If you've ever wondered why there's a dearth of radical older gay men, mostly in the range of 50+, it's at least in part because of that. Puritanical anti-sex assholes like Larry Kramer managed to survive for obvious reasons, and then got to revise history and sound like an unheard Cassandra, when the reality was that a lot of the damage had already been done by the time he started his own activism.
In my view, this led to a rightward shift in the activism of the gay community, which ended up hijacking a lot of the hard work that lesbian and trans activists had built up, and moved towards respectability rather than queer liberation.
All the more reason to say fuck Reagan for ignoring it for nearly a decade. Even Thatcher did something about it and that's saying something.
This isn't even my take, it's something that an AIDS activist in the late '80s said, that AIDS killed off the interesting gays. But thought it would be
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This is why I don't go to pride any more. The seething contempt from heteronormative assimilationist gays towards anything weird or different was too much.
I have railed against charging money for pride (since I'm in New York they act like it's normal to pay $100 a ticket to see Madonna say the n-word on a barge or whatever) and for making it more accessible, and all the asshole older gays have had the most blisteringly bad takes on it
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You can go to the parade for free, but any of the dances or events or literally anything else, there's a fee.
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It just helped me identify my enemies more easily.