Has the Gay Movement Failed? Quotes

“There’s even less acceptance of bisexuality than homosexuality. Binary thinking still holds strong sway with the general population, and the exclusive homosexual is more understandable to the average person than is an individual who wanders the Kinsey scale with apparent—and alarming—abandon.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“Anal sex is in fact characteristically the interaction of two active partners, not one aggressor and one passive recipient of aggression. No anal sex worth a candle involves a limp, passive, nearly comatose “victim”; both participants write the script, both actively orchestrate the scene, both gyrate their bodies with interactive abandon. Which fact, if acknowledged, would, as it were, make the traditional-minded heterosexual male’s blood run cold (or, perhaps put more appropriately, scare the shit out of him).”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“We take you at your word: you are like us; now that we’ve ‘let you in,’ we expect that in your gratitude you won’t pull any surprises and start behaving like some subspecies that you’ve assured us you’re not; if we now say it’s OK to be gay, we don’t expect you to pull the rug out from under us and start acting queer.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“When GLF talked about sexual liberation, the agenda often included two interlocking items rarely mentioned these days: freeing up same-sex attraction in confirmed heterosexuals and releasing heterosexual desire in those who considered themselves exclusively gay.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“A host of other matters that affect the lives of many LGBTQ people—among them, health care, senior centers, immigration, poverty, homelessness, diet, and education—are currently given short shrift. Even those issues still being partially addressed, like hate crime legislation, are of uncertain relevance (and even potential harm) to much of the queer population.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“Humanitarian concerns are always dismissed as impractical, at least initially.
Humanitarian concerns, however, aren’t high on the national gay movement’s list of priorities; if they were, we’d hear a lot more from them than we do about the inequities that derive from race, class, and gender.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“... “homonormativity”—namely, the gay white middle-class focus on consumption and domesticity. The liberationists’ goal is radical transformation, not liberal tinkering.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“In regard to gay male life specifically, a number of academic studies have concluded that we’re more emotionally expressive and sexually innovative than heterosexual men, more empathic, and more altruistic (we do volunteer work far more often than our straight male counterparts), and we’re more likely to cross racial and gender borders when forming close bonds of friendship. When part of a couple, we—and this is even more true of lesbian partnerships—avoid stereotypic gender roles and instead emphasize mutuality and shared responsibilities. Gay couples have “more relationship satisfaction” than straight couples, and when we do argue, we’re better at seeing our partner’s point of view and at using humor to deflate belligerence.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“These days, especially within queer theory’s hallowed halls, sexual “fluidity” has become something of a talisman for personal authenticity.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“A “successful” relationship is best defined not as one that sustains erotic intensity but rather one that helps to soften the brute fact that we’re alone in this world—and will leave it.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“She, too, wanted “the option of random sex with no emotional commitment” when in the mood for physical release, though she predicted that if women also had bathhouses, they would be “less competitive than the gay men’s baths, more laughter would ring in the sauna, and you’d touch not only to fuck but just to touch.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“The attitudinal changes we’ve seen in recent decades regarding racism, sexism, and homophobia are real, but can encourage simplistic optimism about additional progress.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“The main goal here is to make ourselves “familiar enough” to straight people to win their acceptance. But why should that be of paramount importance? Precisely why would we want to do ourselves over in their image? To become more like them would be to forget our own singular history and the special insights and perspectives that derive from it, giving us, as spies in the culture, a unique perspective for evaluating and critiquing aspects of mainstream culture.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“Historically, blacks and Latinos were routinely “carded”—denied admission—to white gay clubs; today, segregated socializing is less pronounced but an expansively “welcoming” atmosphere remains uncommon, and for trans people all but nonexistent. Lesbian activists, comparably, have been subject through time to gay male chauvinism so pronounced that they’ve felt the need periodically to form separate organizations.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“AIDS, of course, changed the gay scenario. Yet some twenty years into the epidemic, and despite ample reason for fear, a number of studies from the early 2000s have reached a similar conclusion: though monogamy has gained more adherents than earlier, only between one-third and one-fourth of male couples together more than five years are sexually exclusive; the majority of subjects defined “fidelity” in terms of emotional commitment rather than sexual faithfulness—a much higher percentage than found among either lesbian or heterosexual couples.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“Gay men know a lot more about sexual responsiveness, and the erotic potential of their bodies, particularly of their nipples and assholes, than straight men.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“Some unknown but apparently significant number of both homosexual and heterosexual couples do seem to believe that sex is hottest with comparative strangers and love is the property of emotional trust and intimacy.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“A quote from the London Gay Liberation Front Manifesto: 'The ultimate success of all forms of oppression is our self-oppression. Self-oppression is achieved when the gay person has adopted and internalised straight people’s definition of what is good and bad.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“GLF deplored the embedded class structure that most Americans denied existed (even as it kept them locked in the cellar) and rejected, too, the claim that traditional notions of “maleness” and “femaleness” were biologically grounded—that our genes and hormones dictated and warranted the view that women were intrinsically emotional and men intrinsically aggressive. Further, and centrally, the early gay movement affirmed sexual pleasure as a positive good, vigorously condemned the nuclear family as nothing more than a detention center for women and children, and viewed monogamy as unnatural.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“When complaining among ourselves, someone invariably cites the contrast between the movement’s recent “assimilationist” agenda—marriage rights and “permission” to serve openly in the armed forces—with the far broader agenda that had characterized the Gay Liberation Front at its inception following the 1969 Stonewall riots. GLF had called for a fierce, full-scale assault on sexual and gender norms, on imperialistic wars and capitalistic greed, and on the shameful mistreatment of racial and ethnic minorities.
Or had it? Were we mythologizing the early years of the movement, exaggerating its scope in order to substantiate our discontent with what we viewed as the shriveled posture of the movement in its present guise?”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

“A whole new genre really, that portrays the improved public perception of LGBTQ people in hyperbolic terms skirting dangerously close to parody.”
― Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?