“THE WAR OVER GAYS – Murder In Laramie, Changing Gay Politics, Do Hate-Crime Laws Work?, Showdown Ov

“THE WAR OVER GAYS – Murder In Laramie, Changing Gay Politics, Do Hate-Crime Laws Work?, Showdown Over Gay Marriage,” Time, October 26, 1998. “What people mean when they say Matthew Shepard’s murder was a lynching is that he was killed to make a point,” Richard Lacayo wrote in the opening line of “The New Gay Struggle,” the cover story of the October 26, 1998 issue of Time. Using Shepard’s recent murder as a starting point, Time focused on the mainstreaming of gay politics. “Gay politics is more complicated than ever right now because what seems like an irresistible force of cultural change is meeting an immovable object of political resistance. For a long time, lesbians and gay men have been defining themselves into the ordinary fabric of life. All the while, conservatives have been field-testing homosexuality as a defining issue for the Republican Party, especially for the next presidential election.” Citing writer Andrew Sullivan (“who epitomizes the argument that homosexuals should embrace the existing institutions of heterosexual society”) and the efforts of the Human Rights Campaign (“with a name so innocuous it could be transferred intact to a group devoted to fair labor practices, H.R.C. was established to speak to the middle-class in middle-class terms”), Time noted that “lesbian and gay organizations have gone from being outcasts of the left to being an expected presence…at least in Democratic coalitions.” The article briefly mentioned the work of ACT UP and Queer Nation (“‘We’re here, we’re here, get used to it’ was an interesting statement of the facts. But the cutting edge of gay politics threatened to cut gays off altogether from the give and take of lawmaking”), while effectively endorsing the assimilationist approach of H.R.C. and its ilk. In a poll accompanying the article, 33% of Americans said homosexuality was not at all acceptable, 48% said it was morally wrong, 51% said one could change one’s sexuality if one chose, 29% favored legal recognition of same-sex marriage, and 35% supported gay couples’ right to legally adopt children. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #QueerHistoryMatters #HavePrideInHistory -- source link

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