At first when I hear the phrase family values I think of children, and of community support around the raising of children... many many people loving and caring for children. Family.
I'm now realizing that's not how it's meant. The phrase family values has nothing to do with children, nothing to do with love, nothing to do with family as I think of family. It's all about structure and control. It's about erasing anything that challenges the status quo. It's about ensuring everyone either fits into a nice little box or spends their lives in the attempt. Today's version of family values is about maintaining the illusion of functioning nuclear families. It's about a smear campaign implying that those who do not cleave unto the idea of the nuclear family are anti-family, anti-children. It's about painting those who don't comply into monsters who threaten the well-being of our children. So the words family values are spouted to enforce censure of anything that deviates from both the nuclear family structure and the controlled images of sexuality so often associated with it.
This current definition of family values is not about a lack of sex and sexuality; it's about controlling sexuality. There is no passion, no wildness, no ecstasy, in the sex presented as compatible with family values. The sex must remain hidden and polite. Queer sex most especially must remain hidden. Because queer sex is not polite. It's not nice. It's dirty and messy and crude. There's nothing pretty about it. Queer sex is bodies hot and sweaty and touching in places that aren't even taught about in elementary school. Queer sex is about connecting. When someone has queer sex they connect to the world. That wild animal side is released. It's that wild animal side that is so dangerous. It's that wild animal side that wakes us up, that tells us that something isn't right, that disables our abilities to close our eyes to the world around us. So that wild animal side that revels in the carnal must be kept sedated. Chasing the dream of conformity – being just like everyone else, accepted by everyone else, validated by everyone else – is great sedation for some, drugs and alcohol offer a better alternative for others including those with little to no hope of ever being able to conform or pass. But that's another rant.
Policing each other to insist on compliance with a value system created by a social order that only grudgingly accepts gays, and even then only accepts a specific breed of gay, does not further equality for gays. It only serves to support a social order that breeds contempt for what is different. There is no celebration of diversity here, only a very clear message that we must change who we are and how we live, and become “just like everybody else” in order to be accepted. In order to be permitted to live in peace. In order to not be burned out of our homes or beaten to death on the streets. I do not accept those terms. I WILL NOT accept those terms. If the social order under which I live refuses to accept me as I am then the social order needs to change because I'm not. If this social order will not change then I will remain on the fringes of it and work day and night to tear it down, to make space for something better, something healthier, something more inclusive and less dependent on conformity. Something that truly celebrates diversity.
This current definition of family values does no less than royally piss me off. This idea that sex is something vile and shameful from which we must protect our children pisses me off. This insistence on disconnect from our bodies and our nature pisses me off. The implication that anyone who revels in their sexuality is a danger to children pisses me off. The acceptance that queer sex must be hidden pisses me off. Sex IS a Family Value.
