When folks asked me my opinion on gay marriage I was always quick with my half-joking response. I would say: “Well, I hear the right-wing family types going on about how if we allow gay marriage, then we’ll see an end to Western Civilization. That sounds good to me!” I’m kind of glad the issue of gay marriage is beginning to wane because I was getting tired of that joke, and with the recent victories for gay marriage I see Western Civilization is still rearing its ugly head. Look at Russia. A good day in Russia for young gay folks is when they are not being beaten for being gay.

Now, you can go on about being for marriage or against marriage, but unless you understand the history out of which gay marriage grew, you won’t understand anything about the dialectic of politics. When it comes to supporting my basic human rights, as a gay man I have always felt pretty much abandoned by the left in America. I tried, as other gay leftist did, to explain to the traditional left (mostly straight white men) that they don’t have to like us, but they should at least understand the principles of organizing: they should understand the fundamental issues they ignore when they choose to ignore lgbt issues.

Organizing around LGBT issues never was a matter of “identity politics.” The straight left created identity politics, not me or my comrades fighting against the right wing these past 40 years. A few years ago I wrote in The Nation magazine: “What my straight friends refused to understand was that my fight was also a fight against the right. I got tired of hearing straight progressives call the struggle for my civil rights “identity politics” when the truth was that their own identity as members of the heterosexual majority was being mustered and manipulated to drive American politics to the right. Willy-nilly, my progressive straight friends, silent beneficiaries of discrimination, were accomplices. Of course, straight people don’t like to think of heterosexuality as an identity. But couldn’t they see what was happening across the country? When Ronald Reagan held his arm aloft with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Reagan, a divorced man, hadn’t suddenly got religion; he was consolidating Republican power and making his handlers from GE a mint.”

The weakness of the left in America is precisely because it made this choice not to take on the issues that mean most to most folks–family issues–and it created this ridiculous paradigm that fighting for women’s rights and gay rights are identity politics. Meanwhile, the right organizes and gains strength precisely because it has taken on those issues. And when the right-wingers gain strength on their anti-women and anti-gay organizing, they use that strength to go after the things that actually have some meaning for the traditional white left, like workers and unions. Having abandoned the field of human relations, the left forced women and gay people to make coalitions with liberals in order to secure some basic rights. So the right gained strength, the liberals gained some strength because they were seen as the only factor fighting back, and the left wrote itself out of the equation when it chose to ignore me and my kind.