The Gay Agenda and Stonewall

It seems that there really and truly is one. Not the joke one (which I found a looong, quite Queeny version and finally the shorter, better version) but a real one.

I started some research because I once again saw that phrase “gay agenda” and wanted to know more about it.

I did a Google search. There’s a news clearing house place called Gay Agenda, by the way.

Next was Wikipedia with an article titled “homosexual agenda“. That’s where I hit pay dirt. It was first used in 1992 so it is a fairly new term and has been used a lot since then. But I was really intrigued by this:

In 2003 Alan Sears and Craig Osten, president and vice-president of the Alliance Defense Fund, an American conservative Christian non-profit organization, offered another characterization:

It is an agenda that they basically set in the late 1980s, in a book called After the Ball,[15] where they laid out a six-point plan for how they could transform the beliefs of ordinary Americans with regard to homosexual behavior — in a decade-long time frame…. They admit it privately, but they will not say that publicly. In their private publications, homosexual activists make it very clear that there is an agenda. The six-point agenda that they laid out in 1989 was explicit:

1. Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible(…)
2. Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers(…)
3. Give homosexual protectors a just cause(…)
4. Make gays look good(…)
5. Make the victimizers look bad(…)
6. Get funds from corporate America(…)[1]

After the Ball[15] is a book published in 1989 by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. It argues that after the gay liberation phase of the 1970s and 1980s, gay rights groups should adopt more professional public relations techniques to convey their message. It was published by Doubleday and was generally available.

According to a Christian Broadcasting Network article by Paul Strand, Sears and Osten argue that After the Ball follows from “a 1988 summit of gay leaders in Warrenton, Virginia, who came together to agree on the agenda” and that

“the two men (Kirk and Madsen) proposed using tactics on ‘straight’ America that are remarkably similar to the brainwashing methods of Mao Tse-Tung’s Communist Chinese — mixed with Madison Avenue’s most persuasive selling techniques.”[16]

(source)

There is a real agenda. A 6-point list and everything! How cool is that!

But there’s a problem. If that is “our” agenda, it is kinda boring. I mean, isn’t that what religious groups have been doing for eons? Can’t we come up with something more original? Replace ‘gay’ with ‘Christian’ or ‘Baptist’ and you’ve got what I was being taught by the Baptist Student Union way back in ’85. (golly, that was nearly 25 yrs ago! i am so old)

I have a theory. Ready for it?

I think that as long as we LGBTQ folks keep being wusses, we ain’t ever gonna get civil rights. We keep trying one state at a time, quietly, somberly, accepting defeat after defeat. Sure, there’s civilized protests, there’s crying, there’s bitching and moaning. But there’s no real action. We need to be uncivilized. We need to stop crying, bitching, and moaning and DO something.

What if folks had voted to take blacks’ right to vote away? What if they were given that right only to lose it again, gain it again, lose it here and gain it there? Do you think for one single second they would be raising money for the next attempt? Making YouTube videos and Twitter-ing? Hell to the no! There’d be riots, protests, screaming anger in the streets. Blacks gained their rights because they truly believed they were entitled to them. As a group, they’d had enough and fought. Where’s the gay version of King? Of Rosa Parks? Of even Malcom X? Where’s our Maya Angelou? Our Jackie Robinson?

We queers need another Stonewall. We need another riot in the streets. We need to stand up and shout. Loudly. We need to come out of the closets and make our real numbers known. If every person who was truly gay were to wake up in the morning with purple skin, I betcha there’d be some changes. We wouldn’t be able to hide anymore. Our Clark Kent Cloak would be gone and we’d be forced to DO something. With hiding comes the luxury of civility and silence. We can’t afford either of those anymore.

There are groups out there who are Doing. There’s Soulforce but, bless their hearts, they are just too polite even while being arrested. UFMCC had great potential to do more but lacked the initiative gumption care balls/ovaries. (noooo, I’m not still bitter and angry)

Our agenda is wrong. If it is true that they come up with this Great Plan, then they must be have thought it would not take this long. ‘Cause it ain’t working. It is too gentle. It set the stage for us to continue to be gentle and polite and oh so civilized. We need to stop doing that. We need some queen to smack a cop with her purse again. We need a dyke to get fed up with being screamed at by women in the ladies room thinking she’s a guy. We need to put down the Wall Street Journal and take up the On Our Backs. We need to turn the television off of L Word and go outside to the Real World. We need to stop planning and be spontaneous. We need to stop blending in and stand out.

We need another Stonewall.