Interview · moment 12 of 23
Gay Politics From Harvey Milk to Pete Buttigieg
from #259 - Independence Day with Glenn Greenwald | The Tim Dillon Show · #259
4 min
Guest
Tim and Greenwald riff on how gay politics went from genuinely radical (Harvey Milk, Larry Kramer, AIDS activism) to institutional and moralistic; they also discuss the left and right both becoming exhausting mirror images of repressive control over sex and dating.
- Gay institutional politics represents the lowest point of liberal weakness and cringe.
- Harvey Milk and Larry Kramer represented genuinely subversive, radical gay politics.
- The trajectory of gay politics went from Larry Kramer to Pete Buttigieg.
- The right used to control private behavior and culture while the left was transgressive—Sinéad O'Connor ripping up the Pope's picture on SNL exemplified that.
- The cultural left now has more rules about dating, sex, and attraction than the Pope has encyclicals.
- Everything became abuse, everything became harassment—the left became the repressive movement the Evangelical right was in the 1980s.
- Tim doesn't care about trans women weightlifters competing in the Olympics or the culture war around it.
- Both the left and right have become exhausting with nothing new anymore.
Larry KramerSinéad O'ConnorHarvey MilkJerry FalwellMoral MajorityAndrew SullivanCaitlyn JennerPete ButtigiegRachel Maddow