Duberman begins by reviewing the agenda of an early post-Stonewall gay-rights organization called the Gay Liberation Front. He doesn’t claim that the G.L.F. ever represented a majority of gay people in America—revolutionaries, whatever they might say, rarely speak for the masses—but he believes that the G.L.F. offered a vision of what was possible. “They did something few of us ever attempt,” Duberman writes. “They named what a better society might look like, thus establishing a standard by which to measure the alternating currents of progress and defeat.” In this vision, a better society would be brought about through the common efforts of a range of oppressed groups. The G.L.F. was “overtly anti-religious, anti-nuclear family, anti-capitalist, and antiwar,” he writes, as well as anti-racist and anti-patriarchal. In a G.L.F. utopia, gender would be an outmoded concept, kinship would be a function of community and friendship, sex and love would be parsed out, and love would be truly loving. [...]
Duberman acknowledges that the movement wasn’t exactly hijacked: the marriage issue, he writes, “landed on the top because that’s where the majority of gay Americans want it to be.” But he warns against the idea that marriage is an express train to equality, safety, and security. He is highly skeptical of statistics that show a tectonic shift in public attitudes toward homosexuality. He sees evidence that the change is shallow and uncertain, and he notes that hundreds of anti-gay bills have been filed in state and local legislatures since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. He notes, inevitably, but no less ominously, that German anti-Semitism “was to no extent changed or diminished” when German Jews blended in.
By hitching the future of the movement to the vehicle of marriage, Duberman suggests, gay people paid a price that may be too high. “What has been most innovative about the erotic patterns that have evolved over time in the gay community may partly be abandoned or wholly concealed, or we will otherwise run the serious risk of being rebranded as unredeemable renegades incapable of changing our ‘bizarre’ behavior,” he writes. On top of that, by adopting a narrow agenda that is also socially centrist or even conservative, the movement has forfeited its ties to other oppressed groups. [...]
To argue effectively for marriage rights, gay lobbyists had to continuously assert two positions: that gays are not sexual outlaws and that homosexuality is immutable. Duberman details the costs of these arguments. By abandoning a radical sex-liberationist agenda in a country that is waging a war on sex, he writes, the gay community has abandoned some of its most vulnerable members, including teen-agers whose sex with one another is criminalized in many states.
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