After the amazing stories of information warfare against Wikileaks and their volunteers last week, I’ve decided that I really need to get back into secure daily computing practices. I’ve also been planning on leaving facebook for a while now, to join diaspora, and I know I shouldn’t use Gmail, since I’m a thinking person, so I’m finally making a change. I’ve stopped posting to facebook, and will probably close my account soon, although disturbingly enough I still get lots of art world announcements only through facebook, so we’ll see. There are so many other good reasons to leave it anyway, like that I can have more time to do what I want, like read and spend time with my lover, and other reasons like the ridiculous heteronormative ads and so on. I’ve also started using pgp and tor again, encrypted all of my hard drives, switched back to linux and secured my android. Whew! That feels much better…

So, I’ll be posting here on my blog more again, since I do like to keep in a digital dialog with folks, but I really hope others will join the mass exodus out of facebook and back into all the other great parts of the web and the world. Seriously folks, try twitter! It’s so much better than fb! Or at least use something like seesmic or ping.fm so you can post in lots of places at once.

Today, I found one of those really, really wonderful blogs, outside of facebook’s walls, called Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage! I love these kids. I just want to hug them.

It’s truly a brilliant and moving piece of writing. Please read it. All of it. I just want to share it with everyone, which is why I’m writing this post. It’s definitely in line with other anti-homonationalist and anti-assimilationist writings, but its just so good and concise and packed with goodness. READ IT!

Here are some choice quotes:

It’s hard for us to believe what we’re hearing these days. Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed black men and bashing queers, and gays want more policing. More and more Americans are suffering and dying because they can’t get decent health care, and gays want weddings. What happened to us? Where have our communities gone? Did gays really sell out that easily?

As young queer people raised in queer families and communities, we reject the liberal gay agenda that gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality…

We choose solidarity with immigrant families whom the state denies legal recognition and families targeted by prisons, wars, and horrible jobs. We reject the state violence that separates children from parents and decides where families begin and end, drawing lines of illegality through relationships.  We see this as part of a larger effort on the part of the state to control our families and relationships in order to preserve a system that relies on creating an underclass deprived of security in order to ensure power for a few.  We know that everyone has a complex identity, and that many queer families face separation due to one or more of the causes mentioned here, now or in the future. We would like to see our queer community recognize marriage rights as a short-term solution to the larger problem of the government’s disregard for the many family structures that exist. As queers, we need to take an active role in exposing and fighting the deeper sources of this problem. We won’t let the government decide what does and does not constitute a family…

Rather than choosing to fight the things that keep structural racism intact, the liberal gay agenda has chosen to promote them.  The gay agenda continually fights for increased hate crimes legislation that would incarcerate and execute perpetrators of hate crimes.  We believe that incarceration destroys communities and families, and does not address why queer bashings happen. Increased hate crimes legislation would only lock more people up. In a country where entire communities are ravaged by how many of their members get sent to jail, where prisons are profit-driven institutions, where incarceration only creates more violence, we won’t accept anything that promotes prison as a solution.  Our communities are already preyed upon by prisons – trans people, sex workers, and street kids live with the constant threat of incarceration.  We believe that real, long-term solutions are found in models of restorative and transformative justice, and in building communities that can positively and profoundly deal with violence.  We challenge our queer communities to confront what we are afraid of rather than locking it up, and to join members of our community and natural allies in opposing anything that would expand prisons…