The current issue of Windy City Times has the usual weekly column by Rex Wockner, Quotelines.
Usually it is about what some current celebrity has said suddenly becoming gay-friendly while promoting a new movie or book, etc. Seldom is there a quote from those actually working for the homosexual civil rights movement.
Ironically, in this issue there are two troubling quotes.
First there are the relative newcomers to the cause, GetEqual or some such name, who spend time fussing at other older LGBT groups. Attacking our co-workers is worse than not having a quote at all. Sort of the issue of sins of commission versus omission.
Then I am confused at what might be part of Wockner’s agenda, or view of how to help the cause in the opposite direction. He has a quote from writer Eric Marcus. The problem is that the quote is a “good” quote as opposed to the quote most of the media has from Marcus, which is a “bad” one, if he actually said it, which he either didn’t or didn’t mean to say.
The quote used is merely what many other people have said since the homosexual civil rights movement started in 1950 — some say to be accurate it was then the homophile movement:
There’s the assumption among gay people that if only this famous person came out, things would be better, and that’s never the case.
To expand on what has been said, by many, is that we don’t need to be honoring or be proud of someone who was or is homosexual or LGBT who has not done anything for the cause, much less who has worked against the cause. So why is anyone happy or gay to claim Liberace, for instance, who actually sued a publication that said he was homosexual?
The “other” quote of Marcus is that he seemed to say that there were no “out” people before Stonewall. Why did Wockner not say this and explain it rather than seem to try to cover it by using the quote he did?
Now many people immediately pointed out such people as Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, etc., much less the people who founded the movement and first published a magazine on the subject of homosexuality.
Which the media ignored even when it won a U. S. Supreme Court case (1958) in order to be able to mail a publication dealing with homosexuality. I mean ONE of course.
As young people seem to say a lot, “I’m just sayin.”