Transgressive and Conservative: two gay models

‘LGB’ culture in the West, from its beginning in the 1950s, was strongly transgressive, after the ideals of men like Harry Hay, one of the founders. He was a card-carrying Communist Party member who finally realised that Communists hated homosexuals even more than mainstream society did; so his solution to destroying the culture he lived in was to use homosexuality as a battering-ram.

Peter Tatchell, a ‘gay rights’ activist, first noted for the deliberate exposure of other people’s private li...