In Australia (and, indeed, anywhere else really) there is a peculiar beastie, hereafter called a 'radqueer.'

This particular subset of the queer community are distinguished by their beliefs that queers are continuously oppressed, and that only concerted effort on their part (and everybody else's part, but we'll get to that later) will get us through.

Let me state this for the record: I am not, nor have I ever been, a radqueer. I don't 'fight for my right to' [insert something here]. The closest I think I've ever come to chanting a slogan is 'I'm here, I'm queer, does that get me cheap beer?' during one particularly drunken night at a straight bar having a rainbow-themed night, and the only placard I've ever held was a blood-stained piece of white card proclaiming 'the dead are people too' during a Zombie Shuffle several years ago.

In case you don't get the picture – I don't do activism. Not that kind of activism, anyway, I don't think that it works very well, and I don't think that it's very smart. The things that I want out of life that I would conceivably have to protest for are coming to me, slowly but surely, by me asking for them, working for them, convincing people to work with me rather than fight me.

Relatively high on my list of priorities are things like adoption rights, legal partnership recognition, and decent anti-discrimination legislation. Relatively low on the list are things like the right to divorce the bastard once I can live comfortably off half his assets. Of the things that I find important, many of them are already well on their way in Australia, through legal reform and the action of a gradually more open-minded legislature.

Every time I bring up these desires, I am labelled a 'tool of the patriarchy,' and am told that by wanting these things, I am 'supporting the mechanism of a heteronormative machine seeking the subjugation of women and the oppression of the 'other.'' If I truly wish to 'subvert the dominant capitalism ideals of the hegemony,' I should give up such ideas, and instead 'oppose the normalised xenophobia that manifests as institutionalised homophobia and misogyny.'

I'm rapidly learning that this jumble of words and sentences means very little. Roughly translated?

"Come be a martyr with me. All the cool kids are doing it."