Johann Hari examines the gay left's version of American history. In this narrative, there's much to be admired by gay Americans' resistance to brutal oppression from the very get-go … until it comes to the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty (those dreadful years in which gays finally made legal and political progress):
This is the best I can figure out his position. He does finally explicitly say that the gay movement should have fought instead to "eliminate" all concept of marriage under the law, a cause that would have kept gay people marginalized for centuries, if not forever. Of course some gay people hold revolutionary views against the social structures of marriage and the family—and so do some straight people. But they are small minorities in both groups. If you want to set yourself against these trends in the culture, that's fine. Just don't equate it with your homosexuality. When Bronski suggests gay marriage "works against another unrealized American ideal: individual freedom and autonomy," he is bizarrely missing the point. Nobody is saying gay people have to get married—only that it should be a legal option if they want it. If you disagree with marriage, don't get married. Whose freedom does that restrict?
It has always seemed chilling to me that gay leftists – when pushed to say what they really believe - want to keep gays in some sort of glorious, oppressed, marginalized position, until the majority agrees with the gay left's view of human nature, and revolutionizes straight society as well. This will never happen (and in my view, shouldn't).
Until then, the gay left focuses on demonizing those gays who argue for those who want to belong to their own families as equals, serve their country or commit to one another for life. In this, in my view, the gay left mirrors the Christianist right: they insist that otherness define the minority, even though most members of that minority are born and grow up in the heart of the American family, in all its variations, and of American culture, in all its permutations. No one should be marginalized for seeking otherness. But we are fighting for it to be a choice, not a fate.
The Dish 