Who would not have known in 1969, the year of “Gay Liberation,” for example, that promiscuous anal sex was unsanitary for individuals and a potential danger to public health? Yet, gay liberation was defined by its theorists as just that: promiscuous anal sex, a challenge to the repressive “sex-negative” culture of what queer theorists now call “heteronormativity,” i.e., the heterosexual and monogamous norm. In the radical view, existing sexual norms reflected nothing about humanity’s biological experience, but were merely a social construction to preserve the privileges of a dominant group.
Like black radicals before them, gay activists rejected the idea of integration into a normally functioning civil order. Gay liberation was identified with a sexual agenda that did not seek civic tolerance, respect, and integration into the public order of bourgeois life. It was defined instead as a defiant promiscuity, the overthrow of bourgeois morals and sexual restraints — and, consequently, of bourgeois standards of public hygiene. No natural or moral barriers were recognized to the realization of the radical project.
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