The Hidden Cameras//Ban Marriage

Yo fools! It's OSS’s Queer Week.

Un-coincidentally , I first heard The Hidden Cameras, Canada's very own "gay church folk music" band, on one of my trips to Toronto.

This was the trip when I went with Ali, Stevie and Anjeanette. It was sort of a haphazard tour of south east Ontario, where we made stops with random friends/acquaintances in Waterloo, Guelph and Toronto. We met and immediately loved Andrew in Toronto and he took us around to coffee shops, record stores and thrift stores.

This was also the trip where I was picked up by a random girl at a gay bar and ended up returning to the strange apartment she shared with her friends in the Toronto suburbs. As I began sobering up, I realized that everyone around me was on massive amounts of cocaine and I was had absolutely no idea where I was or what the fuck was going on. It was awesome. Why Ali and Andrew let me stumble away with these people, I still do not know, however they proved their true dedication to me as a friend when, after a harrowed and expensive (international, after all) 4 am phone call, they came to rescue me in a cab.

The next morning we were sacked out from all the adventure, so we laid around and listened to records. The Smell of Our Own was one of them. From there, the obsession with this one song in particular, Ban Marriage, was only natural.

Ban Marriage is an awesome song because it's an awesome statement, on a two key levels:

1. Marriage for queers is already banned, so why not flip the concept around and ban it for everyone else? If we're going to discriminate and say certain people can't have the right, we ought to just take it away from everyone. This is the approach that high school principals and prison wardens have been using across our great land for generations.

2. We should ban marriage. For everyone. It's incredibly useless in our modern existence.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that the song is catchy as hell.

Fabulous!




Ban Marriage.mp3

One Gay Fact: Same sex marriage is legally recognized in Belgium, Norway, The Netherlands, South Africa, Spain and of course, Canada.


It was him or my fag hag.
Oh well, I guess she was never that good of a friend.