The State of the Gay Revolution: Creating a New Culture of Progress for Gay Men

Gay men have experienced radical social progress in just a handful of years. In this salon, Daniel Golliher explores the challenges that come with such success, why the tools that worked to move gay men forward yesterday are quickly becoming harmful today, and what we can do about it.  

From the outside, especially if you don’t have many (or any) gay friends, it can seem like they’ve finally won—at least in the West. Sure, there are still laws and minds to be changed, but those are merely the soldiers of a defeated, rapidly retreating army. The war is won!

But even if that’s true, and in the West it generally is true, winning the war is not nearly the end of the task. After every revolution a new society must be built.

Will you have an American Revolution, a French Revolution, or an October Revolution? There is no guarantee that winning any war will automatically result in the construction of something better; history seems to tell us that one bad situation is usually just replaced with another!

The gay revolution is at the inflection point where much of its efforts need to switch from revolutionary action to peacetime—the factories need to switch from tanks to cars—but our broader culture incentivizes the perpetual continuation of revolutionary war, both individually and collectively. 

In the face of this, how can we build a culture that encourages the positive construction of new norms and institutions geared toward the cultivation of happy gay men? We do not need more revolutionaries, we need more builders. Can we do this? And is this task really so different from the issues faced by any other kind of man? 

This salon is open to anyone to attend (of course), and I extend a special invitation to straight men. This will be an opportunity to get a front row seat to the concerns of the other part of the kingdom of man, in the charitable and welcoming style of an Interintellect salon.  

Reading list:

• Will the Gay Revolution Succeed? by Daniel Golliher (2021)
• Separating Signal from Noise, on factors that make it hard (but not impossible!) to assess the state of the gay revolution, by Daniel Golliher (2021)
• The Implosion of Boston’s Pride Parade Is a Sign of Things to Come by Maxwell Meyer (2021)
• Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, on The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:
  Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois (1838)
• Book Review: The Velvet Rage by Daniel Golliher (2021)

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