ACT UPs in cities large and small joined the fight for health care reform. AIDS taught many of us what every other human in the world and in history has known, but modern middle class Americans typically fail to understand, that health is never guaranteed, that bodies are delicate and vulnerable, and that where care exists it is a class privilege. Thus we fume at the failure of mainstream groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to challenge class and corporate power, and refuse to share their faith in votes for Democrats and negotiations in legislatures, courts, and boardrooms. Tucker discusses the irrelevance of recent biological attempts to explain the origin of homosexuality to the question of rights. If the presence of a few secret homos like Himmler made the Nazi Party, which executed many thousands of us in the death camps, gay or pro-gay, then the Republicans must be the party of militant screaming queens.
Tucker recognizes a similar wimpiness among liberals blind to the threat of corporate power.
Thus the tendency among liberals like Clinton toward centrism and bipartisanship. Sullivan cherishes his four pet philosophies, but wants to erase the equally real differences that arise from distinctions of class, sex, ethnicity, and sexuality. Part of the problem of the left is that they deal so much in abstractions that they can't live in the world. Our betters put this mythology to work whenever they need to justify and whip up hysteria, for instance, for military adventures in the Middle East or Latin America. The extreme right, entertaining no such illusions about the importance of identity, organizes and acts, while moderates and liberals fret and obsess.