For anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of the gay rights movement and the kind of leader we so desperately need, I recommend The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. A longer post about my love affair with Milk still brews, so for now, I give you an excerpt from Randy Shilts’ 1982 work that, while truly simple in its meaning, fills my heart with concrete.
“Few groups were so evenly suited to battle each other as gays and fundamentalists. Both gays and evangelicals shared a profound experience that shaped their politicking; they had both been born again. For evangelical Christians, it was a theological experience, finding God in a sinful world. For gays, it was a social experience called ‘coming out,’ expressing one’s gay sexuality and identity in a generally hostile heterosexual world. For both sides, the born-again experience usually meant breaking with the past, establishing a new social network and building a new life, one that was happier than the life left behind. Both sides also put great faith in the necessity for testifying to the born-again experience. Fundamentalists did this in their routine rounds of testimony for the Lord; gays did this by acknowledging their homosexuality to friends and relatives, a move that practically represented an article of faith for those in the gay movement. Both camps also saw themselves in an ultimate struggle. For gays, that meant the eradication of prejudice; for fundamentalists, it was the scripturally demanded battle against sinners and their sins. Most significantly, the costs for losing the struggle were incredibly high. During the fundamentalists’ anti-gay groundswell of 1978, gay activists talked ominously of how failure could lead to a Hitleresque extermination of gays. Born-again Christians needed to go no further than Revelations to see that gays were the harbingers of the Final Days, times when Christians must fight sin or go to hell. Both sides …stood on polar opposites of society, with fundamentalists calling for a return to the most traditional American morality while gays stood for some of the least traditional social values [of their time].”
If you think much has changed in thirty years, I implore you to observe the battle lines drawn at the gates of any gay pride event today.
I am very hopeful that over the next several decades, there will be fewer and fewer religious people and more and more gay ones.
I’d never thought about the similarities like that.
Your posts always make me think a lot.
And I think it’s stereotypes in general and in both directions that can be a problem.
So even though the fundamentalists are more vocal or visible (and I guess the source?,) I think the ingrained stereotypes of regular everyday non- or minimally religious people can be just as damaging. And the fact that for many straight people, they can think to themselves ‘this doesn’t concern me.’ and tune it out.
My thoughts aren’t so cohesive… dang it!
More people need to read your blog is all. :)
I finally saw the movie. Sean Penn was incredible. And I cried. Like, a lot.