Tony Adragna takes issue with my knocking of his use of the 'radical gay left' by citing this passage by Richard Goldstein:
These gayocons stand outside the tradition of queer humanism that runs from Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster to James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. The moral core of this lineage—its compassion, its critique of power, its respect for the sexual—still informs queer culture. It is gay liberation. But this sensibility is barely visible in the liberal media. (You have to read the radical press to find the real thing.) What has emerged instead reflects the uneasiness that remains about gay coverage, even as genteel acceptance has replaced active abhorrence. No matter how secure we may feel, the fact is that gay people live in a halfway house at best. We are out on parole.
I suppose it depends on the meaning of the word 'radical.' Goldstein is contrasting the (not so) "liberal media," which has essentially excluded mainstream gay voices in favor of the likes of Sullivan, Vincent, and Paglia who, regardless of what one thinks of them, their writing, or their politics, are hardly representative of the gay community, with the alternative or, yes, 'radical press.' If this is the context in which Adragna is using the term 'radical', fair enough - I retract my overreaction.
