And vice versa. I say this as a homosexual man. All my life, heterosexual America has tried to draw a straight line between my private and public life. Religious conservatives want to lock me in the closet. Even good friends, frankly, would prefer I kept sexual matters to myself.
Feminists have, in our time, overcome age-old restrictions that kept women from public lives.
Gays, similarly, are insisting on the light of day. The danger for both homosexual and feminist is that our hunger for public freedom makes us blind to private contradictions. The French like to say, after all, that Americans are puritans. Americans turn prudish when the subject turns to sex. Ah, the French.