http://www.thenation.com/blog/163907/paradoxes-national-coming-out-dayRiding my bike along the Hudson River in Manhattan yesterday, I encountered not one but two giant billboards using gay marriage (recently legalized here in New York state) to sell stuff. Manhattan Mini-Storage dispensed with its usual cleverness (“If you store your stuff outside New York, it might come back Republican”) to proclaim bluntly, “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get gay married” (if there’s a connection to storage, it’s escaping me). A few blocks south, a Kenneth Cole ad proclaimed: “Gay people getting married? Next they’ll be asking to vote and pay taxes.”
How strange, over the past year, to be accosted by thirty-foot-tall corporate endorsements of same-sex marriage doubling as ads, to watch gay marriage become a savvy political strategy that a fiscally conservative governor could push to bolster his liberal bona fides, to see the endorsement of marriage equality become the penance required for a homophobic outburst (this was Tracy Morgan’s homophobic outburst, to be precise; at the time, I tweeted, “Proof that entrenched societal homophobia and marriage equality can co-exist”). It is, after all, the same year in which 50 percent of transgender people were harassed at work, nearly a third of LGBT students skipped a day of school out of concern for their safety, yet another year in which gay people in at least twenty-nine states can be denied housing or a job simply for being gay. As Nancy Goldstein observed here at TheNation.com the night the New York state legislature legalized same-sex marriage, kudos to New York for this win for gay rights, but don’t forget that Mayor Bloomberg slashed funding for homelessness prevention programs that were “pretty much the only path to housing for many of the LGBT youth in city shelters.”
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