Bruce also writes that during the height of the gay rights struggle when “far-Left gay activists — most of whom preferred ‘queer’ to ‘gay’ — who didn’t want a place at the table but, as one of them told me on the ‘Charlie Rose Show,’ wanted ‘to turn the table over.’ Meaning what? Meaning that they weren’t in it for reform but for revolution.”
And now, “Add it all up and it’s hard not to see it as the beginning of a sweeping set of revolutionary, society-wide changes of precisely the kind that the queer Left wanted to achieve with the gay-rights movement, but never did.”
Fighting back:
One Comment for “The Non-Gay Movement”
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Bruce also writes that during the height of the gay rights struggle when “far-Left gay activists — most of whom preferred ‘queer’ to ‘gay’ — who didn’t want a place at the table but, as one of them told me on the ‘Charlie Rose Show,’ wanted ‘to turn the table over.’ Meaning what? Meaning that they weren’t in it for reform but for revolution.”
Nonsense. The strategies and tactics of the gay rights movement changed quickly after it became clear that seeking “a place at the table” — that is, implicitly granting the heterosexual majority the right to set the agenda in terms of equal treatment under the law — was going nowhere fast. The tipping point for many/most gays and lesbians was the fight over marriage equality. At the point, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of gays and lesbians realized that if we wanted equal rights we were going to have to demand equal rights, and work to obtain those rights using whatever avenues were available to us.
Each of us who moved from seeking “a place at the table” to “demanding equal rights, table or no table” came to the realization that asking straight people for our rights was a dead end at different times and different places. My personal epiphany came in the aftermath of the flood of anti-marriage amendments in 2004, and I remember writing about the change in my thinking on IGF — saying that if gays and lesbians wanted equal treatment under the law then we had to stop asking and start demanding, rejecting the right of straights to determine when, if and to what extent we were granted rights. I remember that quite a few other commenters on IGF were shocked and took me to task at the time. But, after the anti-marriage amendments, it was the only viable option. Gays and lesbians had to take control of the process — waiting around for 25 years until the straight majority came around was not going to cut it.
If that realization and change in strategy/tactics was a “revolution”, so be it. Bawer was wrong when he wrote “A Place at the Table”, and he is wrong now.