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Show 241 the hypocrisy of the closet. However, respectability came at the expense of less respectable elements of the community, such as those who engaged in cross-gendered or overtly sexual behavior. Thus, a 1978 Open Door editorial claimed that the "straight" community needs to be educated ... about the true Gay Community, in that the visible Gay person does not necessarily represent The unsophisticated straight person is not aware of the typical/average gay person when they might meet on the street, at 104 work or at play (italics mine). the typical gay person .... Another writer was more forthright, complaining about "strutting peacocks who flaunt themselves" and described sexual identity as a very "private and personal thing."!" The issue of "queerness" versus assimilation was not unique to Utah. During the 1950s and '60s the national "homophile" organizations, Mattachine and Daughters ofBilitis, urged conformity with conventional roles in gays' gender presentation. They also enjoined gays to keep their sex lives strictly private, stressing that the only difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals was what they did in bed. By the early 1970s, gay liberation and radical feminism rejected assimilationist strategies and challenged conventional categories of sex and gender.l'" As in the LDS Church, tensions between assimilation and distinctiveness in relation to the larger world have persisted among gays and lesbians, periodically erupting over such issues as drag queens' participation in public 104The Open Door, July 1978, p. 2. 10SThe Open Door, January 1978, p. 17-18. 106D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970,81-7,108-9,113-14; JohnD'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997),318-23. |
