Love isn't Love isn't Love: The Marriage Game

Love is love is love. That's the game we're playing now. That's what the images say, uniform toilet-symbol representations of binary genders in three different (two person) combinations. Conventionally attractive white young photographed kisses in three different (two person) combinations. Still more - usually young, usually conventionally attractive, usually white - couples photographed in couples, professing how just like anyone else they are, how they pay their taxes and eat toast in the morning and how they're just like anyone else. Our love is just like your love. Love is love is love.

This is the game we're playing. This is the game to get marriage.

We're used to games. We've played them all our lives, played them for survival from the first slight difference bubbling in our consciousness, played them later in press releases and on parliament grounds. We've accepted compromises, concocted strategies. We know we will always have to do this. Sometimes there are winnings. Sometimes we play together and stay together, ready for the next round. Games aren't all bad.

We always play to the same goal. Love is love is love.

Except ours is love is a society that ignores it, that discredits it, that overtly oppresses it. Our love is in secret, or with a never ending shame, a belief that maybe, maybe, it should not be. Our love is a brazen fuck you, our love is a show of pride. Our love is us just wanting, just wanting our love to be like your love. Our love is wanting our love to never be like your love. Our love is never in a vacuum. Your love and our love never started on equal footings. Our love is having to hide our other differences to make us more normal, make us more ordinary, to gain an acceptance of our love you will never have to work or fight for.

You can choose your pieces. You can be yellow or green or red or blue. Sometimes you can be a boot or a dog or an iron or a car.

Make no mistake. This is a game for ordinary people. A game for normal people. A game for people who look good in the newspapers, people who the average kiwi can relate to. No-one likes it, but it's what we have to do to win. Jostling at the edges, or maybe staying home, will be those who will never look good in the papers, but found in the queer community a home of sorts, or those who were never welcome even there. We'll pick up our placards and we'll march, because we know this fight has to be fought, this game has to be won. We may even have a share of the winnings, or we may have a penalty deducted. It won't have been our fight. It won't have been our liberation.

This is the game to get marriage. But does the winner take all? Who has to fold up the board and put away the pieces? And will you, and your winnings, be on our team for another round?