By Marke B.
A photo from SAGE, the LGBT senior advocacy group
Every year around Pride, I get a little teary about all the show of LGBT elder power in the parade (and berate myself for not including more gay senior content in our annual Queer Issue, though I try — and this year we got to look indepth at the Stonewall and Gay Liberation Front generation). In the current issue of the New Yorker, Senior Editor Hendrik Hertzberg commemorated Stonewall’s 40th and got in a few jibes at Obama’s campaign promise foot-dragging. I could have done without some of Hertzberg’s “daddy” tone (apparently we’re overreacting to that awful DoJ DoMA brief that equated anti-same-sex marriage statutes with incest injunctions — although who knows if it’ll help us out in the long run once people see what we’re up against?) but he did come out swinging.
The thing that really caught my eye though, was this snatch Hertzberg included from a heinous, unsigned 1966 Time article called “The Homosexual in America”:
[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.
I just adore that “pathetic little” formulation. It makes me feel so BDSM bottom. Via Hertzberg’s blog, Hilzoy over at Washington Monthly has followed up on the Time story to dig up the original atrocity (take your blood pressure pills before you read it), and pull out this precious nugget: