BitchTits said:
That sounds like a whitewashing of the origins to me. "Gay" as in happy, light-hearted and carefree wasn't used because they were living the life they wanted, it was used as a snide euphemism - a way of saying someone was homosexual by describing gay men as effeminate and camp - which is what the 'gay' refers to as in happy and carefree.
What he described was what I was familiar with as well; that "gay" as a euphemism adopted by homosexual men before it became widely known in the general public. I'd be interested in reading where you heard that.
MWS Natural said:
And that my friend is the major difference people always seem to forget. "If I tell someone I'm gay I will then be discriminated against!!!" Then keep your sexuality to yourself then! I don't walk around talking about who or what I stick my dick into. It's a choice, as long as you have a choice and a minority doesn't it's never a valid comparison in my eyes.
I don't know how you (or other, mostly straight, people who make the same argument) don't actually think through what you're suggesting.
One of the biggest problems with starting any sort of gay rights movement before the 1970s was that so many people were in the closet. There were multiple states where you could get arrested and thrown into mental hospitals for long periods of time, where you could get blacklisted from jobs in the government (and jobs that contracted with the government), where other people wouldn't hire you, and you'd be viewed as simply another variant on a pedophile. You could avoid all this by hiding in the closet, marrying a woman, and having sex on the side. Do you think it would be reasonable for someone to expect you to marry a man, adopt a few kids with him, and have sex with women on the side in order to avoid discrimination? Of course not. But lots of gay men did make that choice. This intense pressure to be in the closet meant that most gay men weren't willing to challenge sodomy cases in court, weren't willing to join political organizations protesting the treatment of gay men, etc. If you are hiding in the closet and afraid someone might figure out that you are gay, you are much less likely to advocate on your own behalf.
This is actually one of the few advantages the black community had with regards to their civil rights movement; they are born into the community, grow up within the community, and there were political and social organizations (e.g. the church); the basic infrastructure was able to form. In contrast, gay men would generally find out that they were gay sometime in their teens, and there was little sense of a larger "community" after the 1930s. It's difficult to organize when you don't know who your potential allies are, and your potential allies refuse to identify themselves out of fear of reprisal.
Granted, things are not so bad now as "jail and destruction of your professional life" for gay people outside of small towns (where "destruction of your professional life" is still a possibility). It is still true, however, that hiding in the closet is not a real solution for discrimination, any more than a Jewish person having to practice their religion in secret is a reasonable thing to expect of a Jewish person trying to avoid Antisemitism.