The Gay Community’s Secret Weapon
In a fantastic interview with Jeff Schechtman’s “Specific Gravity”, columnist and writer Dan Savage discussed his take on the issues surrounding the LGBT community in America today.
He paints a picture that is at once respectful of the difficulty and pain that comes with being gay, and also reflective of a deep optimism about the direction things are going and will continue to go.
To loosely quote his points:
“Being born into straight families is kind of our secret weapon. Gay people have straight parents, siblings, friends. This accounts for the rapidity of the sea change in public opinion on ‘the gay issue’.”
“People are sick of it. The gay issue doesn’t have the same cultural currency that it did. You aren’t attacking just gay Democrats, you are attacking Dick Cheney’s daughter, Rob Portman’s son.”
“The common thread between the issues of birth control, same sex marriage, and abortion is the delinking of sex from procreation. We are designed to have a lot more sex than we have babies. In fact, the natural ratio is about 100 acts of sex to a live birth.So, that strict link between sex and procreation has never really existed.”
“In some ways, it’s gotten better to be a gay adult in the last 20 years, and worse to be a gay teenager.”
“Gay bullying is bad for straight kids too. It leads to higher suicide rates and higher rates of sexual assault on straight girls.”
“When it comes to all of this progress, it is about people coming out. That is what has changed everything. More and more people have decided that they won’t and shouldn’t lie to the people that they love. Like with interracial marriage, the argument is one day going to just stop. We will recognize the conversation for the bigotry that it is, and we will not allow those opinions to be acceptable in public discourse. I feel like we’re reaching that tipping point on gay issues.”
Listen to the interview below.
