Seduced and Abandoned
David Patricia Abelló
Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW
Contact Email:   d.abellounsw.edu.au

‘Same sex’ relationship law reforms are to be enforced from the 1st of July. They are the result of negotiations between the Australian Government and a small group of middle-class, anti-intellectual Labor party members and lobbyists within the ‘gay community’. Their blend of influence, callous disregard and stupidity has had disastrous effects for over 10,000 Centrelink and DVA benefit recipients. In taking disadvantage protection off the bargaining table, the lobbyists have sold out these people for their own vision of ‘gay marriage’ and lifestylism. They do not represent the hundreds of thousands of queers who outnumber the ‘gay community’, who are uninterested in its culture and maleness, who struggle against heteronormativity, who shake their heads at the oxymoron of gay marriage, who maintain multiple partnerships or live in multiple households, or otherwise uphold their independence in relationships, who reject abilism and the objectification and idealisation of ‘beauty’, who have invented their own political practice, sense of collectivity and kinship systems, who make their own fetishes and problematise the apparent truth effects of heteronormative discourse, such as binary sex categories, dependency, romantic love, monogamy and ageism. The antipathy of these lobbyists of the ‘gay community’ towards queers and sex radicals is historical, as this paper will argue.

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