‘LGB’ culture in the West, from its beginning in the 1950s, was strongly transgressive, after the ideals of men like Harry Hay, one of the founders. He was a card-carrying Communist Party member who finally realised that Communists hated homosexuals even more than mainstream society did; so his solution to destroying the culture he lived in was to use homosexuality as a battering-ram.
Peter Tatchell, a ‘gay rights’ activist, first noted for the deliberate exposure of other people’s private lives said, in a 1996 polemic:
‘Those who advocate gay rights alone, without any deeper commitment to the transformation of sexua1ity, are concerned only with removing homophobic discrimination. They want to reform society, not fundamentally change it. Their insistence on nothing more than equal rights for queers, and their typical view of lesbians and gay men as a distinct class of people who are destined to remain forever a sexual minority separate from the straight majority, have the effect of reinforcing the divisions between hetero and homo. It encourages the false essentialist idea that gay and straight are two preordained, irreconcilable sexual orientations characteristic of two totally different types of people. Such attitudes preserve society as it is’
The underlying intention of Western LGB could not be more clearly stated. Those struggling for ‘gay rights alone’ are to be condemned because they only ‘want to reform society, not fundamentally change it.’ To ‘preserve society as it is’ becomes an epithet. But from whence does the idea that ‘fundamental change’ is either a desirable or an achievable thing come, or that society should not be preserved as it is? How do we improve, fundamentally, a free, democratic society in which the rights of the individual are respected? Certes, modification and improvement may be desirable, but ‘fundamental change?’ How so and in what direction? What is the nature of Tatchell’s ‘fundamental change’?