullying and inter-student violence was commonplace; teachers could and did employ corporal punishment, even if it was slowly falling out of use. Although kids I went to school with came out later in life, I only knew of only one 'bisexual' guy at the time. He cut himself with glass pieces that lay around the school ground. That was a real thing, that neither I nor anyone around me was equipped to acknowledge, much less deal with. This was an environment in which putting gay people in concentration camps was considered a 'humane' policy: cruelty against those who were different was a way of life.
This attitude didn't necessarily take its cues from official policy. The school was religious, but overall rather progressive by those standards. Nor was it the result of cultural or racial values: the student body was extremely multicultural, as most in Australia are. No, this was a homophobia bred entirely through adolescent male macho culture that punished deviance and perceived weakness. What a shock then to realise that adult society was no different: that high politics, law and policy embodied these same reactionary values. This awareness dawned for me in 2000, when the conservative Australian government petulantly sought to cut gay couples off from IVF and medically-assissted conception. These adult debates were mirrored in the classroom: one of the jocks threw a chair at me for daring to argue the other side.
Pop culture also played an important role. Joss Whedon and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will always remain an important influence on progressives of a certain age, and "New Moon Rising", the fourth-season episode in which one of the main characters came out as gay, floored me. The narrative of coming out was unlike anything I had experienced before: it was a personalised heroic epic, the individual taking charge of their own fate and making a conscious break with the established rules and customs of society. It also personalised the broader political struggle in a way reading the news never did: I didn't know any out people, but thanks to fictionalised characters I felt like I did. I wrote an extremely personal essay at the time, trying to explain how much influence the 'coming out' narrative was having on my political worldview, the only upshot of which is that my English teacher probably thought I was gay.
So I came to politics late, but I came to it through gay rights. Inequalities based on sexual preference made the abstract aesthetics of progress personal in a way that a cis-, white middle class kid would otherwise not have experienced. To realise that everyone is the hero of their own story, and that we all have barriers and oppression to overcome, is a powerful thing. It's served as a lodestar for me these last twenty years (I almost quit the Labor Party in 2004 over their disgraceful cowardice on the issue) and reaching this point therefore feels like a moment of both culmination and release. I can't claim to have played any role - better men and women than I have made it their life work, and it's they who now deserve all the credit. But I think a lot of us are going to to feel a bit unmoored, directionless and adrift now that it's done.
Where, then, do we go next? Obviously, trans rights are going to be hard fought the next few years, but there too, social change feels inevitable. I think the path I've taken, and the advice I'd give to others, is this: whatever brings you to progressivism, stay a while and listen. Ask your comrades what brought them there and offer your support. Listen and learn, build ties between your struggle and theirs and come to see the connections and structures that unite them. It may take a while, but eventually I like to think we can generalise our identities from the initial struggles that motivate us: to recognise that it was not this injustice that made us angry, but this injustice. And one by one, working together, they will be overcome.