The whole world is built for men-and-women, but not for men or women. There is no place for us in the male-female world. There never will be. So either we create a place for ourselves or we will never have a place, but will continue to be ruled, from birth to death, from job to bed, by heterosexual notions of what is proper. So to them I say ‘I am not a "gay" but a homosexual.’ I object to the avoidance of the word "homosexual". I am homosexual — not gay — and I'm proud. I don't know where the idiot euphemism "gay" came from, but I see no reason except brevity to use any term but homosexual to refer to homosexuals. Heteros don't seem to see any need to avoid the word "heterosexual." HOMOSEXUALITY IS BEAUTIFUL! Hence we are entitled to a full life as homosexuals in a culture arisen from homosexuality and reflective of our lives, and that in order to attain such a society we must assume political and economic control over a specific real piece of the earth. We deserve to be free and the most important freedom a homosexual has is the freedom to feel. We can care. We can love. We can try to help people. So we teach, and enter social work and medicine. We can express our emotions. So we act and dance and sing and write poetry and paint. We can stand before something beautiful and appreciate it. We can express all our emotions, not just hate and anger, and so can be total human beings, while the heterosexual man is allowed to be only a fraction of a person — and not the best fraction at that. Because we can feel and because we can break free of standardized thinking, we can bring a new passion and perspective to politics, the arts, even the sciences. We can foment a vast program of social change without having to worry about what every straight male pressed into the tough competition-proves-your-manhood mold, worries about: being thought a softie, a "sob sister". We can sympathize, empathize — we do not have to pity in order to [relate to] the oppressed. For we have been oppressed and continue to be oppressed. We have some taste of the fury that warps people into things; of the rage that comes of being wronged and powerless to right those wrongs. But because most of us have also known acceptance and "the good life", we have a broader view than have those people in the visible-minorities' ghettoes. Ours have been ghettoes of the mind, and we do, after all, exercise considerable control over our own minds. Breaking down the walls we have placed on our own minds is not so formidable a task as smashing the walls in others' minds, or rebuilding a slum. We know both sides of the ghetto wall. Few others can. And we know both sides of the wall that restricts most people's thinking. Many people contemplate this troubled earth and search for answers. Most are constrained to search in barren territory, the territory they can see within the sterile confines of their accustomed areas of thought. The answers do not lie there, however, but outside. We know some of that relatively unexplored territory; perhaps we can act as guides. We know better than to reject things out of hand merely because they have never been tried or because they may sound strange. For we once, perforce, lived in an Old World of psychosexuality; but then our minds' and bodies' uncomprehended drives guided us to a door into a new existence, a whole New World of people, places, acts, and ideas we might never have known existed had it not been for our deviant nature. Perhaps the entire earth is but a step distant from a dramatic answer, unseen, unappreciated, as we may so long have stood, unaware, outside a gay bar or beside another homosexual, before we managed to come out. Perhaps the earth will find its own New World, undreamed of — or if dreamed, then repressed upon waking. Perhaps we can help discover or rediscover it.
