Quotes from Bruce Bawer

Not all gays respond to the same stuff. Would Alexander the Great have loved Auntie Mame?

Straight Americans need an education of the heart and soul. They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.

Christina Hoff Sommers quotes one professor's compliant about "students who have been trained to take a 'feminist perspective'": "For them reason itself is patriarchal, linear, and oppressive." In other words, Women's Studies agrees with the Victorians that women are the less intellectual sex; the difference is that in the view of Women's Studies this doesn't make them inferior but superior.

In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females.

The most important of these activists was Jimmy Garrett, a member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC. Garrett led discussion groups at which, as he later explained, "we would talk about ourselves seeking identity, and stuff like that. A lot of folks didn't even know they were black. A lot of people thought they were Americans".

By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury—a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference.

Apparently, lesbians and gay men who have no desire "to become queer" have failed at a task that is obligatory for them, whether or not they are aware of it. Halperin, like Foucault, in short, is yet another busybody who has an agenda for other people's lives.