Hi. I’m Simon Copland. I’m very excited to start writing at Star Observer.
I thought I’d start with a bit of a summer post. Every year I love voting for, and listening to, the Triple J Hottest 100. This year many were happy as Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’ made it so high in the list. Yet, as ‘Same Love’ made it to number 15, I couldn’t help but think, and cringe, at the bland ‘love’ politics that have started to take control recently. We see it everywhere; a story that ‘we deserve equal rights because our love is the same’. It’s one that troubles me.
Obviously, the first problem is that sexuality and gender identity is about a lot more than ‘love’. It’s about f**king, how we dress, who we kiss, how we identify ourselves, what toilets we use etc etc. There is so much more to our struggle than love. And what a focus on ‘love’ does is hide all of these things; to provide a nice, friendly, heteronormative face to queer people. To remove the ‘icky’ queer things that conservatives don’t want to hear about.
Even when we do talk about love though, I question whether we really want the ‘same love’. Whilst this is obviously no longer true for many anymore, hetero relationships and love have been built on the power of the patriarchy – something we certainly don’t want to gain access too.
Much of ‘our love’ is already different to this. There is the love of monogamous gay or lesbian couples, the love of those in poly relationships or in relationships where couples may sleep around at times.
There are so many forms of love that I can’t name them all, and it feels like talking about ‘same love’ is a way to ignore this – to narrow our focus to the type of ‘love’ that fits into a heteronormative society.
We’re about so much more than love. And even when we’re in love, whether hetero or queer, so many of us are not like everyone else, and many of us don’t want the ‘same love’. We are broader than that and shouldn’t try and hide it.
You can follow Simon Copland via Twitter @SimonCopland
