In Agreement with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan discusses the latest movement to out gay Republicans. I think he gets the parallel exactly right for this odious movement: "And so we are back to the 1990s, or the '50s, depending on whether it is J. Edgar Hoover or remnants of ACT UP destroying what's left of gay men's privacy."

Am I happy to live in a world where some men can still have their lives destroyed, especially those with political careers, for being outed as gay? No. But we do still live in such a world. And those hell-bent on exposing the "hypocrites" of the Republican establishment are doing so with the intent and purpose of causing just that form of destruction.

Talk about hypocrisy.

In the 1950's a gay man faced a horrible choice - betray yourself, deceive your friends and family, and live a closeted life of furtive discretion or forced abstention - or, be driven from the public sphere, denied employment and housing, derided in public and abandoned by your family.

We faced that choice because people demanded we fit some cookie-cutter notion of what it meant to be a person which did not fit us.

To destroy a gay man for being a "bad queer" is no different than destroying him for being a "bad heterosexual." Those who ruin the lives of closeted public figures out of cheap political motives are far greater enemies of gays and their rights than those who remain in the closet, either out of personal volition (say, a desire for simple privacy) or in response to the pressures against gay men that have not even nearly been eradicate.

"Outing" a public figure in order to destroy him is a weapon. We should be unloading it, not firing it.