We gays emerge from a past in which the freedom to say the unsayable and unpopular — often to great public derision or anger — was almost defining of our kind. We have always been the creators, not the censors; we defend the outrageous, celebrate the subversive, and revel in shock. We have never been the puritans, or the humorless, or among those who want to shut down free expression in order to “prevent harm.”
We defend the eccentric, the unusual, the blasphemous, the offensive. We have never attempted to control anyone else’s speech — until very recently. And this is part of what gays have long brought to the world: the fresh air of freedom and creativity and boundary-pushing against the tut-tutting forces of disapproval and censorship . . .
The capture of the gay rights movement by humor-free, fragile products of the social justice industrial complex is not just terrible PR for all of us. It’s awful politics. They are not even trying to persuade, debate, or make reasoned arguments — as we did relentlessly in the marriage movement. They do not engage and invite critics, as we did. They try to destroy them. Instead of arguments, they tweet out slogans in all caps — TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN — as if they’re citing a Biblical text. And the act of persuasion, the key to any liberal democracy, is, for them, an unjust imposition of “emotional labor.” So much easier to coerce.
This is absolutely on point. While on active duty, I gained a great deal of credibility with senior Defense Department decision-makers. I spent that capital presenting an unassailable case for decriminalizing homosexuality in the Armed Forces. My efforts and others’ led to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy that today is dismissed and despised. For most people, history began around their fourth birthday, and that is their baseline. Nothing that came before was real, which is unfortunate.
DADT was a necessary step for a culture that could not absorb the larger change. It allowed for discussion of the issues and eventually led to the larger chain. Step one in managing change is to gauge the organization’s ability to absorb it. Not until that larger issue had been openly discussed was the organization ready to consider the greater change. Efforts to implement a greater change are futile in an atmosphere of censorship.