The news that Argentina – and Latin America – has just held its first gay marriage ceremony, in addition to the news that Mexico’s Federal District (containing Mexico City) became the first jurisdiction to legalize the recognition of same-sex marriage – comes to me as welcome, but with a shaky, unsettling feeling that such recognitions of marriage equality are granted from the top-down, and can be abrogated within a matter of months if another government institution in Mexico or Argentina decides to strike it down rather than let it be.
My own fear about the international movement for marriage equality is that the prevailing cultural attitudes of the grassroots can lie squarely in opposition to it, and that government recognitions of marriage equality will only be welcomed in some quarters where LGBT individuals have less-to-little to lose for the sake of their sexual or gender identities, and will not be felt as strongly in areas of a country or an administrative subdivision where the presence of "out" individuals and respective institutions is negligible and inferior in its political influence. It matters if a basic LGBT consciousness was already present in the most distributed institutions within an area (such as many parts of California), and it matters just the same if the distribution of such institutions is negligible or concentrated in specific highly-populated areas of a state (such as in jurisdictions like Georgia).
The experience of California and Maine, and other states in which referenda were utilized to popularly repeal marriage equality, leads me – just as it leads those in California who have created "equality teams" to canvas from door to door to appeal to Californian households on the question of marriage equality – to the conclusion that an LGBT consciousness should be disseminated and instituted as widely as possible before one can be sure that marriage equality and other questions can be answered to the affirmative.
On a previous post about the distribution of LGBT community centers in comparison to the proportion of municipal and county populations which voted against Proposition 8, I mentioned that I felt that more community centers should be built in the California interior – and that more ethnic community centers should be built in areas of ethnic minority concentrations – in order to further establish and anchor an LGBT consciousness into the grassroots.
However, I’ve since come to the conclusion that LGBT community centers – as they currently exist – are not sufficient to distributively anchor LGBT consciousness at the grassroots level. Actually, the approach needs to be much more "bite-sized", portable and adaptive to economic and political conditions.
This approach can be best described as a "convenience store" or "shopette" approach that is much more accessible to those who may not feel as empowered to live with their sexual orientation or gender identity in areas where those who do not fit the heterosexual ideal are not as able to participate in the activities which can be engaged by often-close-knit "normals". This approach can also be applied to areas where the LGBT consciousness is high and mighty, albeit with far more competition from already established businesses and institutions which are much more diverse and niche-appealing.
This approach, unlike the sparse, highly-concentrated community centers, bookstores and gay villages, is meant to be replicated in small towns and suburbs, if not rural areas. It could be a one-room building in which food and media (and fuel and vacancy?) are sold in an LGBT-centric interior atmosphere; it may follow that the shopette must appeal to the most popular (and least thought-intensive) common denominator of LGBT tastes.
If this were to become the most that most people may know about LGBT individuals, and if these were much more prominent and distributed into the smaller municipal areas, then it is likely that LGBT convenience stores will make it harder to voice a genuine, founded opposition or denial of marriage equality and other LGBT concerns, just as the presence of Wal-Mart in most towns across the United States has rendered the opposition to its socioeconomic influence almost gutless. A sort of "soft power", in this case, could go a long way toward increasing the visibility and openness of LGBT people, particularly those in the closet.
However, convenience stores are only a soft prong of reaching to the suburban and rural communities of the closeted, and only appeals to those who at least have some money to spare. Another type of bite-sized, portable distributed institution must appeal to the suburban and rural closeted who have the most to loose from coming out or are the least prepared for life outside their heterocentric households (whether that life is consciously chosen or is suddenly foisted upon such individuals). These individuals include the poor and the homeless, including the young and the old.
I want to explore that second institution in depth in a later post.
