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America’s leading gay magazine headlined “Gay Is the New Black”

Source: It’s Not Like Being Black #703

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Section I:
The Myth of the “Sexual Minority”
The Making of the Myth

In December 2008, America’s leading gay magazine, The Advocate, ran a cover article under the headline “Gay Is the New Black.” The author, responding to California voters’ decision to continue defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, wrote:
It’s impossible not to imagine what might have happened if the civil rights of African Americans, Hispanics, women, or any other minority had been reversed by public referendum. If any other group of people in America had their fundamental rights subjected to popular vote, there would be universal outrage in this country.16

The idea that the battle over same-sex marriage was a continuation of the civil rights battles of the 1960s was both strategic and ubiquitous at the time. Gay activists had made a concerted effort to burn this idea into the collective conscience of America decades earlier, and it had worked. The idea that homosexuality was equivalent to race had caught on.
To be fair, even the proponents of this argument knew it was a stretch. The author of The Advocate article admitted,
Our oppression . . . is nowhere near as extreme as blacks’, and we insult them when we make facile comparisons between our plights. . . . Gay people have more resources than blacks had in the 1960s.17

But the strength of the gay-equals-black argument lies not in the accuracy of its comparison but in the effectiveness of its propaganda. And that has never been clearer than it became in the summer of 2015.