Young, Queer and Reflecting on Organizing Around Marriage

I was in San Francisco last week when the California Supreme Court announced its decision upholding Prop 8 and I took the opportunity to interview some of my friends in the LGBT community about their thoughts on the efforts to organize for marriage.

Going into this project, I wasn't sure what I'd hear. I knew from previous conversations that many in my community of young, queer activists had questioned whether LGBT organizations should continue to prioritize marriage recognition at the cost of other LGBT advocacy efforts.

While some folks were still questioning our community's attention to marriage, I heard from other folks that their opinions on the significance of marriage had changed after they'd witnessed the nationwide mobilizations in the wake of Prop 8. One definite effect of the mobilizations and the prominence of marriage in the public discourse was that my friends seemed to have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how they felt about marriage both personally and politically. As Jon, a grad student in public health at Berkley, said, marriage became something he "had to take more of an opinion on."

I found the diversity of perspectives offered in these conversations insightful and so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a few clips in the following video.

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(Originally posted to Get Busy 6/2/2009.)