This is Denneny’s Second Proposition: “Gays, insofar as they are gay, are ipso facto different from straights.”
Liberals assert that we are essentially the same as them and therefore our oppression is unjust. This passes for tolerance. However, tolerance can only be tolerance of real diversity and difference. The liberal position is not really tolerant — although it is subtle — because it denies that we are different, which at bottom is another way of denying that we exist as gays. This position is absurd — if we are not different, why all this fuss in the first place?
By relegating homosexuality to the realm of privacy — that which is not spoken about or seen and is therefore unimportant politically (consequently “no different”) — liberal “tolerance” becomes ... “repressive tolerance” (a concept that seemed to me idiotic as applied in the sixties). The way liberals have of not noticing one is gay or, if forced to notice, of not wanting to hear about it or, if forced to hear about it, of asserting that “that’s your private life and no concern of mine or of anyone else” is an extremely insidious tactic that in practice boils down to “let’s all act straight and what you do in the bedroom is your own business....” This is the source of the liberal’s famous lament: why must you flaunt your homosexuality? ... In other words, get back in the closet and we won’t bother you..... Liberals in general tend to get upset if one tries to make an issue of being gay or if one says that being gay is an important and central part of one’s life and identity. One feels like asking them whether their own heterosexuality is not an important part of their lives. But, of course, they do not talk about heterosexuality, they talk about sexuality, which is the whole point.