it is great when married couples speak up and force others to understand marriage on the unique terms of their own peculiar love commitments ... but, that is actually not the standard practice. in fact, many, perhaps most people get married precisely so they don't have to talk about how different or individual or kinky or counterculture they or their intimacies are. many are very comfortable with telegraphing only the broadest strokes to everyone around them, and marriage is, historically, the cultural tool for accomplishing just that. in an ideal world it would belong only to individuals, but in practice it operates as a tool of silence and silencing because only relatively few are brave enough to, openly and publicly and loudly, queer their marriages.

so, yes to everything JVB said :)

It doesn't empower people to queer their marriages or speak up for their queered marriages if we promote the falsehood that marriage is somehow un-queerable, never-queered, or inherently anti-queer and/or oppressive.

Why aren't we going after the prosecutor and investigators? Susan Ruiz, Kelly Currie, Tyler Smith, and Melanie Hendry. We should be shaming THEIR names and pictures on every social media account gay people have access to and publicly protesting these puritanical money grubbing opportunists.

agreed! and apprising people of the fact that marriage is by default -- by default only, but a considerable default at that -- silencing and anti-queer is also empowering, because it really puts the "openly publicly and loudly" part of queering marriage into perspective.

This is why marriage was not my first choice of a solution. Unfortunately, it was probably the only viable American solution. If we could have formed a new, pro-queer and non-oppressive institution and straight people of similar minds would then have sought permission to join us instead of the other way around, leaving marriage to the fate its history deserved, things would have turned out rather better than they have done.

While there may be a few salient points, this letter is inane, and Dan, you should hold yourself to a higher standard before endorsing it.

Firstly, unlike "casual hookup apps", there is a strong, implicit purpose of rentboy that is illegal (prostitution) that don't exist for Grindr and the like. By-the-by, I don't recall reading about a Grindr raid. Secondly, what is rentboy doing to protect the sex workers that, per Mr. Bond, aren't who Rentboy is targeting anyhow? Mr. Bond is arguing that his site should essentially get a pass because of the good work they are doing protecting sex workers. Let's see some evidence before granting that exemption. Lastly, while an AK-47 on a commuter train is a homeland security issue doesn't mean that any less serious issue is not valid.

These arguments couldn't pass muster in a remedial high school english course, shame on anyone for taking it seriously.

Basically when rentboy wants is a pass on profiting (they're profiting, oh yes) as a middleman in the prostitution game. They're online pimps. The only halfway decent argument is that they aren't the only one and their being targeted to the exlcusion of other large sources of online prostitutes. Backpage was shut down, and Craigslist... I'm not going to look into it, but they've been investigated. Rentboy would not have been raided without some amount of "smoking gun" (or close) evidence.

@6,7 Actually the backpage escort section is still up and running, I checked it just yesterday. I can't help but wonder if this raid happened at this time for fear that rentboy would be hacked next and the wrong people would be exposed. I know the article says they were working on it for years but the timing and the fact that homeland security was in on it make me wonder.