Are the Kids All Right?

Abstract

On May 9, 2012, one day after North Carolina voters dealt a blow to the nation’s same-sex marriage movement by passing its controversial Amendment One ban on domestic partnerships, President Barack Obama announced his support of same-sex marriage; the next day, Newsweek magazine’s cover proclaimed that the nation had welcomed its first “gay” president into office. This provocative analogy of the nation’s social striving toward civil rights progress across race and gender lines was intended, arguably, as a celebratory illumination of the cooperative means by which achievements in the racial justice movement have served as touchstones for subsequent gender-related legislation. Yet, as Andrew Sullivan’s commentary in Newsweek would show, the headline also signaled the appeal of a discourse of interchangeability between African American and same-sex platforms that likened the advocacy of white gay rights proponents to the long since imagined completion of racial projects for socioeconomic and political equity. Reflecting on Obama’s political volleying between “marriage equality” and “civil union” during the early years of his campaign, Sullivan questioned the apparent eth(n)ical irony of the soon-to-be-president’s reticence to acknowledge same-sex marriage: “Was this obviously humane African-American advocating a ‘separate but equal’ solution—a form of marital segregation like the one that made his own parents’ marriage a felony in many states when he was born” (Sullivan)?