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
Sex negative is less worrying than social conservatism to me. Larry Kramer in particular bothers me because he literally pushed abstention, not safer sex, and he felt vindicated because he didn't fuck and he lived. He got lucky and turned into an evangelical. Pretty much everyone else I know who was alive back then hated his guts.
i agree completely. its not even in the same ballpark really. i wish we had that radical spark in gay culture but its so dimly lit now.
to add on to what you're saying, also a lot of european younger/30 something gays have extremely reactionary politics. i used to frequent pop music forums and all the european members were always saying some heinous shit.
Ugh the number of gay Nazis we have right now is horrifying