Denneny’s twelfth proposition is: “The only remedy for powerlessness is power.”
...(I)t seems to me it should be abundantly clear to even the dimmest wit that without power you will not get justice. How anybody could rely on “compassion and kindness” after looking around at the world we live in is beyond me. “Moderate” gays who think we can achieve tolerance by respectability seem to me willfully ignorant of our own history, as well as the history of other oppressed groups. They are the court Jews of our time, however good their subjective intentions.
Straights who object to our daily increasing visibility are basically objecting to the assertion of power implicit in that phenomenon. They would prefer that we continue to rely on their “compassion and kindness” and correctly sense that our refusal to do so directly insults them. With their record on the matter it is hard to imagine why they are surprised. In fact, our extraordinary explosion into visibility, the spontaneous and visible assertion of our sexual identity that constitutes the clone look is politically valuable. Not only are we more visible to each other, we are more visible to them. Of course, one would naturally expect a backlash at this point; it is virtually unknown in history for any group to give up power over any other without a struggle.
As far as the power inherent in “visibility” goes, gays have made enormous strides since 1981. Increasingly, gays are elected to public office in a number of countries. The expected backlash of course did occur and is still occurring in the US and other places. Also, there has been no diminution of the “moderate” gay voices who think we can achieve anything by continuing to appear “respectable” (which still is, as it has always been, code for “invisible”).