For anyone still interested, ATB was published in 1989, and stirred a ruckus at the time (Time, Newsweek, Wash. Post, even the Wall St. Journal ran an excerpt). Its authors were excoriated by most of what constituted the gay activist leadership in the US at that time, mainly because the book harshly disparaged their tired tactics, analyzed the psychological underpinnings of homophobia and, informed by that analysis, laid out a quite different communication strategy for gaining gay rights — a strategy that drove self-styled queer radicals up the wall. Both straights and gay moderates, however, loved the book. I’m told that excerpts of the article upon which the book was based were read aloud, in affirmation, at the founding meeting of GLAAD. The book’s thinking preceded and, in many ways, presaged the better-publicized cases by made Bruce Bawer, Sullivan, and the rest of that conservative crowd.

None of this explains, however, why religious bigots continue to cast Kirk and Madsen, preposterously, as the gay movement’s Elders of Zion. They do so because our book spoke in alarmingly direct language about the brute mechanics of public opinion manipulation, and about the Religious Right’s aggressive use of those mechanics. Worse, we dared to suggest that gays fight fire with fire, and laid out a plan for doing so. In this plan, the Right had found a simulacrum of its much sought “gay agenda”, the blueprint for the gigantic gay conspiracy that it wished to believe was on the march. Their thinking is hooey, and their own rhetorical use of ATB is so deceptive that it marks them out clearly for what they are: manipulative liars. In any case, I must sit by, and watch them misrepresent my writing, over and over, year after year. Tiresome.

Wow, lots today, gathered over a week or more and bookmarked for…

It also confirms one of the things I’ve always noticed about conservatives, and that ought to be made into a post of its own soon: Quite often I find among them the bad habit of identifying oppositional ideas and/or political programs from ten or more years ago, and then claiming that they are a current menace to American society. It seems unthinkable to the author of this piece, for example, that perhaps the red-hot gay sex lives of the 1970s may have cooled down a bit in the age of AIDS, and that gay marriage may actually be teaching us some responsibility, too. Heaven knows that my sex life as a married and faithful gay man is nothing like what many of the pioneers of gay life have had. It’s just not on my agenda. (Frankly, I can’t even imagine finding time for five hundred sex partners in a year, much less libido.)

The same can be noted, I think, in many conservatives’ ideas about present-day feminism. Listen to them, and you might think that feminism was all about separatism, identity politics, even bra-burning. But most of the really cutting-edge feminist theory today is (somewhat weirdly) interested in masculinity, and in critiquing men’s images of manliness. All political considerations aside, I would think that conservatives ought to find this real present-day feminism a lot more threatening to the established order. Yet they’re still blasting away at the brand of separatist feminism that went completely out of fashion at least a decade ago. I guess that to be really appropriate as a target, an idea must also have few defenders; it makes the victories easier.