The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

It was rarely more openly displayed than in the ‘March on Washington’ on 25 April 1993. This march had been intended to do for gay rights what Martin Luther King’s march had done for the civil rights movement of three decades earlier. But the 1993 march was a mess, including ‘obscene comics’ and ‘fire-breathing radicals who spoke for only a tiny segment of the gay population’. It was, as Bawer said, ‘as if the march’s organisers were out to confirm every last stereotype about homosexuals’: I kept comparing the event with the 1963 March on Washington for black civil rights. On that occasion, Martin Luther King, Jr., had given the speech of his lifetime and had imbued not only his followers but every scrupulous American with a sense of the seriousness of his mission and the rightness of his cause. He hadn’t called for revolution or denounced American democracy or shared the podium with stand-up comics . . . On that day in 1963 he gave voice to a vision of racial equality that struck at the conscience of America, bringing out the best in his followers and speaking to the more virtuous instincts of his antagonists.29 And this is another aspect of the gay rights movement that has continued to fester. As another gay writer, Andrew Sullivan, noted in the 1990s, ‘Go to any march for gay rights and you will see the impossibility of organising it into a coherent lobby: such attempts are always undermined by irony, or exhibitionism, or irresponsibility.’30 At almost any demonstration...