First Rule of Being a Good Ally: Know When To Listen

This is 101-level stuff, but particularly at ostensibly feminist sites like Jezebel, it happens quite frequently: if you truly consider yourself an ally, you might want to sit back and listen before commenting

The somewhat sensational headline,"Drag Queen on Gay Marriage: ‘I Just Don’t Want It to be Called Marriage ,' devoid of any nuance, doesn't really help. It largely went unnoticed, but commenter erinhorakova  explained why a member of the gay community would not be in favor of marriage. It's a difficult thing to parse, especially when the right has such a stranglehold on what the definition of  marriage should be, and who's entitled to it, but there is a faction of the gay community opposed to it:

"Within the queer community--perhaps more so a decade ago than today--there's been a lot of debate about whether gay marriage subordinates the energies and culture of the gay community into a heterosexual paradigm: whether effectively, in order for homosexual desire to be accepted by heteronormative societies, it must be channeled into forms that closely mimic stereotypical/acceptable/safe expressions of heterosexual desire. Thus a gay-marriage-skeptical argument wouldn't necessarily be predicated on whether or not the gay community felt they were deserving of the same rights as straight couples in a relationship. It would be more about preservation of a unique and perhaps valuable culture, and about expanding the possibilities 'acceptable' of sexual relationships for everyone, doing something beyond stuffing gay people into nuclear family paradigms. Fundamentally, there was concern was about whether, in an understandable quest for acceptance, the gay community was cheerfully seeking its own abnegation, out of a misplaced desire to become the norm rather than for the norm to accept them as they were."

Activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation  and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity , elaborates in an NPR interview from a few years back: 

"If we take a look at the focus, you know, this narrow focus on marriage, right, what we're told is that this is going to give us housing and health care and the right to stay in this country and tax breaks and the right to visit our, you know, the people we love in the hospital. 

But, really, it's only giving that right to people who are willing to conform to this narrow notion of a long-term monogamous partnership sanctioned by the state, which really doesn't relate to the majority of people's lives -straight, gay, queer or otherwise."

I don't mean to make this an arguement for or against gay marriage, or marriage in general -- personally, I think it should be recogmized at the federal level -- but with a few of the largely straight commenters chalking it up to "self-loathing" or whatever, I think a possible explanation was needed.