
I'm actually susceptible to the argument that
"we're winning." I'm old enough to have been reflexively comfortable with homophobic contempt all through high school, although I only briefly, and early on, had occasion to express this: there was a gay hanger-on in a circle of friends I abandoned after half a year—the poor fellow had to endure routine insults as a condition of sitting below the salt. I can accordingly comprehend, if distantly—working in San Francisco for nearly four decades has largely reset those early prejudices—the squick factor that looms so large in the perceptions of our contemporary homophobes. I think we do better to bypass those hills than to take them: the old attitudes will eventually die there, and will perish feeling increasingly lonely and embittered.
cordially,