by Scott Yenor, First Things
The Pride flag is progressive America’s banner. Before it was unfurled, most gays stayed in the closet. With the advent of Pride, they became out and proud. Over time, gay pride came to be as American as baseball, apple pie, and the Declaration of Independence. The civil rights movement remains a fixture in the official mythology of the nation, but to a striking degree, gay rights has superseded rights for blacks and women as the great symbol of American freedom.
The reasons are many. Gay people are bourgeois. They are just like the rest of us, the boy next door, differing only in sexual preference. A rich white man can’t become black. But his son might be gay. Some women are lesbians; some homosexuals are black. Gay liberation is for everyone, rich and poor, black and white, male and female. It’s the all-American enterprise.
Moreover, gay liberation promises far more than civil rights for blacks and women. The right to same-sex marriage is far more radical than the right to vote or the right to be free from discrimination in employment or housing. The Pride flag represents a new deal for Americans: Government grants what nature denies. We can invent new ways of life in defiance of the most ancient norms. Neither nature nor history can limit us. It’s a stunning view of freedom. It shines more brightly even than the words of the Declaration of Independence, which is why burning the Pride flag today elicits greater opprobrium than burning the stars and stripes.
According to legend, the initial gay rights movement began with a melee at the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village, when gay patrons fought the police officers who had been sent to round up “deviants.” Due to this episode, what we might call “first-wave queerness” crystallized and became prominent. The Stonewall riots highlighted the plain fact that an active homosexual life diverges from bourgeois values.