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Don’t reject the space you gravitate toward just because the windows aren’t stained glass and the congregation isn’t saved.
“You think the Black family was destroyed by vice, and that’s a good play for an elderly white man because it’s safer than looking in a mirror. What wrecked the Black family was white oppression, white political choices, white violence, white men.
he was a self-loathing homosexual who donated millions to denying the civil rights of the LGBTQ+ community. He also gave Gregory chlamydia. To hell with all three of them.
that all great activists start off as young people who don’t really know what the hell they’re doing.
Robber barons, political overlords, and other powerful devils can reign with impunity for decades, and the terror they inflict on those of us beneath them can feel eternal. Yet there is one stone that will slay them all: time. Devils grow old, and the world around them eventually exceeds their understanding and control. Never forget that. Never let them forget it.
The typical gay man in 1987 was hardly more enlightened than the average hetty man when it came to lesbians, and I was no better than the typical gay man.
You can’t protect your interests if you don’t have an accurate understanding of everyone else’s.
Assimilation gays took this to mean that their keen intellect and upstanding character had tucked away their queerness into a footnote that no one would bother to read. As a gauge of how fucking warped assimilation gays could be in 1987, many of them wanted to frame the AIDS pandemic solely as a public health crisis, de-emphasizing how the disease was killing gay men at a genocidal pace.
History bought the myth. I treasure the truth.
How history changing events never happens at random circumstance
“Damn us all then, is it?” he yelled. “Jimmy, Martin, me, our entire generation isn’t up to snuff because we didn’t burn the country to the ground! No, sir, all we ever achieved was securing rights you take for granted!”
“It is difficult for the young to understand the strictures of the past. You want your elders to have fought every slight and grievous offense that came our way.
O’Hara was not a wallflower, and I believe his openly homosexual sensibilities shaped the ethos of the museum in a way that more than twenty years after his death made MoMA a welcoming environment to a colorful fairy like me. Such is the importance of groundbreakers. Thanks, Frank.
How I got the job was grubby and left me feeling unclean. The way to rectify my misgivings—to balance the score—was to wring what I could from this gig to serve the greater good.
