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"Of all the debates Sullivan has been embroiled in, his collision with the gay left is the hardest to reconstruct..."

"... because the gay-rights debate has been transformed in the two decades since, not least by his own writing."

From a long article about Andrew Sullivan, a good recounting of this part of his story, which if you don't like Sullivan or understand why I read him, you need to know:

Yet Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry?and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who waved signs with Sullivan?s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a ?collaborator? and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why?

The Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein spoke for this tendency when he claimed that Sullivan was ?promoting the bargain of assimilation. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we?re just like straights? [But] we were interested in messing with the codes of sexuality.? By advocating marriage, Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people should destroy. He was just ?Rush Limbaugh with monster pecs,? a self-hater who ?would solve the faggot problem by urging gay men not to act like fags?.

Today, marriage is the Number One demand of the gay-rights movement. So why was Sullivan demonised for being the first to articulate it? He says now, haltingly: ?It was the middle of a plague, we were all dying, and here?s this brash British guy who?s a Catholic and right-winger talking about something unfamiliar, that challenges their assumptions? [But] I was too narcissistic to realise that it wasn?t about me.?

If you happened to be gay back then, you were supposed to join the left and contribute to the enterprise of smashing conventions. Now, I think there still is an undercurrent of hating heterosexuals out there, and I often feel it coming from Andrew Sullivan, but I'm not going to elaborate on that now.

Full post as published by Althouse on April 15, 2009 (boomark / email).