A Big Gay Victory?: The Chance to Spend $25K on a “Fairy Tale Wedding”

I am a huge proponent of equal rights for our nation’s many, many gay citizens and have long been both appalled and embarrassed by the shameful and pointless refusal to grant homosexuals equal rights. So needless to say, I was thrilled to hear this morning of a major victory for the rainbow coalition. Disneyland, a place perhaps more symbolic of America than any other, will now welcome the gay population with open arms, allowing them to emerge from behind closed doors so that they too may marry in public display of saccharine overspending in the Magic Kingdom.

So let me get this straight: A shocking number of Americans persist in the belief that homosexuality is a horrible, evil affliction curable by a stay at some sort of summer camp. Not even the most liberal of politicians will find some balls and openly embrace gay marriage. Homosexuals are legally unable to visit their sick or dying partners in the hospital, and when their partners do die, they face estate and inheritance issues that straight couples will never have to deal with. If a gay person falls in love with a foreigner, the only sure way that they can be guaranteed a life together is to defraud the government with a sham straight marriage. Clearly flaming celebrities persist in the belief that it is better to live a public lie than risk the damage that coming out would do to their careers, despite the fact that a) there are openly gay entertainers who are very successful and b) they are silently reinforcing the homophobia that they themselves so fear.

Michel Foucault (who was gay, and is my hero – the two are unrelated) had a theory that society deals with that which it finds most threatening and objectionable by absorbing it into the mainstream and neutering it. As usual, he has a point. When people say “But look at how much more accepted gays are today!”, what the fuck are they talking about? Sure, there are the aforementioned openly gay celebs and gay characters on tv shows. But think of the elision between the depiction of straight romance in the media and that of gay. Gay sex is neutered – if you judge by the mainstream media, people have nothing to fear from gays because they never fuck!! They hug a whole lot, though. Scary!

Foucault would fucking love this Disney shit. It is the ultimate realization of his theory. What bigger slap in the face is there than to say “You still can’t get married in 49 states and are constitutionally forever forbidden from doing so in at least 13, but you can go right ahead and, with our blessing, pump $25,000 into the corporate behemoth that is Disneyland for the chance to be greeted by a fanfare of dressed up idiots with trumpets as your horse-drawn carriage pulls up in front of Cinderella’s castle prior to your legally meaningless civil ceremony. Rest assured that much of the income this brings in will further line the pockets of the very people who donate massive amounts of money to the Republican party and support Bush’s constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.”

The saddest part of this is that there are probably oodles of gay couples with their AmExes out as we speak, dialing Mickey to book their nuptials. There is no greater evidence of the justification for gay equal rights than this – homosexuals are just as big of jackasses as the rest of us.