{"id":14499,"date":"2026-08-13T10:26:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T15:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=14499"},"modified":"2026-08-13T10:29:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T15:29:12","slug":"but-nobody-was-actually-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/14499","title":{"rendered":"But Nobody Was Actually Free…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized. New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.\u201d<\/em>
\n-Martin Sherman, Playwright, author of “Bent”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible.”<\/p>\n

Larry Kramer wrote a novel about that period in NYC, titled Faggots<\/em>. It got a lot of static but he had a point, distilled down to this one line toward the novel’s end: “The fucking we’re getting is not worth the fucking we’re getting.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

Had you come of age back then, you could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, perverts, queers, that needed to be isolated from the rest of society, for the good of society. If many of us fixated on sex it was because that’s what we were told was all that was all there was to us. But there was a necessary element of Yes We Are<\/em> defiance to it. I can appreciate that too. Progress, as George Bernard Shaw once said, is made by the unreasonable man. Also the unreasonable woman.<\/p>\n

But it was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but not the only one. There was still the rest of it. Making that space for our sexual lives was important, but also the space for our love lives; Our whole lives. We couldn’t be neighbors so long as we were criminals. We couldn’t be people so long as we were sodomites.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized. New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[203,4],"tags":[38,103,12],"class_list":["post-14499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gently-tapping-my-pulpit","category-politics","tag-gay-history","tag-the-human-heart","tag-the-struggle-for-our-lives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14502,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14499\/revisions\/14502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}