Word: gayness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...commissioner. But AIDS has increased that tension. Those with the disease have protested for years that the FDA's traditional methods of testing an experimental drug's safety and effectiveness were too slow. "People have lost faith in the system," says Richard Dunne, executive director of Manhattan's Gay Men's Health Crisis...
...gay revolution has failed." To thousands of homosexuals who marched last weekend in the annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Day parades, the thought may be heretical, but it is exactly the argument put forth by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, two Harvard-trained psychologists, in a provocative new book, After the Ball (Doubleday; $19.95). As Kirk and Madsen point out, the revolution began 20 years ago last week in New York City at a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, when for the first time patrons fought back against police conducting a routine raid...
...authors, both of whom are gay, acknowledge that homosexuals' lives have improved since then, but they say the victories are limited because America's fundamental attitudes have not changed. "The gay movement hasn't got nearly so far as the black civil rights movement," declared Madsen in an interview. "Yes, our life-style is now 'public' -- in highly restricted urban areas -- but coast to coast, hatred and contempt for gays aren't far from where they were 25 years...
...fact, the majority of gay men and women still do not openly disclose their sexual orientation because prejudice remains so deeply embedded in the U.S. About 25 million Americans are gay, but society's institutions, from government to the church and the press to advertising, virtually ignore their existence. "America is not only reluctant to recognize news events or address public issues concerning gays, it also refuses to educate citizens on the nature of homosexuality itself," write the authors. Americans, they hold, continue to harbor distorted perceptions. Among them: people choose to be gay, homosexuals are kinky sex addicts...
Kirk, 31, and Madsen, 34, put much of the blame for the revolution's failure on gays themselves. The pair argue that the movement for too long was wrongly focused on sexual freedom and self-expression, issues that they feel have antagonized the public. Instead, they say, the emphasis should be on civil rights and fairness, concerns that appeal to all Americans. AIDS, which has devastated the gay community, has helped shift the gay-rights agenda away from liberated sex to more mainstream values...