It's a partisan site.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/artic.../06/08_gay.html

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If there’s one thing conservatives have become masters of, it’s ascribing the ills of the world to everybody’s freedom but their own. In fact, they’ve become virtuosos of the PR ricochet. So I guess it’s no surprise to me that hiding pedophile priests within the catacombs of church bureaucracy would become the fault of the radical gay “agenda.” It has long been a staple of the Rightist gutters to collapse sex between consenting adult men and sex between a male adult and child onto the axis of same-sex lust. Interestingly though, for a heterosexual rapist, it is still the rape and not the heterosexuality that is the most salient factor. For conservatives, homosexuality is just one lumpen heart of darkness, where sexual desire is directed like buck shot at animal, child, vegetable or mineral. If you can find a same sex practice that is abhorrent then gays by virtue of being a minority, are automatically impugned. Individuality is still the luxurious province of straight white men who can rape, murder and pillage with abandon and still have it be a question of character rather than kind.

Said in his usual brandy snifter tone, William F. Buckley muses about the problem of the Catholic Church as a subset of the apparently greater problem of increased tolerance. “Fifty years ago, in my college with an undergraduate body of 5,000 male students, one could not recall a single homosexual. Now, they are expected to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. . . They were certainly not encouraged to give rein to their impulses; perhaps better said, they were intimidated in the matter.” Perhaps it gives him locker room comfort to imagine that there wasn’t a single gay person in his undergraduate class.
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Buckley obviously is less perceptive than he's given credit for. There were homosexuals, bisexuals and future transgender people among the "5,000" undergraduates at Yale during his time there, and some, like Larry Kramer (yes, he is a Yale graduate from the 1950s), have become quite famous. They were expected to be silent, invisible, and and to suffer in silence and invisibility, rather than live openly as human beings of dignity who love people of the same sex or gender.

It's telling to note that at the same time that Buckley was flourishing in his putatively homosex-less environment, some of the 20th century's major gay and bisexual figures--W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Benjamin Britten, Steven Sondheim, H.D., Hans Werner Henze, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, Bayard Rustin, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, etc.--were living their lives openly, sometimes quite courageously, and refusing to be shuttered in a closet somewhere. AND at the same time, because of rampant societal homophobia and Cold War and McCarthyite hysteria, other noted homosexuals, such as F.O. Matthiessen and Newton Arvin, suffered extreme persecution, led at times by two closet queers, J. Edgar Hoover, and Roy Cohn.

We should all be thankful for the courage of our predecessors, for people like Magnus Hirschfeld and Walt Whitman and Willa Cather and for the generations of gay men and lesbians and transgenders who in various ways have countered idiots like Buckley--and sometimes paid terrible prices as a result.

Bill Buckley's an intelligent guy, but he does have a problem with all things gay. Recall his TV debate with Gore Vidal of several decades ago, in which he called him a queer and threatened to punch his lights out. His magazine, National Review, often gratuitously sneers at gays and stretches stories to do so - when it's not fawning over his latest work, as it is in the current issue. I wouldn't worry too much about Buckley; he's clearly past his prime and the world's moved on well beyond him.

Actually, Bill Buckley went to Williams College, as did Stephen Sondheim - who was doing musical theatre even back then, with a cast of all-male performers. Back then, the college was all male. It didn't become co-ed until 1970, around the same time, not surprisingly, that gay students became more visible, founding the Gay Liberation Organization.

More to the point, I've talked to many gay Williams alumni from the 40s-60s, and while some have said that they didn't DARE THINK about coming out - let alone coming to terms with themselves ... and that they knew several cases of gay suicides and expulsions ... other said that they had more hot, hot, homolove during that time in their lives than they ever imagined.

Why?

Precisely because it was an all-male environment.

Perhaps Buckley's right. Perhaps all this gay-lib stuff is getting in the way of not only gay men getting laid ... but also straight men being able to do so without having that icky "gay" label attached to them.

Because, dude, you KNOW Buckley tried it.

[quote]Originally posted by bridgeportjake:
Actually, Bill Buckley went to Williams College, as did Stephen Sondheim
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Because, dude, you KNOW Buckley tried it.

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You must be thinking of some other Bill Buckley. The one mentioned in the article is William F. Buckley, Jr., who was on the PBS show "Firing Line."

http://www.americanwriters.org/works/mind.asp says:

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William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1952 as a young graduate of the Yale class of 1950. God and Man at Yale accuses it of hypocrisy in its movement away from the ideological
foundation upon which the institution was built. In his opinion, Yale was founded upon the belief in God. Therefore virtue and individualism should have been cornerstones of a Yale education. But Buckley found that in his time at Yale the university was embracing "statism and atheism," the alternative to which was a return to political conservatism, according to Buckley.
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I myself am baffled by the thought that anyone who is an atheist cannot have virtue or be an individual.

One more thing: how can I KNOW that Buckley tried "it"?

[ June 11, 2002: Message edited by: twin58 ]

[quote]Originally posted by twin58:
If there's one thing conservatives have become masters of, it's ascribing the ills of the world to everybody's freedom but their own.

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Don't you think that's true of the rabid ideologues of both the left and the right?

(I think of the example of the "environmentally friendly" band REM ... led by preachy and insufferable Michael Stipe ... taking separate limousines to their concerts back when folks cared about REM. Really good for the environment and greenhouse gases, huh?)

[quote]Originally posted by Charlie in the Trees:


Don't you think that's true of the rabid ideologues of both the left and the right?

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Somehow rabid idealogues are always more palatable when they're on your side of the issue
Unless your stuck defending the SOB, then it's "I can handle my enemies, but L-rd protect me from well intentioned friends!"

[quote]Originally posted by bridgeportjake:
Actually, Bill Buckley went to Williams College, as did Stephen Sondheim - who was doing musical theatre even back then, with a cast of all-male performers. Back then, the college was all male. It didn't become co-ed until 1970, around the same time, not surprisingly, that gay students became more visible, founding the Gay Liberation Organization.
****
Perhaps Buckley's right. Perhaps all this gay-lib stuff is getting in the way of not only gay men getting laid ... but also straight men being able to do so without having that icky "gay" label attached to them.

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As Twin58 said, William F. Buckley went to Yale College, as did his son Christopher. In fact, Buckley used to be considered one of Yale's most famous 20th century (Roman Catholic) graduates. I shudder to think about him enjoying homosex, but I guess it's possible. He certainly has had a golden pole up his *rse for the last 50 years....

Another famous gay Yale graduate was Paul Monette, who wrote about his torment while enrolled there in one of the best gay autobiographies out, BECOMING A MAN: A HALF-LIFE STORY. The gay Harvard crowd of the 1940s and 1950s (William S. Burroughs, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Edward Gorey, etc.) appears to have had an easier time dealing with their homosexuality (all of them went immediate to New York afterwards, too), though as I said, F.O. Matthiessen, a Harvard professor, leapt to his death for fear of prosecution, and Ashbery has spoken of the tremendous fear many young gay people felt at that time, especially concerning McCarthy and the witchhunts, and the raids on gay clubs and bars in those days, which continued all the way up to the late 1960s.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with regard to "gay-lib stuff" getting in the way of gay men getting laid--that was one of the POINTS of gay liberation: sexual liberation, as well as social liberation and equality. The gay-lib era of the 1970s was probably the most openly libertine in American gay history, and the main culprit behind its termination was and is AIDS. People who have survived that era will testify to this. As far as all-male environments go, I for one was glad that my alma mater was coeducational. I benefited from the input and insight of women. There are all-male institutions like Wabash and Morehouse that survive, and so if someone wants that environment, they can go for it, but Yale and every other top-rank university wants the best students it can find, male and female.