queer history and Doctor Who
May. 2nd, 2011 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitA lot of people in Who fandom--me included--have said that Canton's expressed wish to marry his male partner was anachronistic for 1969 in the US. But as lilacsigil pointed out to me, some other folks have shown it wasn't. I don't know who first posted about this in relation to the episodes, so I'll just summarize what I found on Wikipedia once I knew enough to look.
In 1970, Jack Baker and his partner James Michael McConnell applied for a marriage license in Hennepin County, Minnesota. They were denied it and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.
They didn't give up. In 1971 they obtained a marriage license in another Minnesota county and were married by a Methodist minister. They're still together, by the way. They even filed their taxes as a married couple until 2004, when the IRS started rejecting their forms after the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act.
And in 1972, thanks to the activism of Baker and others, the Democratic Party in Minnesota made equal marriage rights part of its party platform. This didn't last, but it was a hell of an important first.
So, Canton's hopes weren't as anachronistic as all that.
The way so many of us assumed that they had to be makes me wonder why we're so invested in seeing queer history as a narrative of complete and irresistible oppression (with the brief exception of Stonewall) until about the 1990s. Obviously I'm not denying that there was and still is oppresion, but why are we so quick to forget the resistance? I know a little about the Mattachine Society and other pre-Stonewall activism, but I don't know nearly enough, and shockingly little about the actual post-Stonewall movement. Clearly there was a lot more going on in the seventies than the "giant sex party" image that one picks up from TV and movies.
lilacsigil pointed out to me, some other folks have shown it wasn't. I don't know who first posted about this in relation to the episodes, so I'll just summarize what I found on Wikipedia once I knew enough to look.In 1970, Jack Baker and his partner James Michael McConnell applied for a marriage license in Hennepin County, Minnesota. They were denied it and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.
They didn't give up. In 1971 they obtained a marriage license in another Minnesota county and were married by a Methodist minister. They're still together, by the way. They even filed their taxes as a married couple until 2004, when the IRS started rejecting their forms after the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act.
And in 1972, thanks to the activism of Baker and others, the Democratic Party in Minnesota made equal marriage rights part of its party platform. This didn't last, but it was a hell of an important first.
So, Canton's hopes weren't as anachronistic as all that.
The way so many of us assumed that they had to be makes me wonder why we're so invested in seeing queer history as a narrative of complete and irresistible oppression (with the brief exception of Stonewall) until about the 1990s. Obviously I'm not denying that there was and still is oppresion, but why are we so quick to forget the resistance? I know a little about the Mattachine Society and other pre-Stonewall activism, but I don't know nearly enough, and shockingly little about the actual post-Stonewall movement. Clearly there was a lot more going on in the seventies than the "giant sex party" image that one picks up from TV and movies.
