What you're seeing is something that has happened to every other minority rights movement as times have changed and they became more equal within society.

Whereas in decades past African-Americans had to fight not to be segregated and to fend off attacks from white supremecists like the KKK, today we have have a black man as a serious candidate for president. The Women's Liberation movement, which famously had strong socialist associations and were very hostile to men also has changed as women's equality grew. Gloria Steinam, who once famously said "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." eventually went out and got a bicycle of her own (a husband). The Hippies eventually aged. No longer trusting anyone over 30 ceases to be viable when you and all your friends are over 30.

In the gay community, as you noted, many of the radicals succumbed to AIDS and were lost. But something else happened as well, something that changed the nature of LGBT discourse.

LGBT people ceased to be cut off from society.

While you still hear about people who come out being disowned by their families this is no longer automatic the way it was decades ago. Back then, it was normal to come out and have you parents, siblings, relatives and non-gay friends refuse to have anything further to do with you. Or you might be grudgingly welcome to come home for the holidays but with strict instructions not to bring any "friends".

This is less and less the case now, and as this has happened gay culture has changed. Because they were often cut off from their families, gay people would commonly build new families out of their friends and often sought to live in gay ghettos where they could comfortably exist amongst others like them.

But now it is quite common to come out and have one's straight friends and family accept it. Rather than being banned from bringing their partners to Thanksgiving dinner, many gay couples now face the traditionally straight problem of which of their families they'll be going to this year. Assuming of course the family isn't coming to their house.

The gay ghettos are all in decline, as it has become more safe for gays to live in mixed communities (and as we've driven the property values up beyond the ability of younger gays to move into many of the old ghettos).

Finally, AIDS made sexual promiscuity seem a lot less inviting. And since gay people were now more commonly connected to the non-gay world, there was little reason to not openly live with a same-sex partner in many places, rather than going from one furtive encounter to the next.

In the face of this the radicals became less relevant because it became harder for many gays to relate to them anymore. We weren't fighting to stop police raids on bath houses, we were more worried about getting partners onto our health insurance policies. The nature of gay life underwent a shift and we started looking at different heroes. Instead of looking to leaders who preached sexual liberation and the joys of free sex, we started idolizing the John Barrowman's who drag their shy spouses on-stage at Pride events.

Black rights radicals, radical feminists and Hippies all still exist but the movements they belonged to have largely moved on. The same has happened with us, as it happens with all of society.

Consider this: the Founding Fathers of the United States were, in their time, a bunch of rebels directly considered treasonous by the government under which they lived. Today they are considered the very height of Establishment respectability, despite the fact that many of their political views would be considered outrageous by today's political establishment. So history glosses those views over as we pretty the players themselves up for the history books. This is partly because some of their radical beliefs are no longer deemed relevant, or are simply inconvenient to the cultural mythology.

This is the nature of all of human history.

Although it seems to us that progress for gay rights in this country is painfully slow, I really am forced to point out that in fact it has been moving forward at an amazing pace compared to comparable civil rights movements for women and blacks. Both of those movements are older than the United States in fact.

In contrast, a stable gay civil rights movement didn't really form until after World War II, which had caused pivotal changes to almost every aspect of American life, and which had also helped consolidate larger numbers of gay people into urban communities that would form the roots of the later gay rights movement.

But in this the time since the founding of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis to the modern gay rights movement an enormous amount of social change has occurred.

However, liberal and moderate Americans have become much less receptive to radicialism in recent years as people have become more generally tolerant and radicalism has, ironically, become more popularly embraced by conservatives (such as Ann Coulter).

This is balanced against the fact that radicalism is less successful than perhaps it once was. Very aggressive and (in my opinion) overconfident efforts to attain same-sex marriage in Alaska and Hawaii through judicial fiat not only resulted in ammendments to those states' constitutions that rendered judicial recourse impossible, but triggered similiar ammendments across the country.

Nowadays when Americans react hastily to almost anything it's usually in a negative way and that was what has happened in the case of same-sex marriage. Too hard a push, too quickly for the public to adjust to resulted in a backlash. Now years will be spent undoing the damage.

The thing is, conservatives want liberals to be more radical. It's become increasingly difficult to demonize their foes in recent years. Back when gay rights was associated with communism and radical sexual liberation it was very easy to paint gays as immoral perverts. The rise of moderate, visible gays has made it much harder for the Right to depict us as deviant monsters. Also, the "gays next door" thing has resulted in more people becoming sympathetic to gay rights issues as people simply care more about the well-being of people they know and are close to.

Granted it feels like a waiting game, especially as LGBT folks in other countries have been making gains that we, the denizens of "the Land of the Free" have difficulty attaining. But sometimes there are lessons to be learned. For example, even though they are amongst the most liberal societies on Earth, the Dutch had to go through a period of having just civil unions before they eventually realized that it was silly not to allow same-sex marriage.

In America many semi-radical activists equate accepting civil unions as surrender and demand "all-or-nothing". More often than not the result has been "nothing".

So it's not clear what the role of the radical is in today's socio-political climate. Changes in our culture have given radicalism a negative connotation. This reminds me of another discussion I had with some lovely Canadian fellow somewhere here on AE about how there is no true "Left" in America anymore, given that the Dems are largely Centrist and the GOP is on the Right. My opinion was that he was absolutely correct, but that Americans didn't seem to see enough of a rationale to build a solid Left movement anymore.

Clearly another aspect of our current culture.

I am glad you brought this up.  It gets to the heart of whether gay people strive to be who they are or not.

Psionycx, your hypothesis doesn’t take into account why the gay rights movement started in Europe in the mid-1800s and not sooner and in another location.  The reason why the gay rights movement started in the 1800s in Europe is because of the Industrial Revolution.  No longer were the rich and powerful in control of communication.  Gay people found out that there were a lot more people like them than they thought.

I think gay people are back into bargaining.  Most feel their life is pretty good and they don’t want to rock the boat.  The reality is life for the average gay person is not good and we are no where near a level playing field between straight and gay people.  In every area of life gay people are discriminated against whether you realize it or not.  Late last year a survey  found gay couples earned significantly less than opposite-sex couples in the Maryland/ Virginia/ D.C. area.  None of the gay couples suspected they earned less.

There is a long history of bargaining in the gay community (most of the time that was the only choice).  During the first 1,000 years of the catholic church gay clergy could have changed the doctrines regarding gay people instead they didn’t.  Now there are a whole bunch of christian sects, which are way beyond gay people’s control.  They didn’t do anything because they didn’t want their lives disturbed if things got hot.  In Hollywood there has never been an openly gay leading actor ever even though there are gay executives.  The gay executives are trading an openly gay leading actor for some semblance of a typical life.

Gay people need to get invested in their own well being or there will be things even worse than AIDS down the line.  You can’t just fight when your back is against the wall.

On a personal note, what I can't stand is that you can't say straight supremacist without people getting angry or laughing.  Straight supremacy is what we are fighting.  Why hasn't this been acknowledged?  Some straight people and self-hating gay people want to continue the subjugation of gay people.

One could easily argue even earlier gay rights efforts exist overtly or covertly. Jean Jacques de Cambaceres, Napoleon's legal eagle, for example discreetly made sure that when France's legal system was rewritten after the Revolution that previous laws against sodomy were not reinstated. This was of course behind the scenes and not something that was trumpeted in the streets.

I suppose I also dislike radicals because they themselves are often just as bigoted as the people they oppose. For example, my family consists of a lot of liberal Democrats who also happen to be committed Christians. They fully support things like same-sex marriage. Yet I am frequently embarrassed by rants from some gay rights campaigners who denounce Christians as evil and deluded. I know they've had bad experiences but that doesn't justify making blanket statements of hate anymore than when the Right does it to us.

Alienating our allies just for the sake of venting spleen is counter-productive and ultimately denies us what we need.

I'm in Marketing. Basic marketing principles say that when you want people to buy something you need to convince them why they should want to buy, not why you want to sell it.

This is why we've actually made so many gains in the last two decades. AIDS didn't just kill off the sexual liberation radicals. It stripped the anonominity from the gay community and gave it a direction. Suddenly gays weren't just radical countercultural types demanding freedom to have sex in public restrooms. We became real people who were facing real suffering and forced a change in some of the most basic assumptions.

Our gains really began to speed up when our friend and families, who weren't gay, began to understand us and support us. Their votes are what help change things for us. Without them we're too small a minority to force change on a majority culture on our own.

Also, I admit that the impatience begins to grate on my nerves. Think it's rough being gay in America today? Feeling disadvantaged? Try being gay in Africa or the Middle East.

Change can't come fast enough to make most of us happy.  But I would rather have gradual positive change than explosive backwards movement like we got with all these assinine state constitutional ammendments.  Yes, those were proud accomplishments of aggressive activism. 

Larry Kramer was mentioned a little further back on this board. Larry is for us what Bill Crosby has been lately for blacks. He's long criticized our self-indulgent culture and he's right. But criticizing gay culture is a no-no nowadays. Pointing out all the losers flying high on drugs in circuit parties is "homophobia". Suggesting that highway rest stops aren't an appropriate place for sex is "anti-gay". We have a lot of problems of our own to address as well, not just external ones.

So then, who exactly is a "straight supremecist"? Hillary Clinton? Eminem? Rush Limbaugh? Jimmy Kimmel?

To me such labelling is lazy and attempt to avoid true intelligent discourse through grade school name-calling. And nobody we care about would be impressed because liberals, generally speaking, don't take to that kind of talk the way conservatives do. If your goal is to just insult people a gig on Fox News is probably more your speed.

After all, while I've got my friends and family on-board, that's dozens of people who support gay rights. If I drive them away by being an obnoxious @$$ then it would just be me.

That's just not sensible, and would in no way advance my goal to win equal rights.

Radicalism--political and social movements and ideologies that aim at fundamental change in the structure of society--has been a persistent feature of U.S. history. Radical movements have challenged Americans to live up to their professed ideals and have developed penetrating critiques of social and economic inequality.

From me:

No amount of Monday morning quarterbacking about gay marriage backlash, Ann Coulter-baiting, historical comparisons versus human rights movements here or abroad, or assumptions about receptivity of radicalism in our society, beliefs about what conservatives may want should discourage gay radicalism and general independent thinking.

While radicals may be an endangered species, even "pragmatists" may want to keep in mind that sometimes one can wind up getting a lot more by pressing key buttons really hard than those afraid to make any material demands for possible fear of winding up with nothing. The latter sometimes wind up just getting crumbs or the promise of future dialogue if they are good little soldiers. No one can predict the outcome of many battles even if the home team is undefeated.

And since this site focuses on the media, let's not forget that even corporate America rewards many "radicals" who are directly responsible for the thought-processes that keep introducing new technology, counter-programming, and almost anything that will differentiate them from what everyone else is doing.

While the suburban gays next door have indeed made many more sympathetic to the fact that ALL gays are not psycho-deviants, God bless them, but I'd like to present a case for gay radicals or non-conformists not to be treated like THE enemy to an agenda. Some seem so ready to bash their gay brothers simply because their choices may not support a more mainstream perspective about how things should get done.

No matter what the subject matter is, I have strong opinions that apply to me and I share them with others to see how they shake. I want to hear other thoughtful voices and engage in a little dance of sorts. No name calling, but I'll gladly accept being called out and will do the same. I do find it odd that some of the better voices don't want to grasp that it's perfectly agree to disagree and leave it at that.

This part is directed head on to P.  - I put it in bold as I am not sure how your screen name is spelled Phy.... and because subtlety is not my strength.  How many posts does it take to yet again call out those impatient gay marriage pushers and remind readers of all the damage that they have caused? Why not give it a rest and let others chime on Nukely's question regarding gay radicalism? I see you as wanting to execute anyone even contemplating being one or even contemplating why it might even be good to have Ann Coulter around. Point taken. Next? Do you see how others my be intimidated by this and not contribute? 

If we are supposed to be more tolerant than most because we've experienced intolerance, why can't different opinions co-exist rather than beating that drum harder and harder? Are you looking to establish intellectual supremacy, lecturing the masses, or engaging in dialogue with other gay/bisexual men? What is even harder for me to reconcile is how you can be so patient/lenient with the straight community about so much, but sometimes show no signs of mercy when it comes to other gays, including some who are right here on this site. I think that sucks. It's an opinion, not a fact anymore than the gay radical is dead.  He might be, but not if I can find him/them.

Coming attractions: Guillermo's Cultural Guillotine

http://springintoaction.typepad.com/cultural_guillotine/

For a long time, I was one of those, contributing to the AIDs walk or whatever and that was enough for the year. So I took the veil. Perhaps if the battle against oppression were actually a marketing campaign, the tactics of Madison Avenue would indeed be preferrable. But I'm not selling anything, I am simply refusing to be oppressed. Till everyone gets what they need to live free and happy, not just a few of us.

www.LASisters.org