From "Gay Community News," Feb. 15-21, 1987
(Reprint of The Congressional Record)
In 1987, Michael Swift was asked to contribute an editorial piece to GCN, an important gay community magazine, although well to the left of most American gay and lesbian opinion. A decade later this text, printed in the Congressional Record is repeatedly cited, apparently verbatim, by the religious right as evidence of the "Gay Agenda". The video Gay Rights, Special Rights, put out by Lou Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition cites it with ominous music and picture of children. But when the religious rights cites this text, they always omit, as does the Congressional record, the vital first line, which sets the context for the piece. In other words, every other version of this found on the net is part of the radical right's great lie about gay people. For a discussion of the whole "Gay vs. Religious Right" phenomenon see Chris Bull and John Gallagher: Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s, (New York: Crown, 1996)
This essay is an outrΓ©, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.
We shall ******* your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and ****** lies. We shall ****** them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us.
