Thread by @scottlong1980

This gay man is 36. He insists for most of his life, "gay rights" had nothing to do with trans people or gender. It's all a recent perversion of the movement.
I'm a gay man, 23 years older than he. From the moment I came out in 1982, I understood trans rights as connected to me.

https://twitter.com/ComradeDoom1/status/1634221127349198849

When I came out--five years before this bizarre dude was born--I saw my sexuality faced social repression not just because of Bible verses but because it menaced what manhood was supposed to mean. I realized I wouldn't be free till others' bodies were also free from those norms.

How did I experience rights, and myself, and the gay movement so differently from this arrogant guy--who now claims the experiences and relations I value only came along later, when in fact I know they were a coalescent part of the political world in which my desires emerged?

He's rewriting the history of gay rights, erasing what they meant to an older generation he's never tried to understand. But he's also written himself as gay in a way that's incomprehensible to me--in its solitude, its echoing emptiness, its refusal of coalition or connection.

I accepted my gayness--after a long struggle--because it connected me to other lives, other battles, other aspirations for liberation; it wrapped me in an invisible web of hope and dissidence, it linked me to bodies I didn't know,

it invited me into their utopias which were strange to me as new continents, it permitted me to visit their inchoate dreams, it told me that the identical is false and there is no solidarity without difference, that we could understand each other even without the same desires.

I know there are gay men for whom gayness just means meeting other men who call themselves gay, and not having to think about it. But their worlds are arid and empty to me compared to the world of new understandings, new connnections, that opened when I came out 40 years ago.

Andrew Sullivan says the "gay rights legacy"needs to be protected from "trans extremists." No, it fucking doesn't. And don't tell me what the "gay rights legacy" is, because I know it. I was part of it. So were the "trans extremists."

https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1634270440146305025

Kids don't need to be protected from trans people, "trans extremists," or trans ideas, any more than I needed protection from the dread gays who supposedly menaced my innocent Appalachian childhood. I trust kids. They'll make the connections. They'll figure themselves out.

Sullivan and @ComradeDoom1 are welcome to their version of gayness--one that's sealed, self-sufficient, unconnected to anybody else's aspirations or agitations, fucking away in the Fortress of Solitude. It's theirs. Honestly, nobody will take it away from them.

But I'll keep insisting on gayness as I experienced it 40 years ago--a radical encounter with what's beyond the skin, a revelation of an unknown kind of open self, an understanding that your oppression is not your private possession but is shared, and only overcome when shared.

Only connect. Dispossess yourself even of the oppression you treasure as your particular possession, and walk naked into the solidarity of the dispossessed. Without a utopia in mind, a commons of the persecuted where all losses can be salved, there is no point to being gay.