GAYS DEFEND MARRIAGE

A piece I wrote for the LGBT press but couldn’t publish in any gay newspaper because of the “activism” of my opponents is in Wednesday’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. That’s the 12th-largest metropolitan daily in the country, and the third-largest in the Midwest. As of midnight, my piece was both the most-viewed and most-E-mailed opinion piece on the Star-Tribune Web site.

I’ve excerpted the parts that relate to marriage below:

Now that the gay white men in American cities who are the main funders of the LGBT movement are no longer dying quite so often from AIDS, the lesbian and gay community has moved on to other issues, such as marriage, while millions of people, many of them men of color who have sex with men, are still suffering from HIV-related illness.

In my eyes, “marriage equality” is a far less important gay and lesbian issue than the fight against HIV/AIDS. Virtually the entire gay community felt that way when I first became a gay activist. After all, what lesbian ever died a horrible, painful death because the government called her relationship a domestic partnership instead of a marriage?

UPDATE: I just found out that my W piece will appear in a daily newspaper in a major East Coast city next Tuesday. That means the total circulation of the papers running this piece will be close to a half a million – instead of at most 20,000 had I run the same piece in the gay press. Good going, guys!