The gay rights hobble.

The Gay Rights Hobble

HOMOSEXUALS FROM across the nation converged last week on Washington in a show of political and emotional force. Organizers claimed 500,000; police estimated 200,000; so probably there were 100,000-- still, a huge number.

The affair had a strangely double-barreled quality, reflecting the ups and downs of the homosexual movement. In the beginning--the end of the 1970s--homosexual activists sought to model themselves on previous "civil rights' movements. Gay leaders employed all the by-then-standard tropes and tactics of oppressed groups seeking corporate restitution, including holocaust hitch-hiking (pink triangles taking the place of yellow stars of David).

Then came AIDS. Male homosexuals, who at least in America exchanged bodily fluids more rapidly than any other group except needle-users, suffered in large numbers; homosexuality and the disease became inextricably linked in the public mind. Homosexual activists were faced with two not easily reconcilable tasks: to depict AIDS as another suffering situation, the last and worst example of straight oppression; and, at the same time, to sever the connection between homosexuality and AIDS (hence, the oft-expressed hope--it can only be called that--that AIDS will mushroom among heterosexuals: an event which has not yet occurred, though given the long incubation period of the disease, it may yet).

Homosexual activism is concerned with several things at once, maybe too many. This is one force that may have peaked.