The year the gay rights movement made "gays in the military" its rallying cry, was the year the gay rights movement began its drift away from me, and others like me.

It was 1990, I believe--twenty-seven years ago, in fact--when the call for a March on Washington went out; anticipating the presidency of one, William 'Bubba' Clinton. Somehow, between the time the call went out and the march itself, a public relations campaign successfully launched "gays in the military" as the primary demand of the March on Washington that year--a demand that took the masses of gay folk there by surprise.

It was a campaign strategy that borrowed from, and modeled itself after, the Civil Rights movement--a movement associated primarily with securing civil and political rights for African Americans. The fact that "Negroes" (the preferred euphemism back then) had fought and died on the battlefields of WWII, only to return to "the legacies and badges of slavery" here at home, functioned as a ballast for the multi-headed hydra that became the Civil Rights movement.

The United States of America, facing embarassment in eyes of the world, was forced to act. So as a campaign strategy, "gays in the military" was borrowing from a social movement that, by most accounts, was a success (and the accounts of those who did not agreed had long before been marked for exclusion).

Suddenly, "gays in the military" became, for a time at least, the public face of the "gay rights agenda." Military gays (the more highly decorated, the better) were trotted out as showpieces, and temporarily displaced celebrity "outtings" in the press. It was, in other words, 'all the rage;' until, "don't ask, don't tell" became official U.S. policy--one of the first 'gifts' the Clinton administration handed to lesbian and gay Americans, replete with unintended consequences.

Another aspect of the gay rights movement's agenda in those days got far less serious 'play' in the press, despite the fact that it was just as theatrical as uniformed gays: lesbian and gay couples were staging mass 'marriage' ceremonies to both "confirm" their commitment to one another, and to protest their exclusion from all the social and economic benefits a marriage license currently bestows only heterosexual couples.

Here and now, the gay rights movement is still dancing this two-step, and with essentially the same partners who screwed them in the past. Q: Why? Because IF there ever was a "gay Agenda," as the religious(ly) (self-)right(eous) would have everyone believe, (THEN) its most deep-seated plea is this: "Why can't you accept us? We're just like you: we want the same things, we share the same 'family values;' we're all about 'home and hearth;' just like you, we love 'God and country.' And here's the proof...."

Meanwhile, what I (and others like me) would like to know is this: how did that gloriously warm grassroots movement, predicated on gay pride, turn into the largely cold, sterile gay rights movement--a movement focused 'like a laser,' apparently, on the desires of a socially conservative few whose core values consists of home/hearth, God/country, and for whom the right to marry is really the only civil right that continues otherwise to elude them.

Ripping a page from the strategic playbook of the Civil Rights era, that is, leading lights of the gay rights movement decided to pursue the 'just like you' approach to reversing discrimination against gay and lesbian people. In doing so, they (unwittingly, perhaps) threw the mothers of our movement, along with those of us who are interested in neither marriage nor the military, not only off, but 'under the bus.'

Allow me to clarify the problem: when the argument for expanding rights or conversely, eliminating discrimination, is based on worthiness ("we're entitled to equal rights under the law because we're just like you"), the few who gain do so at the expense of the many who, in this case, are not "just like you."

The irony is, had leading lights of the gay rights movement 'done their homework,' they would have discovered that once the Civil Rights movement was captured, in effect, in the backwaters of partisan politics, it never returned to its broader objectives. It grew more or less content with what it could get--symbolic (Phyrric) victories; comfortable with current arrangements, and quite expert at sustaining them.

Here and now, before we go any further, the LGBT community needs to directly confront the ideological divide exposed in "Pride vs. Progress." The gay rights movement of today, as pridevsprogress puts it, sees the impulse for freedom that gave rise to it as "the bane of the gay rights movement."

Here and now, the push for "normalization," to borrow pridevsprogress's word, is intense, as the gay rights movement feverishly markets the desires of a few (hearth/home, God/country) to the many in order to curry favor with those who need to see us as humans, apparently--something public displays that err on the side of 'gay pride,' he insists, would proscribe.

Following a failed political model, that is, the gay rights movement of today would have us believe that we have to mask ourselves and, most of all, repress our sexual energies, in order to forward the gay Agenda. It's still a closet, even if gussied up with a few rights that are only of interest, really, to a few.