From the New Oxford Review:
…why waste thousands of dollars on books that no one was going to buy? It was clear from the large “on sale” section that only a pitifully small number of books were ever purchased at their original price. The owners of Lobo’s were apparently wasting a lot of money on gay novels and works of gay history, when all the real money was in pornography. But the money spent on books wasn’t wasted. It was used to purchase a commodity that is more precious than gold to the gay rights establishment. Respectability. Respectability and the appearance of normalcy. Without that investment, we would not now be engaged in a serious debate about the legalization of same-sex “marriage.” By the time I lived in Austin, I had been thinking of myself as a gay man for almost 20 years. Based on the experience acquired during those years, I recognized in Lobo’s a metaphor for the strategy used to sell gay rights to the American people, and for the sordid reality that strategy concealed.
After spending two years in the music industry signed to a record label run by a gay couple and often working out Friday nights in a downtown gym prior to hitting the night clubs, I am probably a little more familiar with gay culture than most straight Christians. The VQPF are no doubt more informed on the issue, but I suspect they will likely agree with me that the portrait painted by Ronald Lee is, by and large, an accurate one.
The problem of the Christian is how to meet this challenge. I suspect it is easier for many Christians to accept a repentant murderer or an adulterer than a thief or a homosexual, because the first two sins speak more of a momentary action while the latter two tend to be seen as states of being. But if homosexuality is viewed as a specific temptation towards which an individual harbors a prediliction rather than an identity, it is perhaps easier for both the tempted and the one who does not endure that temptation to understand and deal with.
Of course, the problem does not solely lie with the Church. Unrepentant sinners are neither asking for forgiveness and acceptance, nor do they merit it. This is as true for queers as it is for thieves or adulterers. But this necessary refusal to condone behavior does not require hate or even dislike, indeed, I find it much more reasonable to loathe those forms of sin which destroy others than those which are predominantly self-destructive.
As Camille Paglia points out in Sexual Personae, the world of the male homosexual is a coldly Apollonian one, cruel and proud in its devotion to youth and beauty. Those subject to its harsh chains may deserve our disapprobation, but they merit our pity as well.