Freedom not to marry kit.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Humor - gay activists push for legal marriage rights - Column

Recently, I was reading one of the many glossy gay magazines I get. There's a sentence you never used to hear. No more plain brown wrappers for us! The only magazine I insist come under wraps into my neighborhood is The New Republic.

Now, all manner of gay magazines with "out" in the title are mailed openly to post office boxes all over the country. Out and About--gay travel. Trout--gay sports trolling. Doubt--a magazine for bisexuals. Pout--The Log Cabin newsletter (great article about Bob Dole returning gay money).

And OK, I wasn't really reading. I was looking at the pictures. We've got pictures! Famous gay people. Famous dead suspected gay people. Famous gay half-sisters playing ministers at gay weddings on hip, gay-friendly shows. Gay cruises to take. Gay things to buy. In between the ad for gay real estate and gay colonics ("Swallow a prism, shit a rainbow!"), I spotted an ad for "The Freedom to Marry Kit." Of course, I wondered, "Who is Kit? And why do we want to marry her? Or him?"

It was a very androgynous "Ask Pat" moment. I could understand the Freedom to Marry Melissa. Or the Freedom to Marry Martina, with very clear, signed prenuptial agreements, of course, but this Kit thing had me mystified.

Turns out the FTM kit is designed to help concerned gays organize in their municipalities for the freedom to marry! Now if I were into handicapping, sorry, predicting the next issue for gay people to get het up about, it would not have been gay marriage.

I would have thought our issue would be violence against gays--witness the murder in Oregon of two known lesbian activists. Investigators think the motive was robbery. Like rainbow-colored freedom rings are hard to come by.

Or I would have predicted we would be organizing around the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on the Colorado amendment, or at least having a small action to protest that the Clinton Administration did not even see fit to file an amicus brief.

I would have thought we would have been out in the streets over health care, given the cost of caring for people living with AIDS and the disproportionately high rates of breast cancer among lesbians.

But no, the issue du anno burbling up in the gay movement is the Freedom to Marry. Go figure.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I have applied rigorous self-criticism to understand why this issue does not exactly knock the dots off my dice. It's not the first time I have had to work up enthusiasm for a gay issue.

Gays in the military was a...